Professional Liar
Paul Duncan

James Sallis is a liar. And what's more, he gets paid for it.

He writes novels featuring Lew Griffin who may, or may not, be writing the stories. But, of course, James Sallis is writing the stories, isn't he?

Lew Griffin is a black private eye, operating in New Orleans - well, the bars, really. Or rather, he's a debt collector who ends up, so the story goes, giving money to people to pay their debts. No, that's not quite true. Lew Griffin is a murderer, I'm sure. No, tell a lie. He's a lecturer on European literature. Nope. He's a novelist. Or he is all of them.

How can one man be so many things?

The same could be said of James Sallis. A trained musician, he plays French horn, violin, guitar, mandolin and Dobro. At one stage, to earn money, he was doing club gigs on weekends, music lessons in the week. There are a couple of failed marriages and alcoholism in his life. More recently, James has been working at the bedside of critically ill or dying adults and newborn children. On the literary front, he's an editor, reviewer, teacher, musicologist, essayist, translator, poet, novelist and short story writer.

In a world where we are pigeonholed by marketing statistics, stereotyped by our appearance, analysed by rote, it is satisfying to meet someone who defies categorisation. Someone who falls between the cracks.

Paul Duncan braved a tube strike, smog, sweltering heat, and a gaggle of Scandinavian air stewardesses to meet James Sallis. As they talked in a deserted hotel bar, Oasis were singing Don't Look Back In Anger. No fear of that - James was constantly smiling and laughing, happy to be in London again.

*****

NEW WORLDS

An avid reader of SF since he was a child - his first book was The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein - James began writing in the mid-Sixties.

"SF had always been a genre with a lot of potential, and I thought that, in the Sixties, science fiction was extremely important, largely because of New Worlds magazine, which was edited by Michael Moorcock, and all that was going on in London. For the first time, it seemed to me, someone had said that this stuff, SF, could be literature. Nobody had seriously thought about this before. Reading Jimmy Ballard was exciting. It fed my love of the surreal and edge literature.

"I just recognised something in SF for which I hungered. Like pregnant women crave things, I craved this literature.

"I'd been writing forever, but only then did I begin writing seriously, to finish stories, polish them. I ended up selling my first story to three people at once, which was rather embarrassing. I finally sold it to a guy in the States because he could pay me money, where Mike could only offer me hula hoops and any other door prizes he could scrape together. The story sold for $300, an awesome amount of money at that time. I can't sell a short story for that amount of money NOW, which is why I'm writing novels.

"I was in college and, after selling some short stories, decided to drop out to write full time. Mike had already published a couple of my stories in New Worlds when he came over to the States to attend a writer's workshop organised by Damon Knight. We met, spent a lot of nights talking till dawn. At the end of that Mike, who wanted to back away from editing and just remain publisher, invited me to become the editor of New Worlds. I knew nothing about editing and had no money, so I said sure."

James' first visit to London was in the late Sixties, where he became fiction editor, then editor of New Worlds. He solicited and edited Harlan Ellison's famous short story A Boy And His Dog. Other writers whose early work was published include J G Ballard (Crash, Empire Of The Sun ) and D M Thomas ( The White Hotel). When the magazine ran extracts from Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, questions were raised in Parliament, and New Worlds was banned for obscenity.

"You know how these things are - you're never really told. There was a lot of criticism, and one of the large bookstore chains refused to carry the magazine, which completely wiped out what financial base we had. The magazine sputtered on for a little time. Meanwhile, I went back to the States to try and save a marriage - which I didn't save - and was just too poor to come back to London, which I've regretted ever since."

James went on to edit two SF anthologies, The War Book (1969) and The Shores Beneath (1970), a recent issue of The Review Of Contemporary Fiction about Samuel R Delany, and Ash Of Stars (1996), a critical anthology of Delany's work. There is a collection of SF short stories, A Few Last Words (1969), and James continued to write SF short stories throughout the Seventies.

