Kirkus review
RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2011

Sallis’ latest prose-poem entangles a hit man’s last days with a Phoenix cop’s search for him and an abandoned boy who’s tormented by the killer’s dreams.

Minutes before the veteran killer who calls himself Christian plans to execute his latest target, someone else takes his shot—someone a lot less effective than he is. Now accountant John Rankin is hospitalized but very much alive, and homicide detective Dale Sayles, who naturally knows nothing of Christian’s existence, is left to wonder why anyone would take a shot at him. By the time Sayles, whose beloved wife Josie is dying, and his partner Graves, a newbie who’s so full of attitude that he spends a night in jail after running off his mouth to an impatient judge, get a line on the shooter, they’ve stumbled onto the trail of the killer they call Dollman because of the way he identifies himself to prospective clients and others: “I sell dolls.” Meanwhile, across town, Jimmie Kostof, an enterprising teen who really has been selling dolls and other toys through his own mail-order business ever since his parents left him on his own, is troubled by violent third-person dreams he finds scary but meaningless. His dreams are just one more example of how “the world speaks to us in so many languages…and we understand so few.”

Sallis (Salt River, 2007, etc.) takes his time weaving together the lives of these lost souls, each apparently as aimless as the bugs and birds they can’t help noticing. The payoff is a moment of well-nigh miraculous consolation.

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James Sallis’ noir outlook in ‘The Killer Is Dying’ and ‘Drive’
By Scott Martelle
Aug. 7, 2011
Special to the Los Angeles Times

James Sallis lives in a place that really shouldn’t exist. The city sits in the middle of “an incredibly forbidding desert,” where on this day the temperature will reach 112 degrees. Like Los Angeles, decades ago it became too big for its local water supply. It’s a place of migrants, and of rootlessness. It feels as permanent as a trailer park.

Which makes Phoenix the perfect setting for Sallis’ dark new novel, “The Killer Is Dying,” (Walker: 233 pp., $23) a sparse, noir tale of a sick and slowly dying hit man, the homicide cop trying to run him to ground and a resourceful teenager carving out an improbable life after both parents abandon him.

“There’s something very intriguing about this place,” says Sallis, an Arkansas native who lived in New York, Boston, London and a handful of other places before settling here in 1995. “The book is really about people who are cut off, either for personal reasons or familial reasons, or social reasons, whatever, they’re cut off from society. This artificial town in this desert, without bringing it up to the surface of the story, really seemed to work for it.”

At age 66, Sallis is balding, with gray hair and beard, and in his wire-rim glasses he looks a bit like Elmore Leonard. Arkansas still drips from his voice, and he finds a dark humor in most things, including noir and crime novels and movies.

“I like edgy stuff,” he says. “My attraction to crime fiction is that it puts people in strange situations. Their relationship with the world becomes much, much stronger when you see them in extreme situations, and that doesn’t mean that you can’t find a lot of humor there.”

Sallis worked for decades outside the literary mainstream, producing more than two dozen books, including the six-volume Lew Griffin detective series, collected profiles of blues guitarists and a biography of Chester Himes, who set the benchmark for gritty portrayals of black life in America from the Depression years through the postwar era. Sallis also has translated poetry from Spanish, French and Russian.

“I studied Russian formally for many years, chiefly because I wanted to read the poetry in the original,” he says. “Most of it now, alas, is gone. I also studied Spanish for a while with a native speaker, again to be able to make my way through poetry.”

While wide recognition has been elusive, that could change this fall. Sallis’ new novel is out a few weeks ahead of the Sept. 16 release of “Drive,” the Nicolas Winding Refn-directed movie adapted from Sallis’ 2005 novel of the same name, which is being republished as a tie-in. The film premiered in June at the Los Angeles Film Festival, picking up strong praise from reviewers.

A hit movie would be nice, Sallis says. His books have been optioned before, but “Drive” is the first to make it to screen. Sallis’ involvement ended with selling the rights, and he first saw the production at the Los Angeles premiere. He found it “astonishing.”

Refn “said he wanted it to be what the book was, and he did, with some changes,” Sallis says. “The spirit of the book is right up there on the screen. It’s romantic. It’s sweet. It’s incredibly violent, almost too violent for me in some places. But the violence is real, it happens, there’s no dwelling on it. You believe it.”

