Download or read book Drive written by James Sallis and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 toward him...
Download or read book Sarah Jane written by James Sallis and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive. Sarah Jane Pullman is a 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 chaos. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she is named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she’s filling—and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends. This kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail—a virtuoso work by a master of both and the tender aspects of human nature.
Download or read book Chester Himes written by James Sallis and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] smart, conscientious, often stylish biography” of the great African American crime writer of the mid-twentieth century (The New York Times). Best known for The Harlem Cycle, the series of crime stories featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, Chester Himes was a novelist and memoirist whose work was neglected and underappreciated in his native America during the 1950s and ’60s, even as he was awarded France’s most prestigious crime fiction prize. In this major biography, literary critic and fellow writer James Sallis examines the life of this “fascinating figure,” combining interviews of those who knew Himes best—including his second wife—with insightful and poignant writing (Publishers Weekly). “Himes wrote some of the 20th century’s most memorable crime fiction and has been compared to Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. His life was just as spectacular as his novels. Sentenced to 25 years in prison for armed robbery when he was 19, he turned to writing while behind bars and, when released after serving eight years, published two novels. Their poor reception by the white establishment only confirmed Himes’s beliefs about racism in America. He eventually moved to Paris, spending most of the rest of his life abroad. While in Paris, he began to produce the crime fiction that would make him famous, including A Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes to Harlem . . . [a] riveting biography.” —Library Journal (starred review) “Satisfying, thoughtful, long-overdue.” —Publishers Weekly “As intelligent, and as much fun to read, as a book by Himes himself. There is no higher praise.” —The Times (London)
Download or read book Willnot written by James Sallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his acclaimed career, James Sallis has created some of the most finely drawn protagonists in crime fiction, all of them memorable observers of the human condition: Lew Griffin, the existential black New Orleans private investigator; retired detective John Turner; the unnamed wheelman in Drive. Dr. Lamar Hale will now join the ranks of Sallis's finest characters. In the woods outside the town of Willnot in rural Virginia, the remains of several people have suddenly been discovered, unsettling the community and Hale, the town's all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon, and town conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes--military records disappeared, of interest to the FBI--mysteriously re-appears in his home town, at Hale's door. "Willnot was a lake into which rocks had been thrown; mud still swirled." Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, bump up against the inexplicable vagaries of life in Willnot. And when a gunshot aimed at Lowndes critically wounds Richard, Hale's world is truly upended. Just as great artists can draw a face and create a presence in a few brush strokes, James Sallis conjures indelible characters and scenes in a few sentences. In its brilliant conciseness Willnot presents an unforgettable world. "You live with someone year after year, you think you've heard all the stories," Lamar observes, "but you never have."
Download or read book Others of My Kind written by James Sallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agreeing to help a young woman who has been abducted and traumatized, Jenny Rowan finds long-buried memories coming to the surface, which sets in motion an unexpected chain of events in a world of political turmoil.
Download or read book Driven written by James Sallis and published by Oldcastle Books Limited. This book was released on 2012 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driver thinks he has settled into a normal life, but after his fiancée is killed he must confront his criminal past.
Download or read book Death Will Have Your Eyes written by James Sallis and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mulholland Books takes pleasure in restoring to print an acclaimed novel of espionage and suspense by the author of Drive. David (as he's currently known) was a member of an elite corps of spies trained during the coldest days of the Cold War. For almost a decade he has been out of the game, working as a sculptor. Then a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him: the only other survivor from that elite corps has gone rogue. David is tasked with stopping him. What ensues is an existential cat-and-mouse game played out across the American landscape, through the diners and motels that dot the terrain like green plastic houses on a Monopoly board. Both a suspenseful novel of pursuit and a thematically rich exploration of the mind of a spy, Death Will Have Your Eyes is a contemporary classic of the espionage genre.
Download or read book Eye of the Cricket written by James Sallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son...and himself in the process. Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.
Download or read book Ghost of a Flea written by James Sallis and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mystery of private investigator Lew Griffin is revealed in the conclusion of this critically acclaimed, groundbreaking series. In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Instead of speaking, he reflects on his life—his failing relationship, his missing son, the fact that he hasn’t written in years—and how the two of them ended up there. In a novel as much about identity as about crime, the answers to Lew’s personal mysteries begin to become clear in the series’ brilliantly constructed climax.
Download or read book Salt River written by James Sallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poignant and surprising new thriller by one of America's most acclaimed writers. Few American writers create more memorable landscapes-both natural and interior-than James Sallis. His highly praised Lew Griffin novels evoked classic New Orleans and the convoluted inner space of his black private detective. More recently-in Cypress Grove and Cripple Creek-he has conjured a small town somewhere near Memphis, where John Turner-ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran and former therapist-has come to escape his past. But the past proved inescapable; thrust into the role of Deputy Sheriff, Turner finds himself at the center of his new community, one that, like so many others, is drying up, disappearing before his eyes. 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 left. Then the sheriff's long-lost son comes plowing down Main Street into City Hall in what appears to be a stolen car. And waiting at Turner's cabin is his good friend, Eldon Brown, Val's banjo on the back of his motorcycle so that it looks as though he has two heads. "They think I killed someone," he says. Turner asks: "Did you?" And Eldon responds: "I don't know." Haunted by his own ghosts, Turner nonetheless goes in search of a truth he's not sure he can live with.
Download or read book Black Hornet written by James Sallis and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this flashback novel to Lew Griffin’s past, James Sallis takes readers to 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. A sniper has fatally shot five people. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. Though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and a bail bondsman.