"I don't read too much SF nowadays. I'd been doing a SF column for the LA Times up until recently, which kept me up-to-date. I haven't stopped writing SF, it's just that I don't write it that often, probably 5 stories in the same number of years. I don't write many short stories anyway, since the market isn't there. I sold consistently to Amazing Stories, now they've gone under. Economically, I can't afford to spend a week writing a short story which probably won't sell or, if it does sell, will 'sell' to a literary magazine for a free copy."

To me, the literature of the Sixties was when everyone swore and wrote about sex (Henry Miller, William S Burroughs, etc.), and when everyone played with the form of storytelling. Of the two, the later seems to be the one that has come through into the mainstream. Like fashion, where the outrageous is seen on the catwalk followed by the toned down version in the chainstores, the experimentation of form done in the Sixties is often seen in mainstream books today.

"I agree with you completely. It's been my contention for years - Norman Spinrad contests this, but Mike & I agree. Years ago a friend of mine was saying that we thought we were doing important things in New Worlds, but since then, SF had become unreadable - although it's gotten better since. He told me: 'Jim, what you don't realise is that you didn't change science fiction, you changed literature.' And I think that's what happened. Certainly, we raised the standard of literacy in SF, and expanded the ways you can tell stories, but I think the most important aspect is that our influence spilled over into the most important body of literature and really changed it. I don't think you would see books like The White Hotel by D M Thomas if it hadn't been for New Worlds. There again, this is my opinion, and perhaps I think we're more important than we really are. 'Things in the mirror appear closer than they are.'"

It was whilst editing New Worlds in London that James became a fan of crime literature.

"I had not read much of it. Mike gave me his copies of Raymond Chandler's books and I read the complete works in three days and nights. I've never been the same since. I've tried very hard to keep up with crime fiction since then and fill in the gaps in my knowledge. There are many American writers who are out of print and virtually unknown in their own country. Chester Himes is one, Horace McCoy is another. I'm writing about McCoy now."

NEW ORLEANS

I've read the three Lew Griffin books and I can't remember the plots.

"That's because there aren't any!"

The subtext of the novels serve as the plot. Griffin never solves any cases. Griffin always loses. It's all very strange. Why?

"When I first tried to describe the first book to people, I said - Well, he's a detective that keeps going on missing persons cases, and he never finds anyone.

"I find plot very uninteresting. When I read crime and detective stories, I read for the atmosphere and the voice. I could care less for plot. When I put down a Larry Block book, I couldn't begin to tell you how Matt Scudder found who did it. I don't care. When I read James Lee Burke, it's not for the occasional idiocies of the plot which he eventually works out, but for that wonderful atmosphere, the characters and the voice. The voice more than anything.

"One thing I try to do in my books is to create the book I always wanted to read, but never could find. I love both 'literature' - for lack of a better word - and detective fiction, so why not have an amalgam which combines the best elements of the two? The edgy atmosphere and crisp dialogue of detective fiction. The pursuits and content of 'literature,' which is a study of character and milieu and how the two interact. That's what I'm trying to do. Write books I'd love to read, but can't find anywhere else.

"Also, I get very bored with plots - as reader AND as writer. I can't force myself to sit down and write them. I try to make it as obvious as possible that there are no plots. Lew is often saying that he just sat down and drank until someone tripped over his feet. This is a big criticism of my publisher, of course - he wants pumped-up plots so that he can sell 50,000 copies."

I can't see it happening.

"Neither can I."

It's obvious that you're enjoying yourself. You can always tell when an author enjoys writing.

"I like playing with the reader. If you're not aware that you're being told a story, that it's artifice, then where have you been for the past forty years? That's what 'serious' fiction - again, for want of a better word - has been doing. I want to keep it in the reader's mind that this is a game we're playing, that it's artifice, that Lew's stories and the reversals that occur in the books are just fun. I hope people enjoy that aspect, also that those readers who aren't aware of that aspect won't be bothered by it.

"I try very hard to submerge the artifice so that people can easily read from beginning to end without stumbling over it. You'd be shocked to find out how many people read The Long-Legged Fly as just a straight detective story. They have no idea what the ending is all about. It amazed me when I got my first fan letters, from people who read nothing but crime fiction. What book had they read?"

