It is not midnight. It is not raining.
An interview with James Sallis.

by Gerald Houghton (1997)

One reviewer recently spoke of James Sallis as 'a white poet of some renown' - a description barely scratching the surface of such a prodigious talent. Sallis' career defies simple labels, from his early years in SF, editorship of the legendary New Worlds, translations of contemporary French writing, numerous works of musicology, through to his current position as one of the most exciting and distinctive voices in contemporary crime.

In its time, the town of Helena, Arkansas, on the banks of the Mississippi, was home to such blues legends as Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson. Jim Sallis remembers listening to the latter every day at noon on KFFA's King Biscuit Hour.

I grew up listening to blues, early rock and roll, country. My first love was classical: I studied trumpet, French horn and violin, put together a quartet for whom I wrote the music while in high school. Then I fell in love with folk music my senior year and taught myself guitar at college. Over the years I played with various bands; taught guitar and other stringed instruments, along with theory, for several years back in Texas. My listening may veer in a single day from Hawaiian guitar to Mozart concerti and Mahler symphonies to Bob Dunn's steel guitar on old western swing records to Blind Willie McTell, Bartok's quartets or Counting Crows.

He describes his father as a freethinker, believes his mother may well have been schizophrenic. To this day, no one in the family talks about it. His heritage is largely French (the family name derives from Salle), and includes an Indian great-grandparent. It was while bed-sitting in London in the mid-sixties, eagerly devouring the complete works of Chandler and Hammett, that he began reading and translating poetry by Apollinaire, Ponge, Du Bouchet, Cendrars and Guillevic. Brother John is a philosopher, a friend of Derrida and an authority on Heidegger.

My brother is John Sallis, a philosopher who himself writes rather dense though fascinating books. His latest is one on painting, and dedicated to me. Each time one of us, John or I, publishes a new book, my uncle in Memphis buys a copy and donates it in our grandmother's name to her hometown library. So there's this tiny library in this tiny little town in Arkansas that has damned near everything I've written, and all these books by John on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the nature of being, sitting there together looking out over the cotton fields and one-room churches. We call it the Archives.

He'd started to write short stories in college, getting a couple of pieces published in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds before he dropped out. The two met and became friends when Moorcock arrived in the US to attend a writer's workshop. For his part, Sallis says he 'craved' the kind of writing Moorcock was sponsoring with the magazine. Then Moorcock invited him to London.

Mike came to the States, as I recall, for the World SF Convention, which was in New York City that year, and attended Damon Knight's Milford Conference (invitation only, professional writers) more or less by happy accident. Judy Merril was living in Milford then, and Mike and Judy were close.

He'd published my very first story, one called 'Kazoo,' in New Worlds, in the second of the large format 'slick' issues. (I sold stories at the same time to Damon for Orbit, and to Ed Ferman for F&SF, but 'Kazoo' was the first in print.) We sat up talking all one night and he asked me to come to London. He was looking for someone to take the weight off him with New Worlds. I remember sitting with Mike looking out the window at Judy Merril's as dawn came up, thinking how the leaves on a tree looked like the skeletons of fish.

That first story, 'Kazoo,' was written here in the States, and I was reading all sorts of things at the time: Burroughs, Ballard, Brian Aldiss. Certainly the story has this affinity to Burroughs: it is about, or is written out of, a world in which everything is possible, a world in which metaphor has become real. Incidentally, my favorite line of all is from this story: 'He was giving me the eye, so I took it and put it in my wallet next to the finger someone gave me the day before.'

I was with the magazine for about a year, putting some issues together in tandem with Mike, Charles Platt or Graham Hall (who carried through on the new writer's issue we'd conceived together), putting others together largely on my own. I was, of course, abyssmally young, stupid and inexperienced. But London and New Worlds were astonishingly important to me. I published Chip Delany's 'Time Considered As a Helix of Semiprecious Stones' - which had actually started off, the first page or so of it (though all written by Chip), as an intended collaboration - several Brian Aldiss pieces, DM Thomas, and some vintage Tom Disch (who was in London then).

And then there were the installments of Norman Spinrad's still infamous Bug Jack Barron that eventually got the magazine banned. WH Smith and Sons refused the distribute them any longer on the grounds of 'obscenity and libel' ('we never did find out what they thought libellous', wrote Moorcock) and questions were even asked in Parliament (by a Tory MP, of the then Labour Arts Minister Jennie Lee.)

Memory, especially of details, is dimmed, but it effectively sent us, shaky enough at best, nosing groundward. The profanity was, of course, amazingly mild stuff by today's (or any) standards. We staggered on - for a time, I tried to edit the magazine from the States, then it passed through the first of many metamorphoses into an original paperback anthology - waiting for the dead man to drop.

