James Sallis

The new collection of weird and intriguing tales from the author of DRIVE which reflect on his deep respect for classic science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction.

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in…

Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when…

In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Dr. Lamar Hale, the town’s all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon and town conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes – his military records missing, and followed by the FBI – mysteriously reappears in…

At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor’s bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for…

A hired killer on his final job; a burned-out detective whose wife is dying slowly and in agony; a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and disconnected from society….

In a time of anger, activism, and bitter racial tensions, a sniper has appeared to heat up an already sweltering New Orleans summer – by tearing up innocent people like paper targets. The shooter’s sixth fatality is cut down while she is walking at Lew Griffin’s side….

‘Somewhere, among the wastes of the world, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom,’ Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. Never has a man’s search among those wastes, for that freedom, been better represented than in this stunning conclusion to the Lew Griffin cycle….

Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. And he is a man subject to all of the frailties to which we are heir. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son…and himself in the process….

As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he has just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes to, Griffin discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the sniper?…

David (as he’s currently known) was one of an elite corps of spies trained during the chilliest days of the Cold War. But those days are long gone and for nine years he has been an ordinary, upstanding citizen. Until, that is, a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him…

Ex-policeman, ex-con, former therapist, Turner is Deputy Sheriff in a small town within driving distance of Memphis, Tennessee, to which he had migrated in hopes of escaping his past. His life is mending as he and Val Bjorn grow closer. And then a young man, arrested on a routine traffic stop with more than $200,000 in his trunk, is…

One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, La Verne Adams is dead – and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers… leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery….

As Salt River begins, two years have passed since Turner’s amour, Val Bjorn, was shot as they sat together on the porch of his cabin. Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left, Val had told him, a mantra for picking up the pieces around her death, not sure how much he or the town has…

There are those who vanish into the steaming New Orleans night – and it is part time Private Investigator, Repo-man and blues afficionado Lew Griffin’s job to find them….

Seven years have passed since Driver ended his campaign against those who double-crossed him. He has left the old life, become Paul West and founded a successful business back in Phoenix….

‘Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there’d be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping…

There was no major crime to speak of until Sheriff Lonnie Bates arrived on Turner’s porch with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a problem: The body of a drifter has been found-brutally and ritualistically murdered-and Bates and his deputy need help from someone with big-city experience who appreciates the delicacy of investigating people in…