You can never tell how people are going to perceive the books.

"Never."

You have presented a literary puzzle. Readers have solved, or ignored, it. But their solution may be completely different to yours.

"Once I write the books, they belong to the readers, they can read whatever they want into them. The reader participates in any novel as much as the writer does. The book is whatever they make of it. Obviously readers ARE finding a plot, a story to follow. They're filling in all the bits I left out. I have my vision of the book and do all of the structural and symbolic things I can to try to enhance and realise as fully as possible my vision of the book. And while my vision of the book is not necessarily theirs, I hope I've written well enough and given them enough of the undertones and submerged rivers that, whatever they make of it will be similarly strong and structurally beautiful. Naturally, it's going to be a different book. You're British, Paul. You're a different age, have different experiences."

We've read different books.

"Yes. And the books we read define us. Lew doesn't read in an organised way. He knows a lot about many strange things and almost nothing about most normal things."

He reads a lot of books, and a wide variety of them - all your characters seem bookish. The central character of Death Will Have Your Eyes carries a bookbag with him, even when he's on the run.

"Wouldn't you? This is part of the playful nature of my books, telling you that this is a book, that it is of other books."

Your books could not exist without all these other books existing.

"None of ours could."

The novels are literary criticism and teaching at the same time. One explains the plot of another, that each of them is based on literary works. For example, Lew seems to be equally damned for what he didn't do as for what he's done, which is your interpretation of Camus' The Outsider.

"In Black Hornet everyone believes Lew killed a man, yet he actually tried to save the man. All these stories are told about him. He's completely passive, doing nothing, and everyone is coming to visit him."

People like Lew, who are opaque, on their own, whom no-one understands, often get stories told about them - sometimes they encourage the stories. Because they're not understandable, people try to come up with a reason why they are like they are.

"Especially with someone who has Lew's contradictions of character. Why can he open someone's belly with a leather-worker's knife and then, pages later, take a foundling under his wing and let her live in his home?"

It's circumstances. People act and react under different circumstances. People go to war, kill, then come back and raise a family.

"Maybe. Lew's a fascinating character. I'm always finding out new things about him."

Is he James Sallis?

"No. There are lots of things about him that come directly from me. I kind of play with the details of my life in the same way that he plays with the details of his. That's part of the mirror, the game playing, but no, Lew's not me.

"Certainly, I share a lot of his self-destructive instincts - that's what I tap into when I'm writing. Like Lew, I do wrong things, even when I know I'm doing the wrong things. I drank extremely heavily for a many years, probably for much the same reason as Lew. I've made bad choices that, looking back, I'm appalled by.

"I'm not violent - I think I've gotten into two fights in my life. Still, Lew reads the books I read, lives where I live, eats the same food. I appropriate a lot of the details of my life, but the things damning and confounding Lew's life don't damn and confound mine.

"The Long-Legged Fly developed from a long short story. I just had that first scene in my head, the oil derricks heaving. I wrote it in an hour or so. At first, I wanted to just create a character who did something unforgivable and then make you love him. Afterwards, I wondered where all his rage came from. Twenty pages in, I realised this man was black. That was the only thing that could explain all this rage and anger boiling out of him, usually at inappropriate times. So I went back and started writing it again, and found out more about who Lew Griffin was. I discovered these things about the character as I wrote the text. I didn't decide on format or character before I started - and I'm still eliciting from the character as the stories are being written.

"They're all improvised, I hasten to add. I never know where I'm going when I start the book, even where I'm going from one page to the next. I gave up writing well-made stories many years ago. For it to engage me, I have to improvise, have to wing it."

But you are a controlling force on the book. You have to know whether what you've written is good or not. Do you rewrite?

"Endlessly."

You have to know when to stop writing, to know when you've made your point.

