The James Sallis Interview
Thomas Kaufsek

As a science fiction aficionado who remembers your work from the late '60s, I have to admit it was a surprise when your first novel appeared on the mystery scene with The Long-Legged Fly. Had you done any work in the mystery field before this novel?

Not much, though early Clarion students may recall my enthusiasm for and advocacy of Raymond Chandler's work. I was a kind of bore about it in those days, I suspect. I'd been introduced to Chandler by Mike Moorcock while in London editing New Worlds. I still believe it's a body of work more important to literature than many academically approved oeuvres. As important as Hemingway or Fitzgerald, for instance. But until Fly I'd written only a handful of very short stories, most of them published by Eleanor Sullivan, my earliest champion of mystery folk.

One of the things I can't help wondering is what you did between your first book (A Few Last Words, 1970) and Fly. Henry Roth notwithstanding, twenty-one years between books is an awfully long time.

There were a couple of other books, on music, both published by William Morrow – one of them, The Guitar Players, recently out in a new edition from the University of Nebraska Press. There were also reams of music and book reviews, personal essays, journalistic sorts of things. When the short-story market disappeared – it really was like some cartoon figure running along, looking down and noticing the ground was gone, only then falling – I crabbed sideways into whatever sand would have me. Fiction did go on getting published, as did poetry, dozens and dozens of pieces, but these appeared in literary magazines seen mostly by other contributors.

On the same subject, Katherine Dunne said she went so long between her first two novels and Geek Love specifically because she felt she didn't have enough life experience to be a writer. Do you agree with the wisdom that says one has to live first in order to write?

There are a few lines in Fly: "Strange how one person can live in the middle of a minefield, stepping over bodies, and never see what's going on around him, while another walks to the corner store for bread and in a hundred recondite images, shadows slouching in a doorway, light creeping up an abandoned building, sees everything." I think that sums up what I feel about "experience" and creativity.

I mean, how else do you explain a Rimbaud, a Radiguet, a Chip Delany?

With me, while I certainly accumulated a horde of experience in those days – alcoholism, tours of duty in state hospitals, a couple of failed marriages, playing clubs on weekends and teaching music on weekdays, years of work at the bedside of critically ill or dying adults and, later, newborn children – it was more a question of waiting until I had reached a certain emotional point in my life. Sometime in the '80s I began to notice a new warmth in the stories I was writing, a fullness that hadn't been there before. Shortly after, I started writing Fly.

I always tell students that they will have to write a certain amount of junk, write it out, before the good stuff starts coming. Similarly, I believe I had to live through certain things, become the person I am now, before I could be a novelist. But that's just for me; it applies to no one else. Everyone, everything – what we can so easily forget in this world of 30-second news – is a special case.

Your recent book, Difficult Lives, seems to imply that David Goodis, Jim Thompson, and Chester Himes were all great writers in part because they led difficult lives. Or am I reading too much into it? What exactly are your feelings on the ways in which an artist shapes his life and vice-versa.

No. Goodis, Thompson and Himes were not good writers because they lived difficult lives. We all live difficult lives. What is interesting about these three are the very specific ways they came upon (specific, as individuals; and specific historically, in that they were writing during the period of paperback originals) to use their writing to overcome truncated lives, and at the same time to bend and forge the very faults of those lives into often stark, always intense, highly individual work.

And on one level, of course, the Lew Griffin books are a kind of Nabokovian discourse on this very connection. We're never allowed to forget that these detective novels are being written by a novelist and literature teacher, that they are an attempt to redeem his life. We can never be sure what is real, what is imagined. The end of Fly and portions of Moth (the Queneau lecture, for instance) suggest that it may all be imagined.

To what extend do you think this life experience influences the choice of genres in which a writer works? I ask this because I've observed so many writers over the years who work in the fantastic genres when they're younger, but move into mystery and thriller genres as they get older – John D. MacDonald, Kate Wilhelm, Neal Barrett, Jr., Dick Lupoff. I even found a story by James Preston Girard in an old Terry Carr "Best SF" anthology from 1981.

