The American writer James Sallis died last Tuesday, January 27 at the age of 81. In a statement on their website they confirmed that he died “peacefully, with his wife Karyn by his side, after a long illness.” He was the author of a series of novels that had detective Lew Griffin as the protagonist, and of Drive, the book that in 2011 was made into a film with the same name, starring Ryan Gosling.
His career began in the sixties when he wrote science fiction for magazines, a time in which he sold several stories to writers such as Damon Knight and Michael Moorcock. When he was around 25 years old he was invited to London to work for the magazine New Worldsjust when the work took a leap towards large format. It was at that time that he published Kazoo (1967), his first science fiction story.
“The crime novel is an essential part of American literature of the last century,” he told this newspaper in an interview in 2019. At that time he was critical of the situation in his country: “Racism is the great sin of the United States,” he stated, adding that the barrier of civility had been “broken.” “Now, after a long time, things are said that couldn’t be said before. Maybe there is no solution,” he said.
During his career he published 18 novels, multiple collections of stories, poems, essays and musicology books; He was also a critic, biographer of the African-American writer Chester Himes and translator of novels. He also worked as a reviewer for newspapers such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post; He was a literary columnist for Boston Globe and of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His career earned him the Bouchercon prize, the Hammett for literary excellence in police writing and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière. In 2013 he acknowledged to this newspaper that his inspirations were many: “I am influenced by everything. European and American science fiction films from the fifties, Theodore Sturgeon, Julio Cortazar, Albert Camus (especially The foreigner), Pablo Neruda, Raymond Queneau, Hammett and Chandler, Faulkner… You have to see the shelves of my library.”