"Yes, but it's wholly instinctive, Paul. I'll write a scene or chapter, read, and wonder whether it did what it was supposed to do. It's all about feeling. A lot of times I don't consciously know why I reject a scene or a chapter. There's a controlling influence, sure. But that's a complicated thing that occurs while I'm writing. I'm making lots of choices as I'm writing. Endless choices. And I revise a lot.

"When I was writing The Long-Legged Fly, I wanted a small book, everything boiled down. I'd write scenes, dialogue, then cut it all by half."

Because the books are cut so fine, the reader devours them quicker. Things are missed, so the reader has to go back and re-read the book. I don't think that's a bad thing. They're so short, it's quite easy to go back and read them.

"I worry about that sometimes. Perhaps I should put up the equivalent of road signs like those we have in Arizona reading Slow, Watch Out For Rocks or Animals Next Ten Miles. Lots of readers tell me that they go back and read the books two or three times.

"I think of my writing in these novels as a kind of poetry. Everything's just so condensed. And so quick that people miss things. My agent does. She'll ask me a question, and I'll explain the answer is obvious, it's on page so and so."

When I think of your writing, I think of it in terms of jazz rather than blues, even though the blues features strongly in the novels.

"It's always specious to make comparisons between different arts, but... I would say blues has become a symbol for me because it's trimmed-down, no fat, stark, telling-it-as-it-is storytelling. My writing's also similar to jazz insomuch as I'm improvising, playing off major key forms, figures, looping back and doing variations. Any writing has that analogy with jazz, but I may be more aware of the improvisational element.

"As I'm writing, I listen to music all the time. There's a scene in The Long-Legged Fly where Lew is writing about his Cajun detective and listening to Cajun music. I do the same sort of thing, playing different kinds of music depending on the scene. I'm sure it affects me. When I was doing the Raymond Queneau translation I played a lot of old Forties French accordion torch songs, which was highly appropriate."

OLD ORLEANS

Lew Griffin is a black character. Have you researched the black experience in New Orleans?

"Yes. Quite a lot. In New Orleans and outside it. The earliest influence was Chester Himes. A lot of Lew's character traits come, not so much from Chester's characters, as from Chester's life. Lew's passivity, for instance, the way he lets himself be moved from crisis to crisis. His almost exclusive love of white women. His inchoate rage, which Chester had. Acting out inappropriately at the worst possible times. Alcoholism. Some of the sections when Lew's out of control I intentionally tried to pattern on Chester Himes' The Primitive (1955). It's the book I most admire. I buy copies at second hand stores and give them to people.

"As I got into this, and was doing the research, I read a lot of black literature. I already had an interest in black music - jazz and blues - and was fairly knowledgeable about that. I grew up in the South and played exclusively with blacks up until the age of ten, when I was told I couldn't do that any more. I didn't understand why. A lot of this dovetailed into the books. Some of the things in Lew's early life are transformations of things which happened to me.

"As for New Orleans specifically, I've spent a lot of time in cheap bars and cheap restaurants talking to people of every sort, and I tend to steal what I can."

Have you run into any trouble with people saying you're a white writer writing about blacks?

"I keep expecting it to happen, but so far it hasn't. Every time I'm at a signing or reading, I truly expect anger to be projected towards me, but everyone's been gracious. Not to say that there haven't been some very surprised faces at signings, when they realise I'm not black."

There have been other white writers, like Ed Lacy ( In Black And Whitey) and Shane Stevens (Go Down Dead), who have successfully written black characters. The whole argument is slightly ridiculous because it's like saying that Walter Mosley can't write white characters. Or that Charles Dickens couldn't write women and Jane Austen couldn't write men.

NEW WAVE

You are playing with time and form in the books, making a lot of literary references.

"Far too many, according to my publishers. And a lot of my readers."

You're expecting a lot from them.

"Not really. I don't expect them to pick up on all the allusions. They don't need to know all this stuff. They can read on past the literary stuff, concentrate on the characters and the adventure. However, if they want to take note of and track down the literary allusions, then they're free to do so - there're plenty of them. My French translator amazes me because she'll pick up on these tiny, little phrases - her ear is so good that she can tell it's an allusion, but she won't know to what."