Before that drop, however, it also saw one of SF's true Holy Grails - Harlan Ellison's 'A Boy And His Dog' - into print.

Harlan called me up one night - I was back in the States by this time - to read the first five pages of that one, while he was still writing it. Steve McQueen's here, he said, and he's rolling on the floor.

What people don't realize is that, for all its importance and commercial appearance, New Worlds was at heart an amateur affair: purely a labor of love. There was no budget, no office, no staff, and issues were put out on a sort of committee basis. Charles Platt did the layout and physical prep. Contents were a mix of stories in inventory, pieces pulled from the submissions pile, things to which the magazine was committed (Brian Aldiss's acid head stories, or Ballard's) and things written especially for it.

I didn't really get to know Ballard. He and Mike were quarreling during this time, I believe, so I only met him once or twice, in pubs and the like. I loved what he was doing, of course.

As to who edited what, I doubt if any of us can remember. No one who knows Mike imagines for a moment that he sank into the background, I'm sure. His spirit was the spirit of the magazine; and the whole enterprise was funded by his overdrafts and income from books he wrote, everything from sword and sorcery to the novelisation of 'Behold the Man'. I do remember that Mike and I had serious disagreements over the inclusion of a number of stories, especially 'Time Considered As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones' [by Samuel R Delany] and the Ellison story. He felt that neither of those stories addressed the true spirit of the magazine, that they were too mainstream SF. They could be published in any of the magazines, he pointed out. But Mike had said I was editor, so he let me edit.

This gives you some idea of the contradictions we harbored, wherefrom much of the magazine's energy derived. Here's Mike, this hulking 19th-century novelist supporting this incredibly avant-garde magazine with money he makes writing heroic fantasy, essentially hack work; and here I am, thinking of myself as a poet, up to my neck in French and avant-garde literature and considerably farther out on the literary limb than Mike, making a case for these centralist stories. Both of them got us a lot of attention, of course.

It was also I who wrote the first non-Moorcock Jerry Cornelius story. Others then came along behind - Mike Harrison initially, I believe. (Now there's a hell of a writer!) That first one, 'The Anxiety in the Eye of the Cricket,' is never identified as a Cornelius story, though it obviously is. It was first published in an anthology Lang Jones did. Then I wrote 'Jeremiad' for New Worlds, and a bit later along, 'Marrow,' published in one of the paperback-format New Worlds. For a time Mike and I planned a dual volume of stories, even had a prospectus together that I believe I showed around New York, but no one was interested. Just another orphan, and no one buying matches on the streetcorner any longer. We were to have alternate stories and then, for the end, actually write one in collaboration.

It seems to me that Jerry Cornelius was one of those watersheds, one of those cracks in the floor from which runners extend in all directions. Hard to imagine two more different writers than Mike and myself. Yet I'd just come off reading The Final Programme and A Cure for Cancer and the power of Mike's imagination overtook me: he'd created an engine that might run any metaphoric system. I sat down and wrote 'The Anxiety in the Eye of the Cricket' virtually straight through, I think, from notes jotted in his kitchen. Then a little later on, 'Jeremiad.' And once I'd returned to the States, 'Marrow,' which I think far the best. By then Mike Harrison had waded in as well, with his usual magic.

Judy Merril, sadly, died recently.

Yes, in Canada, where she'd lived since the early Seventies. It makes me realize anew that all these important first- and second-generation SF writers, the ones who created the field, are slipping away from us, and no one's had the good sense to get down what they had to say. The history of SF still goes unwritten.

Judy's taste and my own were quite discrete, but we spent a lot of time together, and she was of course a great champion of New Worlds and of all the new work being done in the field back then. I worked briefly as her secretary. She had at one point, I recall, recommended me to her publisher to succeed her as editor of her Year's Best, a monumental landmark in SF. Judy was working on her memoirs, including what's said to be some wonderful material on Theodore Sturgeon, when she died. I sincerely hope these will be published.

Sturgeon is another of those sadly gone, and a particular hero of mine; I've wanted for years to do a biography. Sturgeon is the first great stylist science fiction produced. Read stories from his contemporaries and you'll be astonished at how poorly they're written; read Sturgeon and you'll be astonished at how incredibly well they're written. He wrote stories with real ideas and real human beings, and he wrote, line for line, sentence for sentence, as well as anyone writing at the time. Much of later science fiction comes directly out of Sturgeon. He is also, more than any other single writer, the man I learned to write from. I can remember, when I first started, reading More Than Human and his stories over and over, trying to understand how he did it: the way he looked at things, the connections he made with people, how he went at telling a story (never, never straight ahead), those marvelous voices he always tapped into.

