James Sallis

Author Information
James Sallis's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    28 Books (3 Series)
  • First Book:
    August 1992
  • Latest Book:
    January 2025
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Full Series List in Order

Drive

1 - Drive (Sep-2005)
2 - Driven (Apr-2012)

John Turner

1 - Cypress Grove (May-2003)
2 - Cripple Creek (Oct-2005)
3 - Salt River (Oct-2007)

A Lew Griffin Novel

1 - The Long-Legged Fly (Aug-1992)
2 - Moth (Aug-1993)
3 - Black Hornet (Oct-1994)
4 - Eye of the Cricket (1997)
5 - Bluebottle (Nov-1998)
6 - Ghost of a Flea (Nov-2001)

Book List in Order: 28 titles

  • The Long-Legged Fly

    A Lew Griffin Novel - 1

    As much a classic detective story as it is a literary masterpiece, The Long-Legged Fly introduces us to Lew Griffin: tough, smart, and living in a corner of society where life is fought for as much as it is lived.In steamy New Orleans, black private ...

  • Moth

    A Lew Griffin Novel - 2

    Lew Griffin, now fifty years old, has abandoned his former career as a New Orleans private investigator for the safety of teaching. But his old life draws him back.   One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin’s dark and violent past has fli...

  • Difficult Lives

  • Black Hornet

    A Lew Griffin Novel - 3

    With this flashback novel to Lew Griffin’s past, James Sallis takes readers to 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists.   A sniper has fatally shot five people. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin i...

  • Renderings

    A man travels alone to an island. There he reflects on his life as an artist- a writer- and on the women he has loved. Soon the reader realizes that this man is on the edge of sanity, and his review of his life is his attempt to retain what he can of...

  • Ash of Stars

  • Eye of the Cricket

    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy
    A Lew Griffin Novel - 4

    Finding people is what former private investigator Lew Griffin excels at. The terrible irony is that the exception is his own missing son. Dreams, memories, and reality run together to form his own darkest night.   Lew Griffin is a survivor, a ...

  • Death Will Have Your Eyes

    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 al...

  • Bluebottle

    A Lew Griffin Novel - 5

    Lew Griffin is leaving a New Orleans club with an older white woman he's just met when somebody fires a shot -- and Lew goes down. When he finally comes to, he is temporarily blinded and has lost a year of his life. Now he must find out why and ho...



  • Long-Legged Fly and Moth

    Set in the more sordid parts of New Orleans, Long-Legged Fly and Moth feature a black private investigator who has a bad drinking problem, a shady past, and a present that continually tries to drag him down into the depths of hell....

  • Time's Hammers: The Collected Short Fiction of James Sallis

  • A City Equal To My Desire

    From crimes of heart and crimes of violence, A CITY EQUAL TO MY DESIRE effortlessly guides you through the narrows of human existence in all its forms. In this selection of new stories, James Sallis, author of the acclaimed Lew Griffin series of dete...

  • Ghost of a Flea

    A Lew Griffin Novel - 6

    The mystery of private investigator Lew Griffin is revealed in the conclusion of this critically acclaimed, groundbreaking series.   In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the ...

  • Cypress Grove

    John Turner - 1

    As he has shown so often in previous novels, James Sallis is one of our great stylists and storytellers, whose deep interest in human nature is expressed in the powerful stories of men too often at odds with themselves as well as the world around ...

  • Limits of the Sensible World

  • The James Sallis Reader

    The POINT BLANK READER series is dedicated to introducing you to the finest novelists in the mystery and crime fiction genres in carefully selected volumes that each include a full length novel, selected shorter fiction and other writings by the auth...

  • Drive

    Drive - 1

    Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there’d be no doubt. But f...

  • Cripple Creek

    John Turner - 2

    Struggling to come to terms with his past, Turner, a burnt-out Memphis cop turned rural deputy sheriff, goes on the rampage when the local sheriff is seriously wounded during a jail break, following the perpetrators' trail back to Memphis, where he f...

  • Potato Tree

    Fiction. Short Stores. POTATO TREES's 41 stories, with their vivid imagery, poetic language and heart-wrenching emotions, are Sallis at his edgiest, most indefinable best. James Sallis is best-known for his six-volume Lew Griffin cycle, his authorita...



  • Salt River

    John Turner - 3

    As Salt River begins, two years have passed since Turner's amour, Val Bjorn, was shot as they sat together on the porch of his cabin. Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left, Val had told him, a mantra for p...

  • The Killer Is Dying

    A hired killer on his final job, a burned-out detective whose wife is dying slowly and in agony, a young boy abandoned by his parents and living alone by his wits. Three people, solitary and sundered from society. In what is at one and the same ti...

  • Driven

    Drive - 2

    Driven is the sequel to Drive, now also an award-winning film. As we exit the initial novel, 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, don...

  • Others of My Kind

    At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor's bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, ...

  • Willnot

    In his celebrated career, James Sallis has created some of the most finely drawn protagonists in crime fiction, all of them thoughtful observers of the human condition: Lew Griffin, the black New Orleans private investigator; retired detective John T...

  • Sarah Jane

    A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive. Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runa...

  • Dayenu and Other Stories

    Reflecting as always his deep respect for classic science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, DAYENU AND OTHER STORIES collects 22 of Jim's new tales. Bluesmen whose thoughts become real, chatty philosophic spiders, revenant cars, thawed-out hitmen,...

  • Bright Segments

    For the first time ever, the complete short fiction of literary legend James Sallis is collected in one gorgeous volume -- a must-have holiday gift for the crime, mystery, or speculative fiction fan in your life.Published over the six decades of...

  • Difficult Lives Hitching Rides

    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.

    A...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

James Sallis has published 28 books.

The next book by James Sallis, Difficult Lives Hitching Rides, will be published in January 2025.

The first book by James Sallis, The Long-Legged Fly, was published in August 1992.

Yes. James Sallis has 3 series.
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