Albert Camus, Raymond Queneau and W B Yeats are mentioned by you within the text. You're obviously widely-read, write essays, poetry, short stories. But why is this all in a crime novel?

"Why shouldn't it be? A lot of the literary stuff underpins the artifice. You have to remember Lew, or whoever, starts off writing a very conventional detective story. As the book progresses it becomes more and more literary, more and more autobiographical, so that you think, in the third section, when Lew says that he's writing so close to his life, pretty soon he's going to have to start writing what he says next. Then, at the very end of the book, the narrator says that he's been lying to you all along. He just made up this character called Lew Griffin, you don't know who's really writing this."

The stories are written so that you don't actually know what Lew is thinking, even though they are supposed to be written from his point of view. He tells you he's walking down the street. Then he tells you he hits someone. There's no guarantee of an explanation.

"There are two levels to the books that seem contradictory. On one level there is Lew Griffin as a made up character, which is written as a story. On the other level, there is Lew Griffin as a real character, which is written as an autobiography. Those are both goals, and I don't think they are contradictory. I think the stories most important to us are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They are fictive. They allow ourselves to get through and over bad things in life."

It's like the stories your parents or grandparents tell, and tell over and over again with different details. They are exaggerated, to make them entertaining, palatable. Sometimes they are full of outright lies, but they hold grains of truth, which is their point.

"That's why I repeat so many things. Some reviewers find it annoying that I repeat little bits of narrative within the books. What they fail to say is that the story's told differently each time."

Lying is important.

"Lew talks a lot about dissembling. That's what the black experience has been all about - saying one thing but thinking another - having to lie and not say what you feel. Lew talks about things in the books, but he really means something else - much of the point is what's not said."

Lew seems very intelligent in the books, but it is his emotions which lead him astray.

"Painfully so. It's the whole dichotomy between the head and the heart. For me, that darkness and light is what is so compelling about Lew. He is such a smart person. He understands so much about other people's feelings and about what they need - again and again you see this - yet he can't understand himself. He can't figure himself out at all - he's a complete mystery. And he never gets control of whatever it is inside himself which is tearing him up. He goes through periods when he's able to function and has a safe existence, but life always turns dark again."

In Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories, the detective is invisible. You don't know what he's really feeling. You know his intellectual approach and his moral outlook, but essentially he's a commentator on the world around him. Very much like reviewers and essayists and I think Lew Griffin fits perfectly into that role.

"I agree. I certainly tried to keep that in mind. There are all sorts of little homages to Hammett, Chandler and other crime books."

You haven't had a happy ending yet, have you?

"Could Lew ever have a happy ending?"

The happy ending depends upon where you end the story. Lew's life story is told over a long period of time and you chop and change and spindle parts of his life into a solid form. Surely there is something he did which ended happily?

"I suppose I could always do a David Goodis and tack on a happy ending that makes no sense to the rest of the story."

You make it seem that Lew lives such a terrible life.

"Bit it's not so terrible. I mean, for all the crap that goes on, how many of us have friends like Don Walsh and LaVerne and all the wonderful women Lew meets. He has success as a writer and as a teacher. He loves fine food. He doesn't really have a terrible life - it's just he has a lot of things going on inside him. What the hell's a happy ending? In the end, we all get thrown into the dirt. You have moments, islands, when things are okay, then something bad happens.

"Obviously, because this is edge literature, I'm not focusing on these islands of happiness, but they're there. I think the final scene of Black Hornet is a beautiful romantic scene, where LaVerne comes up the steps and Lew reads her a passage from a book he doesn't really understand. They hug. It's a tender, hopeful moment - and at a time when he's young and really just getting fucked up for the first time."

A nice ending, but not for long.

"They never are."

OTHER WORLDS

If I read your non-crime writing like Renderings (1995), Limits Of The Sensible World (1994), and the upcoming Gently Into The Land Of The Meateaters, would I find the same concerns?

