James Sallis

Driver, a man who makes a living doing stunt driving for films during the day and by driving for criminals at night, finds himself caught in the middle when he is double-crossed by some former partners and is forced to take violent means to protect himself and to seek revenge on his betrayers, in a short novel that evokes the world of classic noir. Reprint.

Drive

Driver thinks he has settled into a normal life, but after his fiance e is killed he must confront his criminal past.

Driven

A Novel

A brilliant new protagonist and his memorable community are introduced in the latest masterpiece by acclaimed novelist James Sallis.

Willnot

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.

A Novel about Spies

Death Will Have Your Eyes

Surucu

A Life

Chester Himes

Neil Clarke

Octavia Cade

Lettie Prell

Fiona Moore

Volodymyr Arenev

Amal Singh

Sarah Pauling

Mykhailo Nazarenko

Clarkesworld #192

James Sallis' latest poetry collection is a study in gothic noir where post-war trauma surfaces in a speaker's haunted relationship with time and space, where the familiar is strange, and the strange is familiar. In Night's Pardons, Sallis writes of the "terror of the ordinary," the things that keep us up at night, that populate the darkness waiting for an absolution we cannot muster, from which we can find no peace except in the language of poetry itself.

Night's Pardons

The killer is dying

Killer Is Dying

A powerful novel of self-discovery, crime, and culture follows private detective, teacher, poet, and writer Lew Griffin as he tries to deal with his turbulent personal life when his relationship with Deborah disentigrates, his son disappears again, and his friend Don Walsh, who is leaving the police department, is shot interrupting a robbery.

Ghost of a Flea

O'Neil De Noux

"Former homicide detective De Noux turns out an engaging, fast-paced collection of stories featuring private eye and womanizer extraordinaire Lucien Caye as he tracks philandering husbands, possible murderers and missing cats. Set predominantly against the rich backdrop of 1940s New Orleans, these stories-abounding with ample bosoms and willing women-are fun, and the author knows his stuff when it comes to the Big Easy."--Publishers Weekly.

New Orleans Confidential

After moving to a small Tennessee town to escape his past, Turner--a former cop, psychotherapist, and convict--is asked by the town's overwhelmed sheriff to help investigate the brutal and ritualistic murder of a drifter.

Cypress Grove

Driver thinks he has settled into a normal life, but after his fiancée is killed he must confront his criminal past.

Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes

Difficult Lives

A compelling call for compassion and resilience in the maw of social dissolution from literary legend James Sallis, master of many genres and Nebula, Edgar, and Shamus–nominated author of Drive All I wanted was for my life, when you picked it up in your hands, to have some weight to it. In a not-so-distant future the United States has fragmented, balkanizing into unstable provinces often at war with one another, and Americans, their great promise not so much lost as forfeited, are encountering the terrors and devastation so much of the world daily lives with. Throughout a land littered with refugees, ruins, orphaned children, soldiers, militia, and fugitives, people go on about their daily lives as best they can. The five linked stories of World’s Edge track the false starts and stall-outs of a nation and civilization trying to rise again, to rebuild, and of individuals caught up in that rebirthing. As ever, the only true history lies in the story of individual lives, in the old rag and bone shop of our hearts.

World's Edge: A Mosaic Novel

Sarah Jane

"The perfect piece of noir fiction." —New York Times Book Review "Terse, brutal, poetic, perfectly wrought." —Publishers Weekly STARRED review At the end of Drive, Driver has killed Bernie Rose, "the only one he ever mourned," ending his campaign against those who double-crossed him. Driven tells how that young man, done with killing, becomes the one who goes down "at 3 a.m. on a clear, cool morning in a Tijuana bar." Seven years have passed. Driver has left the old life, become Paul West, and founded a successful business back in Phoenix. Walking down the street one day, he and his fiancée are attacked by two men and, while Driver dispatches both, his fiancée is killed. Sinking back into anonymity, aided by his friend Felix, an ex-gangbanger and Desert Storm vet, Driver retreats but finds that his past stalks him and will not stop. He has to turn and face it. Because he drives. That's what he does.

The sequel to Drive

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.

James Sallis

Books

Your next favorite book is out there