From all his says, it can be gathered that the legacy of science fiction in general and of New Worlds in particular lives on in his work, as indeed it does in general fiction.

New Worlds' influence on my writing was tremendous, just incalculable. Within myself I had sensed, inchoately, these great potentials for science fiction; I had been brought up with canonical literature, much of which I truly did love; and I was becoming enamored of the modern continental novel, of Chandler, Hammett. New Worlds, its spirit, in the deepest way gave me permission. Mike and I believe - a belief contested by others - that New Worlds' strongest and most lasting influence was not upon science fiction (which, after all, shortly thereafter swung back into conservatism) but upon 'mainstream' writing - more lateral than vertical.

A few years ago, Mike and I were talking about the possibility of creating a New Worlds imprint for a line of books, novels and such, to be brought out under license of some established publisher. There's just one problem, Mike noted: nothing with the name New Worlds attached has ever made money - for anyone. And we laughed.

Sometimes I think I should move back to London. Last fall, when I was there on a brief sidestep from Paris, I was greatly impressed by the sincere interest, seriousness and general knowledgeability of interviewers and readers. I've remained in touch with many of them, in fact. Not that we're taken more seriously there (though we are) so much as the simple fact that we're noticed. That whole European heritage of attitude toward the artist, which never really gained a foothold here, and which has lost, with the decline of literacy and the superfluity of literature to our culture, whatever purchase it may once have had.

In recent years the Sallis reputation has been one built on four extraordinary crime novels. 1992's The Long-Legged Fly takes its title from Yeats and its plot from 1964, 1970, 1984 and 1990. In it a series of women disappear and black New Orleans debt collector/teacher/writer/detective Lew Griffin investigates. It's a complex, dense work that introduces many of the characters and themes established in the series, and in particular the unique central character of New Orleans itself. It is also one of the most disturbing, allusive, disorienting crime novels ever written. A year on and Moth followed, wherein Lew ostensibly looks for the daughter of his late lover, LaVerne.

Our lives are not plotted, or achieve what 'plot' they have only in retrospect (memory). One of the things I'm trying to do, line to line, incident to incident, book to book, is to create the texture of a real life. Things in our lives don't lock together; they don't make a lot of sense. We start things, drop them, let them lapse on their own.

Again, I'm trying to transcribe, or represent, what our lives are really like. We don't have this one thing we're pursuing. A dozen things a day - all kinds of people, trips to the post office or dog pound, things that have nothing to do with who we love or what we believe, that don't make much sense in any overall view - come at us. Plot to me is a gathering-point, a line you hang the clothes on. Again, this is all set up in Fly; it all comes right out of there.

Black Hornet (1994) - the most recently published in the UK - finds us back in the 60s, at a time of radical racial politics, in a city stalked by a rooftop sniper who has already picked off five of its citizens. Lew is standing beside the sixth victim when she falls. It is arguably the most accessible, consciously plotted of the Griffin novels, but one still suffused by ideas of memory and the act of remembering. Lew's detection is as much into himself as anyone else.

We learn to use memory the way we use art: use it to cobble together images of ourselves, partial explanations, that allow us to go on. Lew writes at one point that memory's forever more poet than reporter. So things get changed in there. In the Griffin books, again and again, you'll see incidents recounted, and they're different each time. The new one, the one I'm writing now, for instance, begins with a retelling of the incident in Black Hornet in which Lew leaves a bar with a white reporter who's shot down beside him.

Some of the books actually do have overarching plots - Moth, Hornet - though perhaps more in the nature of thrust than a form where all the pieces interlock. I've tried in each novel, while retaining the series' overall character, to write a different kind of book. Fly purposefully begins as pulp fiction and circles inwards towards a kind of autobiography that gets closer and closer to Lew's 'real life' until, with the very end, suddenly it all turns back into fiction. I think of the book as what might have happened if Raymond Chandler and Samuel Beckett had collaborated on a mystery novel. Certainly it's the most innovative structurally. Moth is my Southern novel (I am, after all, a Southerner, and grew up sixty miles from Faulkner) - the most traditional I'll ever write. With Hornet I wanted something lean and muscular; I thought of Larry Block, Donald Westlake's Stark novels and Chester Himes as I wrote.

A hundred times a month I begin reading novels with wonderment, loving the backstory, all the non-narrative stuff, where people live, what they do when alone - then the story kicks in and kicks much of this out the window. I really want to keep that backstory going, maybe draw it out, make it essentially the story. Again: just as it is in our lives. Life is mainly what happens to you while you're waiting around for something else.

One the strangest things to those raised on strict conventions of the genre is how, in Black Hornet especially, we are given a detective much taken to sitting around his apartment reading heavyweight literary tomes while the remaining cast bring the plot to him.