"Yes. I don't see that much distinction between my writings. Renderings, for instance, is science fiction, although you could just as easily read it as a surreal fantasy. It started as a long novel, but I super-condensed it down to 100 pages. Most of the editors who read it said it was too bookish. It does have a plot, but you pick it up as you go along. As in the Lew Griffin novels, there's a lot of talking about books, thinking about the fictions we tell ourselves.

"Limits Of The Sensible World is a collection of what I consider to be my very best short stories. They are very intense and have the same feel and penetration as the Lew Griffin novels.

"There's little distinction between them all. It's just me explaining, in words, the way I see the world, and they all have the same preoccupations."

I don't like the way publishers pigeonhole writers, categorise them into marketing genres and sub-genres. Was H G Wells just a science fiction writer? Was Rudyard Kipling just a children's author?

"I do have this problem with publishers in the States. I write a lot of different things and so have multiple publishers."

James listed his literary influences as Julio Cortázar, Tom Disch, Boris Vian, Theodore Sturgeon, Chester Himes and Raymond Queneau. James translated Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau in 1993, and Queneau is mentioned in Moth.

"Queneau was a French writer who came in at the end of the surrealist period, became involved with them, overlapped into the existentialists and the Pataphysicians."

What were they? It sounds medical.

"They were a group who loosely patterned themselves on Alfred Jarry (author of the play Ubu Roi) and didn't take anything seriously. It was said that if you gave a Pataphysician a form that had three duplicates, he'd fill out each one with different information.

"When I was editing New Worlds in London, I got a lot of continental books to review and discovered Queneau, the first French writer I fell in love with. For me Queneau is the ultimate artist as artificer. His books are very strange and unworldly, very obviously books. He plays a lot of jokes on the reader, on himself, on expectations. There's nobody like him in English. In fact, there's nobody like him in French.

"He was a complete man of letters. He was an excellent poet. He wrote popular songs. He translated. He was a great editor. He oversaw a huge encyclopaedia project that is supposed to cover the entire knowledge of mankind. He even wrote an autobiographical novel in verse, Chêne Et Chien. He wrote a play where a character just decides to leave and walk around real life for a while.

"Why did I include him in the Lew Griffin books? Probably because I was reading him, or thinking about him, at the time. There are two set pieces in Moth, one of which is a lecture Lew delivers about Queneau. All the information is wrong, everything is mixed up."

You're telling lies.

"Yes. I think Queneau would have heartily approved."

NEW DAY

"I'm a binge worker, so I tend to work on one book at a time, and work on it intensely. Now that the short story market is dead, I'm essentially just writing novels, and doing occasional book reviews.

"Some work sits around for a year or two before I finish it. Renderings was in manuscript for years before I finally found time to work through it.

"I try to write full time, and can usually manage this for two to four years at a stretch, then something happens and I have to let go and earn some money. The last time was when I wrote Death Will Have Your Eyes. It didn't sell at first, so I had no money for six months and went back to work.

"I'm a respiratory therapist. I work with people on ventilators, especially and by preference with newborns. I do that when I can't make a living writing. When we first moved to Arizona, things were really bad; I worked full time as a respiratory therapist for about four or five months until we could get our savings back up.

"All that stuff about being at the bedside in Moth, that everyone thought I'd researched so carefully, was all off the top of my head. I've done this for almost twenty years off and on. I'm licensed, can pretty much get a job anywhere and at any time I want.

"I think it's important work for me. One, because it's so different from writing and everything else I do, and two, because I'm dealing with extreme situations - these kids are gravely ill, crack babies, chronics, and many of them die. Makes me think about things a lot."

I could never do it. It's too much like facing reality.

"Exactly why it's important to me. Most of us, in our lives, are not up against death all the time. When I'm doing this, I look it in the face twelve hours a day. If I do something wrong, even if nobody does anything wrong, this baby will die. I work in one of the major centres for my part of the country, so there are many extreme cases, emergencies flying in all the time."

It must be very distressing.