Download or read book Difficult Lives Hitching Rides written by James Sallis and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Sallis's (Drive) seminal biographical essays on crime fiction pioneers Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes restored to print and joined by a handpicked collection of essays, reviews, and introductory writings on noir fiction. At the time of its original publication by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was a pioneering work of literary investigation. Sallis's subjects of Himes, Goodis, and Thompson were as enigmatic as they were out-of-print, and literary scholarship on the subject of their lives and works scant. As the title of the collection indicates, the three men led difficult lives, and although they forever changed the history of crime writing, they all passed in relative isolation. The literary detective work Sallis did then has been built upon since but rarely with the same poetry and authorial sympathy. Despite there now existing several works of academic and popular biography on each writer Sallis's novella-length biographies retain the sense of the newly uncovered. Those three pieces, "Jim Thompson: Dime-store Dosteoevski," "David Goodis: Life in Black and White," and "Chester Himes: America's Black Heartland" are prefigured by a new introduction by the author as well as the original introduction, "Portable Worlds: The First Paperback Novel." Following Difficult Lives is collection of reviews, essays and introductions, selected by Sallis, covering a wide range of crime fiction's most legendary authors and books: Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Boris Vian, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Paco Taibo, Shirley Jackson, and more.
Download or read book Cypress Grove written by James Sallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As he has shown so often in previous novels, James Sallis is one of our great stylists and storytellers, whose deep interest in human nature is expressed in the powerful stories of men too often at odds with themselves as well as the world around them. His new novel, Cypress Grove, continues in that highly praised tradition. The small town where Turner has moved is one of America's lost places, halfway between Memphis and forever. That makes it a perfect hideaway: a place where a man can bury the past and escape the pain of human contact, where you are left alone unless you want company, where conversation only happens when there's something to say, where you can sit and watch an owl fly silently across the face of the moon. And where Turner hopes to forget that he has been a cop, a psychotherapist, and, always, an ex-con. There is no major crime to speak of until Sheriff Lonnie Bates arrives 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 a small town. Thrust back into the middle of what he left behind, Turner slowly becomes reacquainted not only with the darkness he had fled, but with the unsuspected kindness of others. Brilliantly balancing Turner's past and present lives, Cypress Grove is lyrical, moving, and filled with the sense of place and character that only our finest writers can achieve. It is proof positive that the acclaim James Sallis has enjoyed for years is richly deserved.
Download or read book What You Have Left written by James Sallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past five years, James Sallis has created three of the most acclaimed mysteries published in America, each of them featuring the complex John Turner--former cop, therapist, and an ex-con, trying to escape his past, yet ever involved in the small community somewhere near Memphis where he has sought refuge. The Turner Trilogy--concise, elegiac, memorable--collects these three classics in one paperback volume.
Download or read book Cripple Creek written by James Sallis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As this tale opens, Turner, ex-cop, ex-con, and ex-psychotherapist, remains on the lam in rural Cypress Grove, Tennessee, escaping the demons of past lives in Memphis, but he is starting to mend. There's a developing relationship with Val Bjorn, teacher and country musician; there's the appearance of his daughter from Seattle; and there's the fact that he has come out of hibernation to accept the job as deputy sheriff of Cypress Grove. Then his boss, the kindly sheriff, is assaulted by a gang of mobbed-up toughs in the act of breaking one of their own out of the small-town jail. Turner pursues the thugs to Memphis, confronting his past and giving vent to his suppressed blood lust. Every action prompts a reaction, however, and soon the thugs return to Cypress Grove looking for some blood of their own. Sallis tells the violent tale quietly, effectively using jump cuts, flashbacks, and flashforwards to generate both suspense and, simultaneously, a sense of inevitability.
Download or read book Renderings written by James Sallis and published by Black Heron Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man travels alone to an island. There he reflects on his life as an artist- a writer- and on the women he has loved. Soon the reader realizes that this man is on the edge of sanity, and his review of his life is his attempt to retain what he can of sanity and meaning. Renderings is a novel written so tightly that no air escapes and no impurity seeps in. Harlan Ellison says of the author: It is quite possible that speaking of Jim Sallis in the same tone as Poe and Dostoevski is not overblowing on my part. His early work indicates a mind and a talent of uncommon dimensions... He may well be one of the significant ones. New York Newsday: Sallis is a rare find...a fine prose stylist with an interest in moral struggle and a gift for the lacerating evocation of loss. Twentieth Century Fiction Writers: James Sallis's extraordinary fiction is distinguished by it honesty and meticulous artistry.
Download or read book August Snow written by Stephen Mack Jones and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Hammett Prize and the Nero Award From the wealthy suburbs to the remains of Detroit’s bankrupt factory districts, August Snow is a fast-paced tale of murder, greed, sex, economic cyber-terrorism, race and urban decay. Tough, smart, and struggling to stay alive, August Snow is the embodiment of Detroit. The son of an African-American father and a Mexican-American mother, August grew up in the city’s Mexicantown and joined the police force only to be drummed out by a conspiracy of corrupt cops and politicians. But August fought back; he took on the city and got himself a $12 million wrongful dismissal settlement that left him low on friends. He has just returned to the house he grew up in after a year away, and quickly learns he has many scores to settle. It’s not long before he’s summoned to the palatial Grosse Pointe Estates home of business magnate Eleanore Paget. Powerful and manipulative, Paget wants August to investigate the increasingly unusual happenings at her private wealth management bank. But detective work is no longer August’s beat, and he declines. A day later, Paget is dead of an apparent suicide—which August isn’t buying for a minute. What begins as an inquiry into Eleanore Paget’s death soon drags August into a rat’s nest of Detroit’s most dangerous criminals, from corporate embezzlers to tattooed mercenaries.
