I met James Sallis for the first time in Phoenix in July. I had landed at midnight for a reading at the famous Poisoned Pen bookstore. It was 94 degrees F and panic set in as I imagined what the temperature would be like during the day.
Sallis showed up at the breakfast place on North Goldwater Boulevard wearing jeans, boots, a shirt and a sweater. I thought he was taking the piss, but in fact, he explained, you need a sweater in Phoenix because everywhere you go was over air-conditioned. He was right, of course, and as I tucked into my pancakes in my shorts and t shirt I began to shiver.
Sallis enjoyed the perversity of an Irishman freezing his arse off in an Arizona summer.
And James Sallis wrote like a man too who knew that the universe was strange, disappointing, briefly beautiful, and probably not going to explain itself. This is why his books feel less like stories you read and more like places you wander into, look around quietly, and leave slightly changed, wondering why your coffee tastes different afterward.
He is best known, of course, for the Lew Griffin novels, books that technically involve a private investigator but behave very badly for the genre. If you went into a Sallis crime novel expecting clues neatly pinned to a corkboard, you came to the wrong neighborhood. Griffin is less interested in solving crimes than in surviving memory, history, racism, music, and the general indignities of being alive. The mystery is usually solved almost by accident, which feels right, because Sallis understood that real life rarely pauses to admire your deductive brilliance.
Sallis’s prose was lean, but not minimal in the fussy, showroom way. It was lean like someone who has walked a long distance carrying thoughts instead of luggage. He could compress a whole life into a paragraph, a philosophy into a sentence (his brother was a famous moral philosopher) and an ache into a single sideways remark. Reading him can feel like overhearing a very smart, very tired person muttering truths you weren’t supposed to catch.
He also had an enviable disregard for literary fashion. While the rest of the crime world was busy explaining how guns work, Sallis was telling you what it feels like to hold one when you’d rather not. While others built intricate plots, he quietly slipped poetry into paperback covers and walked away before anyone noticed. He smuggled jazz, anthropology, existential dread, and compassion into novels that were shelved next to books with embossed bullets on the spine. This took confidence, and probably a low tolerance for nonsense.
There was a lot of humor in Sallis, too, though it was the dry, side-eye variety. His characters often seem amused that the world keeps insisting on being absurd, even after all the evidence. The jokes are rarely jokes, exactly—more like small acknowledgments that yes, this is ridiculous, and no, we’re not going to fix it before lunch.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about James Sallis was that he trusted readers. He trusted them to sit with silence, to connect dots that were emotionally adjacent rather than logically aligned, and to accept that some questions are better left unanswered. In an age increasingly allergic to ambiguity, that feels almost rebellious.
James Sallis didn’t write books to entertain you in the conventional sense. He wrote books to keep you company while you thought about being human. He was generous, precise, unsentimental, and just funny enough to keep despair from winning outright. His work remains—a quiet, crooked, beautifully written reminder that literature doesn’t have to shout to be unforgettable.
Read his novels (maybe try The Driver which became a famous Ryan Gosling movie) and remember his advice about the sweater when travelling to Phoenix in July.
