James Sallis Books in Order

Sallis looks at the guitar through the musicians who shaped American music across blues, jazz, country, and more. It is part history, part appreciation, and full of listening clues for curious readers.

Lew Griffin takes on a missing-person case in New Orleans and keeps finding echoes of his own broken life. The first Griffin novel is detective fiction, city portrait, and character study in one.

When the troubled daughter of an old lover disappears, Lew Griffin is drawn back into the streets he knows too well. The case becomes a dark search through addiction, grief, and the ruins people leave behind.

Set in 1960s New Orleans, this Lew Griffin novel finds Lew caught up in a string of sniper killings and the city's racial tensions. It is both a murder story and a portrait of the man he is becoming.

An unnamed man travels alone to an island and reflects on art, love, memory, and approaching death. More collage than conventional plot, this is one of Sallis's most openly experimental novels.

Edited by Sallis, this critical collection looks at the writing of Samuel R. Delany from multiple angles. It is a useful companion for readers interested in Delany's fiction, ideas, and influence.

Edited by Sallis, this anthology charts how the guitar found its voice in jazz. Essays on major players and styles make it a strong guide to the instrument's history and evolution.

David, a former Cold War operative turned sculptor, is pulled back when the last survivor of his old spy unit goes rogue. It is a road novel, manhunt, and meditation on identity all at once.

Lew Griffin, teacher, writer, and sometime detective, is drawn into fresh missing-person cases while still haunted by his lost son. Dreams, memory, and street-level New Orleans blur together in one of the series' richest books.

Lew Griffin wakes from a coma with a year missing and only scraps of memory about the night he was shot. His search for answers leads through New Orleans, organized crime, and racist violence.

This story collection ranges from intimate human trouble to stranger, more speculative ground. The pieces are short, sharp, and interested in how people carry violence, longing, and surprise through everyday life.

Sallis traces the life of Chester Himes, from prison and literary fame to exile and reinvention. It is a clear-eyed biography of a major writer whose life was as turbulent as his books.

Sallis studies Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes in three concise literary biographies. It is a smart, early work of noir criticism, interested in both the books and the hard lives behind them.

This essay collection gathers Sallis on writing, reading, culture, and the odd details of everyday life. It shows the same clipped intelligence and restless curiosity that run through his fiction.

These poems linger over aging, love, sleeplessness, and the ordinary losses that shape a life. The mood is late-night and reflective, but there is warmth here as well as sorrow.

This collected stories volume brings together Sallis's shorter fiction from across genres. Crime, science fiction, and literary experimentation sit side by side, bound by his compact style and interest in people on the margins.

In the final Lew Griffin novel, age, loss, and old mysteries close in at once. Griffin moves through New Orleans trying to make sense of missing people, wounded friends, and the life he has made from fragments.

Turner, a former Memphis homicide cop trying to disappear in a rural backwater, is asked to help with a ritualistic murder. The case pulls him into the town's secrets and back toward the life he meant to leave.

An early collection of Sallis's short fiction, this book shows his taste for compression, unease, and speculative turns. Even at small scale, the stories keep pushing at questions of identity and reality.

By day, Driver handles stunt work for movies. By night, he drives getaway cars, until a bad job leaves him hunted and forces this cool, stripped-down noir into sudden, brutal motion.

Turner is now a deputy in a small Tennessee town where the trouble looks minor until it doesn't. Sallis uses the case to dig into old loyalties, buried damage, and the uneasy calm of small-town life.

Collecting stories from across decades, this volume shows how widely Sallis could range without losing his voice. The tales move through noir, science fiction, and quiet strangeness with equal ease.

Now wearing the sheriff's badge, John Turner faces a troubled young man, a possible murder, and a town running out of money and hope. It is a quiet Southern crime novel about grief, memory, and whatever can still be saved.

A dying hit man, a burned-out detective, and an abandoned boy move toward one another across Phoenix. The result is a spare, strange noir about violence, loneliness, and the thin line between fate and accident.

Years after Drive, Driver has tried to disappear into a new life. When sudden violence finds him again, he is pushed back onto the road in a sequel that is lean, bruised, and quietly mournful.

Years after surviving a childhood abduction, Jenny Rowan has built a fiercely independent life. When another missing child enters her orbit, Sallis turns a crime setup into a tender, tough novel about damage, resourcefulness, and chosen family.

This poetry collection works in a plain, musical voice, attentive to weather, memory, aging, and the everyday world. The poems feel spare on the page but carry a lot of emotion underneath.

This new and selected poems volume gathers the lyrical side of Sallis in one place. The poems are musical, plainspoken, and alert to darkness, tenderness, and the stubborn fact of being alive.

These poems stay close to ordinary fears, private reckonings, and the restless hours after dark. Sallis writes with a stripped-down music that turns anxiety and longing into something quietly memorable.

This story collection moves through crime, science fiction, and stranger territory in between. The tales are brief, sly, and often unsettling, with Sallis asking readers to piece together what really happened.

A mass grave outside the small town of Willnot unsettles a local doctor and everyone around him. What follows is a quiet, uncanny novel where mystery, violence, love, and ordinary life keep colliding.

This nonfiction collection pairs Sallis's landmark biographical essays on Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes with later pieces on noir writers and books. It is sharp, readable criticism from someone who knew the territory.

Sarah Jane Pullman, acting sheriff of a rural Southwestern town, looks back on the hard turns that made her a cop. It is part police story, part life story, and all about survival, memory, and second chances.

This collection brings together later short fiction that slips between crime, speculative fiction, and fable. The stories are brief, oblique, and often haunting, with entire worlds suggested in just a few pages.

For the first time, Sallis's complete short fiction is gathered in one volume, including previously uncollected work. It is the best single look at the range of his imagination, from noir to science fiction and beyond.

When an old police friend asks for help in his hometown, retired cop and jazz guitarist Bishop steps back into investigation. What starts with a bloody car and a disappearance becomes a small-town case with long shadows.

In a fractured near-future America, five linked stories follow refugees, veterans, children, and survivors trying to keep going. This mosaic novel is dystopian, but its real subject is endurance and human connection.