I think much of the action-adventure aspect of detective novels silly. The real thing's a lot more Ross Macdonald than Mickey Spillane: one walks around, talks to people, the truth gradually comes clear. Part of this, too, is the fact that while Lew always has good intentions he doesn't always follow through. But New Orleans is a small town; people hear what you're up to, and sooner or later your paths cross.

There is also a sense in which these novels are about the very act of writing itself. You're forever reluctant to nail facts or people in this man's life, to such an extent that someone fictional in one book may intrude on the reality of the next.

In the introductory essay to my book on Samuel R Delany I quote Pasternak: 'The clearest, most memorable feature of art is how it arises, and the world's best works, in telling of the most diverse things, are in fact narrations of their own birth.'

These novels are tightly structured, though perhaps structured more in the manner of poetry than in that of narrative prose generally. You don't use just rhyme, you don't use just plot. There's this whole battery of effects available: alliteration, syllabics, alexandrines, slant rhyme, simple euphony. Allusion.

Yes, in a sense (a sense that will become much clearer as the novels go on) the Lew Griffin books are about writing: what it is and how it's done, our use of it, our compulsion to form, to make patterns where probably none exist. And this, in turn, is but another aspect of Lew's use of autobiography to 'explain' himself, obsessively using these stories and memories to give himself form.

A third aspect is the way in which we're constantly shown this Lew Griffin through other eyes, what they have made of the scattered fragments of his life. People still tell stories about how he used to help them when he was a collections agent. Others remember when he was young and had a rep on the street as someone you absolutely did not fuck with. My favourite instance is from Black Hornet, where everyone believes he hunted up and killed the sniper, when in fact he tried to save him.

Eye of the Cricket is perhaps the most illusive Griffin so far. Several relatively harmless strands start the novel - a local juvenile crime gang, the search for a missing man - but the book revolves around themes of family, and especially Lew's relationship to his (thus far) missing son. It's the kind of haunted and haunting novel where even a simple shop sign - 'Sorry We're Not Here' - has echoes.

I feel rather as I do when my French translator, Elisabeth Guinsbourg, writes to say 'Okay, Jim, what's this line on page such-and-such,' because she doesn't recognize it, but she knows, has the ear to hear, that it's a quote, an allusion, something inordinately freighted for its size. I worked for maybe an hour on that description of the shut-down donut shop, kept going back and rewriting it, changing things, cutting, and the scene finally came alive only when I hung up that sign. Part of it's naturalist: all over New Orleans, on windows, in cars, you see these atrocious signs. The phrasing strikes me, still, the same way it strikes you. It's the ambiguities: that 'were,' read as verb, shifts the statement into past tense, in effect saying this place never existed; and there's an eye rhyme with 'here' that causes the thing to ring shut like a couplet. Reading it as a kind of pidgin English, we might construe its meaning as 'sorrow (pity, remorse, sympathy, redemption) is not/never has been here.'

Cricket is both the darkest and most literary of all, but if you look closely at what's in there, it's all set up in the previous books, things had to go this way. You get on the bus and go where it takes you. Think, for instance, about the relationships between the fourth section of Fly and the last quarter or so of Cricket. The fifth book, Bluebottle, is a kind of mirror image of Hornet: set in the past, lean, plot-driven in much the same way, dealing with early white supremacy just as Hornet deals with black-power movements.

In Cricket we are told that New Orleans is a city that 'could still be 1940.' The Griffin novels take place over many years and yet seem to exist within the same time - almost out of time. References to beepers and e-mail in the novel leap out.

The modern touches are to some extent meant to be jarring. In Cricket for the first time Lew begins to feel that the world has passed him by, that he's on his way to becoming an anachronism. New Orleans, as Lew says again and again, is a kind of island, cut off from mainland American society, timeless in its own peculiar way, filled with people (as well as buildings and social structures) who are anachronisms. Remember, too, that in these novels Lew is looking back on his life, relating it; memory, as it always does, runs things together, blurs them (more poet than reporter). That's pretty much the reason for using the title for The Long-Legged Fly from Yeats. Lew, like the fly in the poem, is sitting up above the stream of time, watching it flow beneath him.

'If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree,' Lew quotes in Cricket, and here again is the whole theme in a nutshell. From the very first pages of Fly, the books ask: What are these stories we tell ourselves? just how necessary are they? do we cease to exist without them? The entire fabric of these novels is Lew's attempt to 'create the world' in which he suffers.

Once again, the reasons for this structure and theme will become increasingly clear as the books progress. And, with the revelation of the final book, will lock into place. Which all begins to sound forbiddingly heavy. Maybe here's a good time to mention that stuff actually happens in the books - that people are killed, others get beaten, Lew moves through a Balzacean world of New Orleans society, lowest to highest? And that he, and the books, are often rather funny?