When I first began writing, science fiction was like a huge trunk that had dropped out of the sky and broken open, and everyone could make of its riches what he might. Mike Moorcock had assumed editorship of New Worlds . Damon Knight was starting up his Orbit series. Early work of people like Tom Disch, Ursula Le Guin, Chip Delany, Joanna Russ and Roger Zelazny was everywhere. Today, I think, the mystery genre offers a similar latitude for highly personal expression within an established readership. This is why you have writers like Stephen Greenleaf, K. C. Constantine, James Lee Burke or Neal Barrett, excellent writers who could make it on any ground, gravitating towards the mystery. There are still traditional whodunnits, still standard-fare P.I. stories, but there's also room for a lot more. Writers like David Lindsay have pushed the genre to the very edge.

Feet firmly in both camps, I work towards the day when "literary" writers will come to realize what energy they forego in setting themselves apart and when "genre" writers will stop retreating defensively behind fictive walls. Literature is not some imposing sideboard with discrete drawers labeled poetry, mystery, serious novel, science fiction – but a long buffet table laid out with all manner of fine, diverse foods. You go back and forth, take whatever you want or need.

I'm told that's how Roger Elwood "edited" his many anthologies in the '70s. He had a long table with piles of manuscripts, and when he needed to turn in an anthology he'd go around the table and take one from, say, the Roger Elwood pile and one from the Barry Malzberg pile, and so on. And the resulting books were terrible mishmashes that never cohered as anthologies.

Well, of course – as writer, editor or reader – you have to know what tastes good and what's left over from last Tuesday's banquet.

One of the things I've loved about your two novels is the way in which the books remain true to the pulp genre conventions while enlivening them with literary influences that come from far afield. To what extent did you consciously set our to remake the genre this way?

Remake the genre? No: that would be incredibly presumptuous of me. Hammett and Chandler remade the genre. The rest of us just go on scattering feed at the feet of their pigeons. But I did set out, as a reader, to write a kind of book I'm not often able to find. Loving both mysteries and what many would consider esoteric literature (I am, after all, a translator and champion of Queneau, and this year's Limits of the Sensible World collects my own "avant-garde" short stories), I rarely found the things I loved of each within the same work. In Fly and Moth, I wanted to try to retain the energy and classical framework of the P.I. novel while at the same time penetrating as deeply into language and character as any "literary" novel.

I hope it's clear that I'm not trying in any way to subvert the genre. I'm only tapping it – for its strength, its power, for its relevance as possibly the urban literature.

Publishers Weekly, reviewing Fly, may have said it best: Not a detective novel, but a novel about a detective.

A lot of mysteries lately have been addressing the serious issues of race relations, but your two novels are the only mysteries I've seen in which a white writer has written about a black protagonist. I think a lot of writers are afraid to try what you've done, so I can't help wondering if you have taken any flak for using a protagonist of color.

Not yet. I'm certain the point will come up. And there's at least one antecedent, by the way: Ed Lacy with his four novels featuring black protagonists.

It's relevant to know that the Lew Griffin books accrue directly from my admiration of Chester Himes' work. I love Himes' Harlem novels, about which I've written at length, but the Lew Griffin books derive every bit as much from his life: from his self-portrait in The Primitive, from his lifelong attraction to white women, from his habitation of discrete, often contradictory worlds (intellectual/sensual, American/expatriate, workingman/criminal).

The second book in the series, Moth, is dedicated to Himes. He's mentioned, and quoted, in the first, Fly; and in the third, Black Hornet, actually does a walk-on.

I've often felt that every American male who has felt emotion deeper than lust has tried to write a hard-boiled novel. What sets apart the good ones for you?

A clear voice. Drive. That sense of history and fate (and not merely the writer's clever plot) unwinding.

In my case, I can tell you how good a hard-boiled novel is by how badly it makes me want to smoke. It's that sense of time's passage that makes me want to taste my mortality. How firmly do you believe the line where you remark, "The novel's true protagonist is always time."

That quote, of course, is very much tongue in cheek: Griffin describes how he always looks at the floor in embarrassment when he says things like that. But it's the sort of absolutely true and utterly useless thing you're told over and over in literature classes, or read in current reviews.

Some years back, I realized that the novels and movies I love best give the whole arc of a character's life. That's what I tried for in Fly. You know how Griffin winds up, you know pretty much how he spent his life. (Or how he says he did.) Now, in these other books, you can go back and see what took him there. (Or the stories he makes up – for the reader? for himself? – about what took him there.)

