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Sallis and the Great American Crime Novel |
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| 07/12/2009 |
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Film jury president James Sallis braved the snows of Courmayeur today to hold a Q&A with the festival’s literature buffs, moderated by Italian author and literary critic Sebastiano Triulzi, about his body of work and how it fits into the landscape of American crime fiction.
Sallis said his original goal as a young writer was to “write the Great American Novel, or the Great European Novel, or simply a great novel!” He admits he was completely ignorant when it came to noir fiction, however. But when he moved to London at the age of 21 he was introduced to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and his life and ambitions were literally turned upside down. “I found something in crime fiction that I couldn’t find in the literary fiction I’d been brought up on. I read all I could by numerous writers, yet it took years before I began writing crime fiction,” he said.
Once he did, he would become a point of reference in the genre. His first cycle of novels, which included The Long-Legged Fly and Ghost of a Flea, featured African American detective Lew Griffin. Set in New Orleans in the 1960s, Sallis says he chose the city because “it’s the only city in the US in which a black man can go everywhere, do everything, move through all aspects of society.” He quickly realized that the historical and social backdrops to his stories were as important as the characters he developed. “I realized they influenced me quite a lot and that I needed to speak about what was going on then, in this case with civil rights and racism, and the city of New Orleans as well, which was a character in its own right,” he explained.
Since then, however, the majority of Sallis’ work has been set in rural America, the kinds of small towns in which he lived as a young boy in Arkansas. “Small towns are redolent, which is why it’s so sad to see they’re dying, and all those lives are being lost.” His most recent trilogy, which includes Cripple Creek and Salt River, centers on ex-cop/ex-con John Turner and are set outside Memphis, Tennessee.
As Turner seeks refuge from his past in his bucolic surroundings, Sallis was asked whether self-imposed exile from the city was one of his favorite themes. He took the notion a step further: “It’s not just a theme of mine, it’s one of the central themes of American literature. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is our definitive novel – we are always heading out to infinity. In every American there’s a cowboy who wants to live by himself, who wants to be away from society. If you look at American literature from its very beginnings you see people writing about being a part of society and apart from society at the same time.”
Besides being an award-winning writer, Sallis is also an accomplished musician and says he approaches both fields with the same spirit of improvisation. “I’m not interested in writing a story where I know what will happen. Each one of my novels begins with an image – I see a person or an instant and wonder what’s going on with them, why they are where they are, and I want to find out what happens to them. The discovery and thrill of finding out what happens in a story is what intrigues me most.”
Cast in point: he was recently taking a walk and “heard” the voice of a new character speaking to him. “By the time I got home I had the first chapter of a new novel already figured out. The rest of the novel is finding out who that person is and why she wanted to talk to me,” he revealed to the audience. |
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