Stuff happens and the novels are certainly emotionally charged, but they are also overtly literary books in a genre not often noted for it experimentation. The opening words of Moth, for example, resonate dangerously from those closing Fly.

I don't see the Lew Griffin novels as (that trendy 'critical' term) subverting, or transgressing, the genre, but as extending it. These books have (I hope) all the momentum, energy and edginess of crime fiction. But they have, as well, something more of the depth, true textures and social freight of 'literary' novels. Fly, the way it sets you up for a piece of pulp detective novel then starts changing on you, pulling off (or putting on) masks, turning into what you think is reimagined autobiography, then with that quiet explosion of the last lines (quoting Beckett) turning back into fiction - you don't even know who's writing this. Read the last sentences carefully. The books are riddled with structural counterparts, some of them easily apparent, others quite subterranean. It seems to me that a book like Black Hornet, for example, is so organic, that form and content so become one, it can be seen only as a whole - and you've no idea how hard I work to try for just that!

I've a sense of the arc the whole series makes, but each day's work, and each novel, is improvised. I don't know where it's all going. I found out years ago that this is the only way I can write. Hopefully by this time I've practised my scales and modes faithfully enough that I can turn loose, sink into the music and, when my turn comes, just blow...

In the lazy world of criticism, of course, everyone is eager for a simple hook, and none seems more readily made than those drawing comparisons between Sallis and darling of contemporary black crime writers, Walter Mosley. After all, the reasoning goes, both are writing about black detectives... But Mosley's books are more concentrated on tracing the social history of black America through deceptively simple detective stories. Mosley's Easy Rawlins and his explosive buddy Mouse live an exterior life where Lew's is an essentially interior one.

Mosley and I both write crime novels that feature intelligent black men who manage to survive inside the dominant white society, sometimes in spite of themselves - novels, moreover, that try to draw out the social history of a specific place, to show the ways in which place history and personal history intertwine: that's a pretty strong connection right there. Stylistically, textually, no, I don't think there's much of a similarity. He's a fine, ambitious writer; I follow him closely.

This duality of protagonist, splitting a personality into two parts, is a genre convention. By direct intention, Lew's Mouse is within himself. It doesn't drop by to have a meal or shoot someone; it's always there. And it's every bit as dark and hard as Walter's Mouse.

There's a lot of Lew that's me, taken directly from my own life; but there's much that's not. He began as an autonomous character - more or less a reaction to my reading of Chester Himes. My use of personal traits and history is twofold: it's sometimes easier than making things up, and it gives great authority to the text, resonances it would not otherwise have.

If you go looking for comparison, you may well fetch-up on a beach somewhere near Barry Gifford and, oddly, America's best kept literary secret, Paul Auster. Certainly the Griffin books find echoes in Auster's own mysterious, oblique debut The New York Trilogy.

George Pelecanos compared Fly to Paul Auster's novels and Willeford's Pick-Up, a combination I like very much. I'd already written Fly when I came across the Auster novels, but again, there was this tremendous identification with them - an arc of electricity connecting me to them. Auster and I are about much the same sort of thing. I do think my book retains a bit more humanity; it's not so abstract. Do I appreciate the comparison? Absolutely. It's quite flattering.

I didn't read Willeford until I was well along in writing my own work, but the fact that instantly I connected with what he was doing speaks volumes. I think what George had in mind in making that comparison was the way in which Willeford's Pick-Up pivots on that final realisation as on a heel, and becomes, suddenly, quite a different book. (At least, that was my experience in reading it.)

I've not met Barry, but we corresponded a few years ago, and I believe he may have read Fly before publication. I love his work: profoundly unsettling, no matter how you scrunch down there and pound at the cushions, you can't get comfortable. I don't see any direct connection. We're both 'literary,' both poets, came from that background and from our admiration of pulp writers, of course.

I was writing and publishing poetry before I began writing stories, and went on for years thinking of myself primarily as a poet. I still publish several poems a year, have a couple of collections wandering about knocking at doors, looking for a home.

I'd also suggest here a kinship with Jerome Charyn, not so much his mysteries (though I'm a great fan of Paradise Man) as his 'conjured autobiographies', The Catfish Man, Pinocchio's Nose. There are also - as one astute British reviewer noted - affinities with De Lillo.

With roots in SF, a heart that beats with more literary matters, and a reputation built on crime, just how is Jim Sallis perceived by his public?