“Drive” and “The Killer Is Dying” both focus on improbable characters. In “Drive,” the main figure is an unnamed Hollywood stunt man (played by Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a contract getaway driver for robbers, and who eventually runs afoul of his clients. In “The Killer Is Dying,” the center stage is shared by Christian, the dying killer of the title whose real identity remains murky; homicide Det. Dale Sayles, whose wife is slowly dying of cancer; and Jimmie, the boy who fools the world into thinking his parents are still managing his life, when is reality they have run off.

The characters’ lives intersect in odd ways. Someone tries to murder the killer’s target before he gets there, sending the killer off on a search for the interloper. Jimmie seems to share the killer’s dreams. Sayles and his partner are investigating the attempted killing, which brings them in contact with both of the murderers. Resolutions are implied, the plot propelled by finely sanded prose that suggests more often than states.

Sallis didn’t set out to be a novelist. Growing up in the Mississippi River town of Helena, Ark., Sallis at first dreamed of becoming a composer of classical music, which he studied downriver at Tulane University in New Orleans. Then he married and decided he needed to find a way to make a living. “So I thought I was going to be a journalist. That didn’t last very long. I wanted to write about stuff nobody in the journalism school thought was interesting, the arts, books, music.”

It was the mid-1960s. Sallis dropped out of school and turned his pen to science fiction, selling a 6,000-word story for $300. “I thought I was in high cotton,” Sallis says, adding that he thought he was on his way to financial stability. Things didn’t work out that way.

“I did survive writing short stories, for quite some time,” he says. “I didn’t survive well. I lived very, very simply. Garage apartments got to know me really well. Sneaking out of apartments in the dead of night. But I did it for a long, long time. And then finally the short story market kinda collapsed.”

He returned to journalism, writing about music for guitar-oriented magazines (he plays guitar, dobro and other stringed instruments in the Three-Legged Dog string band); book reviews for the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, among others. He began moving toward more literary science fiction — the terrain Jonathan Lethem has worked in more recently. Eventually Sallis became a pediatric respiratory therapist and a writing instructor at Phoenix College, a two-year school near his home, to cover bills that his writing career couldn’t.

“The Killer is Dying,” at fewer than 240 pages, is longer than most Sallis novels, and his brevity forms a running joke among his writing students.

“Someone will ask, do you still write short stories? And the other will say, yes, but he publishes them as novels,” Sallis says. “What I tell my students is you need to leave space. You need to let the story breathe. Don’t overexplain. Let the reader join in the story.”

Drawing from Anton Chekhov, “who wanted the reader to be a collaborator,” Sallis believes the fewer details he offers, the more the reader supplies in his or her mind and thus becomes more deeply drawn into the story itself.

“I think my writing has gotten sparser and sparser as I find I can get the effect I want much easier now with fewer words than I could before. One of the early reviews of the new novel said something like, ‘Sallis’ latest prose poem.’ And that’s kind of the way I think of them.”

The plot, the characters, or the writing - one part of a story is always strong enough to keep me reading. With James Sallis' novel, even though I bought the book for the blurb, I was carried along by the writing. He paints a picture with small details and the passing thoughts of the characters, so that even when I wasn't sure what was going on, I enjoyed every line.

A terminally ill hitman, his mark, two detectives investigating the hit when someone else steps in, and a young boy with a strange connection to the killer. That's the dramatis personae, and about as far as I got in understanding what was going on. But I don't care! I loved reading the descriptive vignettes and could perfectly envision each character and the worlds Sallis created for them. Definitely worth reading again. ( )

Three points of view that don't connect very well make this a difficult audiobook to follow, since it wasn't always clear which narrator was speaking. In the end, the resolution seemed incomplete somehow. ( )

I’ll be honest, I’m still not sure what this was all about. The pace was frustratingly slow and quite jerky. Too many different, seemingly unrelated characters and situations. You know there has to be something that ties it all together, but I never found it. ( )

First let me say this is a very well written book, but for the life of me I couldn't keep track of what was going on. Beautiful written passages that created vivid pictures left me going, huh? I believe the book is about a man who has taken many a life a life having his taken from him by life, but I remain uncertain. For lovers of prose, I recommend. If its all about the story, you might want to pass. ( )