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tfitoby 's review for:
The Long-Legged Fly
by James Sallis
“In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you'll get is a few hard drinks and morning.”
This memoir of Lew Griffin, private detective, occasional drunk, crime writer and professional citizen of New Orleans, is the debut novel from James Sallis and no amount of superlative praise can do it justice. Sallis has written introductions for books from Derek Raymond, Charles Willeford and James Lee Burke and he wears his influences on his sleeve, but in a good way. Almost as soul searchingly dark as Raymond's famous first Factory book and yet despite the deep deep existential melancholy that settles over proceedings there's a little bit of joy and hope sprinkled here and there, maybe things aren't as bad as they seem?
Told in four sections, jumping from 1964 to 1970 to 1984 and finishing in 1990, Sallis does himself an injustice by drawing parallels between himself and his fictional creation, calling his work "mere entertainment" but at least he allows a critic to clarify that they are "certainly a bit more than mere entertainment" like the greats of the genre who came before and after James Sallis dug deep in to the dark heart of humanity to craft a genre fiction shell to disguise the literary insights contained within.
“I wondered then: what was it that started a person sinking? Was that long fall in him (or her) from the start, in us all perhaps; or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living.”
The novel extends far past it's natural fictional conclusion as if making a statement against the classic Hollywood detective pictures of the 40s he references, films where a drunken, selfish heel will return from the gin within 90 minutes and become a solid citizen. Sallis is showing us that life is so much dirtier than that, it's not all climbing the social and real estate ladders or designer suits, life is a struggle, it doesn't wrap itself up neatly in three act structures and there's never a happy ending because there's as much chance that it will end in the rain at midnight as it will at midday with cocktails on the veranda as the kids play happily on the lawn.
This memoir of Lew Griffin, private detective, occasional drunk, crime writer and professional citizen of New Orleans, is the debut novel from James Sallis and no amount of superlative praise can do it justice. Sallis has written introductions for books from Derek Raymond, Charles Willeford and James Lee Burke and he wears his influences on his sleeve, but in a good way. Almost as soul searchingly dark as Raymond's famous first Factory book and yet despite the deep deep existential melancholy that settles over proceedings there's a little bit of joy and hope sprinkled here and there, maybe things aren't as bad as they seem?
Told in four sections, jumping from 1964 to 1970 to 1984 and finishing in 1990, Sallis does himself an injustice by drawing parallels between himself and his fictional creation, calling his work "mere entertainment" but at least he allows a critic to clarify that they are "certainly a bit more than mere entertainment" like the greats of the genre who came before and after James Sallis dug deep in to the dark heart of humanity to craft a genre fiction shell to disguise the literary insights contained within.
“I wondered then: what was it that started a person sinking? Was that long fall in him (or her) from the start, in us all perhaps; or something he put there himself, creating it over time and unwittingly just as he created his face, his life, the stories he lived by, the ones that let him go on living.”
The novel extends far past it's natural fictional conclusion as if making a statement against the classic Hollywood detective pictures of the 40s he references, films where a drunken, selfish heel will return from the gin within 90 minutes and become a solid citizen. Sallis is showing us that life is so much dirtier than that, it's not all climbing the social and real estate ladders or designer suits, life is a struggle, it doesn't wrap itself up neatly in three act structures and there's never a happy ending because there's as much chance that it will end in the rain at midnight as it will at midday with cocktails on the veranda as the kids play happily on the lawn.