'Cult novelist', the epithet that's been popping up quite a lot of late, is probably a good fit. What I do is so quirky, so sideways to the mainstream, any mainstream, that I've reconciled myself to that. Then again, so many of the writers I most enjoy and admire are cult writers... I don't have any control over this, so it's silly to worry about it. I want the books to be read, and certainly I've received much greater acclaim - both in terms of reviews, and in terms of letters from readers - for these 'crime novels' than for anything else I've done. In my own mind, as a rule, I don't make those distinctions. A list of favorite writers would include Sturgeon, James Joyce, Chandler, Chekhov, Beckett, Chester Himes, Camus, Nathanael West. I've little patience with the accepted canon, none at all with teachers and reviewers who discount 'popular' (genre) writing, about which they generally know nothing at all. As a kid I read Dostoevski and Alfred Bester at the same time and didn't 'know' they were different. Two days ago I walked out of a bookstore with a copy of Paul Auster's new book and The Best of Henry Kuttner, so I guess I haven't changed that much.

Obviously there are people out there utterly unattuned to what I'm doing, some of them confused by it, others indignant. And they come from either side of the great divide, establishment 'literary' types like Gordon Lish who after telling me at great length how beautifully I write, demand to know why I'm wasting my time and talents writing 'this stuff'; mystery-oriented people who just don't get it because not only am I playing without a net, I seem to them to have thrown the ball away as well. Makes for some odd reviews. The quote I relish most is Gene Wolfe's, used on the hardback edition of Fly here in the States: 'Great writing doesn't consist of doing something better than anyone else can do it, but of doing something no one else can do at all.'

Readers I hear from, understandably, are those who have connected strongly with my work. And what surprised me at first was how many of these read the books simply as genre crime fiction. Others don't, of course. I have wonderful letters. There's one fan, a beautiful lady named Jane, with whom I correspond regularly. I also stay in touch with her children; they're a family of readers, and pass the books among themselves. I've formed friendships that mean quite a lot to me.

Your time in Europe, and your love of European literature, feeds back again and again in your work.

Not much doubt that I'm an American writer, since American society tumbles down to being my primary subject. I do think the subject, however, whatever it is, gets filtered through a kind of semi-European sensibility. One doesn't read as much continental literature as I have, or connect with it so strongly, without it's having a summary effect. This may also be another kinship with Auster. In a way of thinking, we are both Americans writing European novels.

There's not much of a tradition of literary journalism here, with writers like Burgess churning out reviews and set pieces. Writers here tend to support themselves in the academy instead, as teachers of creative writing, so perhaps we have this somewhat more elitist heritage.

I was reading an essay by Gore Vidal who puts it succinctly that literary journalists like Edmund Wilson do not exist anymore chiefly because literary journalism does not exist anymore, and I had this marvelous snapshot of Edmund Wilson at 80 flipping burgers in a cafe somewhere in upstate New York, grumbling magnificently the whole time.

My sensibilities are European as much as they are American, and it's always been my ambition (as I state explicitly in the introduction to my translation of Queneau's Saint Glinglin) to be a man of letters in the way few American writers are, someone like Queneau who writes novels, poetry, criticism, does translations, does it all. This distresses publishers no end, naturally. Or worse: disinterests them.

A line from one of my poems serves as credo for me, what one does in life: 'Find beauty, try to understand, survive.' I think Lew quotes that line in one of the novels. Another line he quotes, 'We must learn to put our distress signals in code,' is from a poem by one of my oldest friends, Dave Lunde, one he wrote in a high fever on his way to visit me when I lived with Tom Disch in Damon and Kate Knight's house in Milford, Pennsylvania.

I began translation as a way of learning French, digging into various poets I'd become enamored of, none or few of whom had been translated (and some of whom, like Guillevic, still have not been - in his case, for excellent reason) groping my way down these forbidding corridors of half-obscure text. I found that it was something I was good at, something I had a knack for. So over the years I published translations of a couple of dozen poems perhaps. Two or three stories. I'd started translating a key work in Queneau, his novel in verse Chêne et Chien, and when the first section was published in a literary journal, I sent it round to book publishers. Dalkey Archive, a very exciting small literary press here, wrote back that the Queneau book they'd always wanted to publish was Saint Glinglin. As I say in the introduction: I didn't step back fast enough when the line was drawn in the dirt. It took me something like three years to get this done - I wrote a novel, all sorts of other things, met my wife, got married, moved back to New Orleans from Texas during this time - but it's a project I am very, very proud of. And Dalkey turned out an extraordinarily attractive book. I'd love to do more translations - Boris Vian, for instance, especially L'Herbe rouge. But translation pays next to nothing here in the States. Much of my payment on Saint Glinglin, modest as it was, actually came from the French government.