"It can be. And it's both physically and emotionally exhausting, which is why I don't do that and write at the same time."

MAKING WAVES

Your work is subversive. I wondered whether there was an element of sticking two fingers up at society. You're playful, but there is a serious message in your work. It's about people who are not happy about the world they are living in.

"I don't think people are happy - how can they be for more than a moment at a time? We have to try to laugh at our lot in life. Laughter through tears as Chekhov says again and again. Nobody seems to mention this, but Lew's a funny guy."

It's a dry sense of humour. Very dry. Very English.

"Yes it is. Quite English. We laugh, we form connections with people that endure. We tell stories to ourselves and to each other that help us forget the real world we live in, how miserable everything is.

"Stories are the fictions we tell ourselves to go on. It's a very Wallace Stevens existentialist kind of thing. We know they're fictions, but we go ahead and tell them, and we choose to believe."

How important are they?

"Vital. It's the only way we ever come close to understanding ourselves and others. That sounds dreadfully...but I think art is urgent."

You are trying to understand people, to find out why they are the way they are.

"Absolutely. What else is fiction about? We try to see the world through different eyes, get into others' heads."

But, once we see the world, understand it a little more, can we then change it?

"Ultimately, no, we can't."

We're supposed to be human. We're supposed to be able to change things.

"You can cultivate your garden. You can strive to make, keep, strengthen the friendships and connections you have in your life. You can strive to maintain a sense of humour about all this. You can strive to be the best man you can. To understand as much as possible about other people and their needs. You can try to find stories that make sense to you and make you more viable. You do have a choice: stories that paralyse you, or stories that liberate you."

Would you say you are subversive?

"All art is subversive."

To what end?

"There's a poem by Lawrence Durrell I love called Style. Durrell talks about finding a metaphor for the way he wants to write and goes through all these rather grand concepts like, 'Ovations of leafy hands accepting' wind. Eventually he comes down to 'Grass - an assassin of polish.' And he describes the way you see grass, touch it because it's pretty and green, pick it up, and how only after you've throw it away do you realise it's cut you: ' the thread of blood from the unfelt stroke.' Art has to be subversive. It has to hurt a bit, has to be not quite what you want it to be. You have to feel that thread of blood from the unfelt stroke.

"Popular literature assures you that everything you believe is correct - and that you're a good boy for believing it. Real art conveys Rimbaud's message: Everything we are taught is false. Nothing you believe is correct, or even close. Let's think about this for a while."

Popular literature is comfortable, makes you real good. In fact, popular literature often affects your body, makes you sweat, your heart pound, arouse you. The thing it doesn't do is affect your emotions, or make you think.

I like the Lew Griffin novels because I can go back and read them again and again, and they will make me think. They also affect my emotions, but I don't really know why.

"I don't really intend people to put down the novel and start thinking about the purpose of life. As with the grass, I want it to be getting to you without your realising it is. I'm very pleased when people write or tell me that my work has moved them, made some deeper connection."

FUTURE PROJECTS

"There are several novels I want to write. One is half done, called Bottomfeeders, which is about a bunch of street people who gang together to find a cop killer. It's a gentle take-off of The Seven Samurai. I've another in mind, in which a man condemned to death for murder and another, rising from a nine-year coma, come together. And I want to write a novel from the point of view of Gilles de Rais, who was Joan of Arc's captain and a child killer."

© Paul Duncan, 1997, not to be reprinted without permission.

Enquiries should be directed to Paul Duncan at Kershed@aol.com.

Paul Duncan is co-founder of Crime Time magazine. He edited The Third Degree: Crime Writers In Conversation, featuring this interview with James Sallis. Paul has published Ark: The Comics Magazine for 10 years, and has contributed to Mystery Scene, Shots, Mean Streets, Hardboiled, Speaking Of Murder, Deadly Women and The Big Book of Noir. He has written graphic novels (Second City, Overload, Beautiful People) and some of his mystery fiction has been published in various anthologies. Paul is presently writing a biography of Gerald Kersh. He also maintains a web site dedicated to Kersh.