Returning to my question about science fiction being something younger writers write, did you feel that way when you were twenty-five?

I don't know. That 25-year-old is farther away from me than you are: another person entirely, a very clever young man with little compassion and a terrible light in his eyes.

For whatever it's worth, this is from a story written by that 25-year-old: "When I was young I cared nothing for history of any sort."

And this is from my novel in progress: "When you're young, history's not worth much. When you get older, whether you consider it baggage or burden, history's a large part of what you have."

One of the beautiful elements of Moth is the way in which Lew views the city of New Orleans. You're not from there originally, are you? To what extent do you still view the city as an outsider?

For over twenty years I had an agreement with myself that I'd own nothing that couldn't either be broken down for easy transfer or left behind. I moved as often as most people pick up their dry cleaning; friends complained that I filled all the vacant "S" spaces in their address books and spilled over into "R" and "T." New Orleans is as close to home as I have. I came here, to attend Tulane, when I was seventeen, and over the years I've returned several times to live. I love the city, but in many ways, yes, I'll always be an outsider here. As will my detective, Lew Griffin. This is his city, he spends his entire adult life here, but he was not born here.

Daily in New Orleans we walk as on a skein barely covering history's river. It's difficult to remain unmindful of the desperate compromises this nation has made, or to overlook how history surges up under the surface of our individual lives. In southern climates, in colonized locales (and New Orleans, a southern city with a profound Caribbean influence, is doubly colonial), the rifts and glitches in the social fabric often show in high relief.

In Moth, Griffin mentions a review that assailed him personally. You yourself have written lots of reviews, and I'm sitting here now by virtue of having reviewed your last novel, so let me ask: how important do you think reviews are?

The average review in your local newspaper, I suspect, matters little or not at all, whereas one in the New York Times or Washington Post may be quite another matter: on such vouchsafements are print runs doubled, paperback and subsidiary rights sought out.

As you know, you're speaking to someone for whom, from the beginning, reviewing has been an integral part of his career. It is like my occasional editing, my musicology and journalism, my teaching: part of the way I relate to the world of letters and that larger world beyond; not a break from, but another facet of, my own creative work.

It's also important, in asking or answering this question, to make a distinction between reviewing at its base level, which may consist of little more than saying what kind of book this is, and a deeper sort of reviewing that places the book in historical and aesthetic context.

I think it sad that there's so little incentive to attract good reviewers. There are very few markets today for serious reviewing, and of these only a handful are able to pay their reviewers anything approaching a reasonable rate. This is all a considerable loss to us all.

In your two novels, you portray a lot of three-dimensional characters from the margins of society – addicts, homosexuals, prostitutes, night-shift workers – but none of them cliches. Are there many people in society's mainstream who interest you?

Everyone interests me. Scratch half an inch into anyone's life and that person becomes as intriguing, mysterious and inexhaustible as the sea. In fact, I often think that in making use of such marginal characters I may simply be taking the easy way out. But I myself have lived a marginal life, largely among people like those you encounter in the books, and my own values are certainly not standard-issue middle class.

One of the many joys I've had in writing the Griffin books is in refusing to let these people be cliches – or more precisely, in first setting them up as cliches, then ransoming them. Special cases, right? Griffin himself, who starts out as the prototype hard-boiled dick and turns himself inside out in the novel's course. Or LaVerne, the prostitute with a heart of gold – who starts working at a rape crisis center and goes on to an MA in psychology. Or tough, pragmatic homicide cop Don Walsh, whom Lew keeps from eating his gun.

What are you working on now?

I recently finished a novel, not in the series, entitled Death Will Have Your Eyes, which does some of the same things with conventions of the spy novel that I do with conventions of the P.I. novel in Fly and Moth. I'm about halfway into the third Lew Griffin novel, Black Hornet.

I've also agreed to do another Queneau translation for Dalkey Archive Press, this one his autobiographical novel-in-verse Chêne et Chien.

Aside from that, I'm guest-editing an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction on Chip Delany's work.

Fly will be out in paperback this fall from Avon, also (from small presses) a short novel, Renderings, and a collection of short stories, Limits of the Sensible World. I stay busy.

© 1994 by Fedora, Inc.

Thomas Kaufsek is a freelance writer living in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as Science Fiction Eye, The Armchair Detective, and Mystery Scene, among others.