Everyone who is not Stephen King, though - anyone with a living to make from a typewriter - faces the question of how much you can be an artist in a commercial world.

Maybe that's the central question of my 'career.' I kept intending to be a commercial writer, you see - I'm tremendously drawn to old pulp writers, to science fiction, to the mystery - but there's also this gravity towards what many consider elitist, that which is generally deemed 'literature.' I've very good friends on both sides of the fence. Certainly in American publishing, where the merchants want to know just what kind of sausage they're flogging, this hasn't done me a great deal of good. All along I've tried to make my living as a writer. And while I've done my share of writing-for-hire - book reviews, pieces and books on music, essays of various sorts - in the States, as I've said before, that whole stratum of literary journalism, by which European writers often subsist, just does not exist.

Since this is a question I seem never to have resolved in my life, I can't answer it in this interview, especially in today's literary climate. From the first I've taken pride in the fact that I was paid for what I did, that I was a professional. I've always thought of myself as a writer, never as anything else; I'm not an academic, not a teacher, in fact have no degree. And heartily distrust the old-boy creative-writing-school network. I love the simple designation 'man of letters' - if one feels anachronistically enough inclined to write novels in the first place and pretend they matter, why not go all the way?

I write every day, beginning early morning and continuing off and on throughout the day. I'm by nature a binge worker, and contract for six-month delivery on most books. There's always one major project - just now, a biography of Himes, for Jamie Byng in Edinburgh - but all along I'll be working at other things as well, book reviews, a poem now and again, introductions and critical pieces, stories. I'm planning to finish the Himes by the end of this year [1998], the fifth Lew Griffin, Bluebottle, is almost done. I've also the opening chapters of a novel with the working title Blue At the Back of My Head, set in Arizona, and about half of one called Bottomfeeders, a comic novel about a cop killer, a take-off of sorts on The Seven Samurai.

Recently I published a story in a literary quarterly here, and when a friend said, Hey, here's another great Sallis story, I pointed out that the story had been rejected 54 times. That's $69.12 in postage alone. My recent novel Death Will Have Your Eyes I wrote in about four months, knowing all along that it was going to be a difficult book to sell. That meant four months with no income - then another two years before it finally sold, quite aside from money lost on the books I could have written during that time. My agent took it out to market and absolutely no one in the States was interested. 'What is this thing?' being the general response. Came home with its tail between its legs after being whipped upon by a dozen editors.

We'd retired it from submission when I asked Vicky to send it around to my friend Gordon Van Gelder at St Martin's, a fine editor. At one of the inevitable editorial conferences, having to justify buying the book, Gordon told them it was like having steak after a lifetime of hamburger. My advance was a whopping $5000. And no paperback publisher here seems the least bit interested in taking the book on. It's done quite well in the UK, however, and I suspect will also do well in France when Gallimard publishes; I felt all along that it was much more to European tastes than American. The point is, writing novels such as these comes down basically to a hobby, one I have to support with money from other enterprise. One book that's a hard sell, and the whole house of financial cards comes tumbling down... Even the Lew Griffin novels don't make money for me. And now the first three are out of print here.

Published last September in the UK, Death Will Have Your Eyes is something else entirely. Set immediately after the cold war, it's about an elite spy assassin now called David drafted in to take down another of his kind who has gone rogue, in the form of an existential road movie down the lost highways of North America from Washington to New Orleans. All rolling jazz, half-empty towns and rented rooms; its deconstruction of genre is to spy novels what Jean-Pierre Melville's astounding film Le Samourai is to film noir. Michael Moorcock's blurb compares the book with Graham Greene.

Alas, I've not seen Le Samouri, know it only by reputation. The most direct influences on Death are Donald Hamilton and Philip Atlee; the book started off as a kind of homage to their books, then (as books will) developed a life of its own. That said, I believe there is a connection between what I'm doing in Death and the Melville film, though a subterranean one. I think currents run out from something like Le Samouri, or maybe it's that some strain in the culture fetches up on individual shores at about the same time, which is why we have Auster and myself coming to similar efforts simultaneously. Something new in the air that sets us all sneezing....

What you call a deconstruction of genre conventions I tend to think of as a certain kind of self-awareness of the text: a recognition that, yes, we are playing a game called literature. This reflects my love of Queneau as much as it does anything. It seems to me that this partially explains my fascination with science fiction, certainly my adoration of Cortazar (who is among my favorite four or five writers). The major lesson I've taken from Queneau (and there are many) is that literature can be at the same time 'realist' and wholly imagined: that these impulses don't necessarily contradict or cancel one another. Maybe, now that I think of it, that's a key to much of what I write?

Romance deals with the efforts of a single man in extremis. It has little sense of society, and its thrust is horizontal, from incident to incident, rather than vertical, ie, penetrating. Essentially it is nonrealist, arealist. (Irrealist?) Perhaps in presuming to write novels against the framework of the romance, people like myself tap into something rather new, some kind of sputtering crossroad where the wires are down and spitting fire and writhing about. Perhaps it's that irreconcilable tension of substance and form - novel vs romance - that gives us the energy we're looking for.

In the novel, David has escaped his previous life, moved on into something more conventional, ordinary. But when he's reactivated by an early morning telephone call we watch as he reassumes that other life, donning it like a costume for the part he is to play.

I rather like that. Yes, the agents are giving performances. In a way this is exactly what textual self-awareness becomes in its avatar as character: David now knows he is giving a performance, and his going on the road is a kind of performance art in the same way his studio work is art. Even the madwoman wraps things up into a pleasant, formal bundle towards the end.

Curiously, Death is a book about the consequences of espionage literature, reuniting participants with a shared history, giving them the past they have been previously denied. It's a book where the word 'should' is more lethal than any hand-gun.

'Should' as used in the book is a kind of code for Joyce's 'all those big words that make us so unhappy,' those voices of authority we can't get out of our head, all these social and psychological proctors telling us what to do or not do, censoring our actions, censoring self-knowledge, all this received wisdom, what American or British or Middle Eastern society tells us is real and important, all the things that stand between us and any full, true apprehension of the world about us.

The temptation, for course, is to accuse you of subversion in your fiction. Indeed, previously you've been quoted as saying that all art - all art that is worthwhile, at least - is subversive.

When I say that, I have in mind that art, if it's to be of any impact or use, must question the things we live by, the assumptions, received wisdoms, national doctrines, even the metaphysics. What Lionel Trilling meant with his 'adversary intent'. While higher (more subtle) arts (the 'literary' novel) may take all that to task rather gently, even subliminally, more demotic arts (science fiction, say, or the crime novel) just go ahead and tear right into it. The directness of that assault explains in part my attraction to edge literature. I love it when cracks show about the doorframe, when the floor's buckled up under the pounding, when the structure just can't quite bear the weight you've put on it. There the poor thing is, groaning in the wind.

Recently too, Sallis has finally attracted some attention from the film world. Rights to Death Will Have Your Eyes have been snapped up, and he was called upon to pen the screenplay for a film called Big Green.

Yes, that's why I was in Paris, and briefly in London, last year. I wrote the filmscript in its entirety in five weeks, then came back to the States to finish Eye of the Cricket, which I'd broken off to come do the filmscript. It's written (and will be filmed) in English, from an original story in French by Simon Reggiani.

My involvement came about as one of those flukish, piano-falling-on-you accidents. A writer traveling in the States settled briefly in New Orleans, met friends there, and wound up returning to Paris with copies of my books, which he passed on to Simon and to wife Patricia Mazuy, who will direct. Looking for someone to write a script from Simon's story, they were intrigued by my dialog. So after a few weeks of phone calls between Paris and Phoenix, I flew off and at producer Philippe Carcassonne's expense spent five weeks in Paris and Brittany working twelve to fourteen hours a day. Barely saw Paris at all.

I did have a chance to meet and work with my translator there, Elisabeth Guinsbourg. I've no idea if the movie will ever be made. Philippe is casting about for financing, I believe, so that he'll not bear the full weight. When my wife met me at the Phoenix airport (I'd been awake thirty or more hours at this point) she handed me a box of business cards she'd had printed up. The cards read 'Have Laptop Will Travel'.

Difficult Lives
Gryphon Books, 1993, pp99, ISBN: 0-936071-35-4
Extended essays on crime novellists Chester Himes, David Goodis and Jim Thompson, as well as being an intriguing history of the American detective story and the 50s paperback.

Limits of The Sensible World
Host Publications, Inc., 1994, 85 pages, ISBN: 0-924047-11-9
A collection of 18 short stories. Includes 'Kazoo'.

The Guitar Players
Bison, 1994, 288 pages, ISBN: 0-8032-9225-2
From Jim Sallis' parallel writing career - an eloquent collection of essays about favourite guitar players, including Roy Smeck, T-Bone Walker and Wes Montgomery.

The Long Legged Fly
No Exit Press, pp184, ISBN: 1-874061-48-3

Moth
No Exit Press, 1993, pp210, ISBN: 1-874061-52-1

Black Hornet
No Exit Press, 1997, pp180, ISBN: 1-874061-63-7

Eye Of The Cricket
No Exit Press, 1998, pp190

Death Will Have Your Eyes
No Exit Press, 1997, pp184, ISBN: 1-874061-78-5

[With thanks to Ion Mills for his invaluable assistance]