Once described as “the best crime writer you’ve never heard of”, James Sallis, who has died aged 81, was a prolific and singular voice in American literature who quietly redefined the crime genre.
He was best known for his neo-noir novel Drive (2005), a propulsive and blood-soaked account of a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver for the Los Angeles criminal underworld.
Sallis drew inspiration from the pulp and paperback novels of the 1950s and set out to capture what he called the “rattiness, energy, glowering doom and general unsavoriness” of these texts, but with an “updated attitude”.
In 2011, the novel was adapted into the hit film of the same name, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan and Bryan Cranston. Sallis was thrilled with the adaptation and grateful that it brought new readers to his previous books. “That’s the best thing a writer can hope for,” he observed. “Drive brought all this stuff back to life and that’s a huge, huge thing.”
Sallis’s breakthrough as a crime writer came with the publication of his 1992 novel The Long-Legged Fly, the first in a six-volume series of New Orleans detective novels featuring an African-American private eye, Lew Griffin. Far from conventional detective narratives, the Griffin novels are striking for their resistance to both narrative closure and linear plotting. Griffin often fails to solve the mysteries he investigates, or ends up doing so by accident. The series also plays with its own fictional chronology; characters are frequently distorted or recast and storylines loop and repeat in disorientating ways.
If Sallis never quite reached the commercial heights of other crime writers of his generation, it was in part because of this opposition to the formal conventions of genre. He was particularly troubled by the “heaviness” of plot, preferring to feel his way into a story through instinct and improvisation. This was evident in his spare and digressive prose style, which combined the hardboiled edge of Raymond Chandler with the surreal playfulness of Raymond Queneau.
This was bound up with Sallis’s literary preoccupation with what he termed “dailyness”: the workaday moments that occupy the majority of our lives. All of Sallis’s crime novels contain extended depictions of the quotidian elements of human existence, be that eating and sharing food, making and drinking coffee, or sitting and talking.
For Sallis, “dailyness” was best described as a mode of realism that extended “beyond the literary, a realism approximating life itself”. Far from projecting a pattern or form on to the chaos of everyday life, “dailyness” captures its inherent unpredictability and plotlessness.
This is typified by Sallis’s novel Willnot (2016), which begins with the excavation of a mass grave on the edge of a rural southern town, only for this plotline to be dispensed with a few chapters later. As the dig team pulls out of town, unable to shed light on the provenance of the bodies, one character remarks: “Bye bye mystery and magic. Hello, ordinary life.”
The other barrier to mainstream recognition was the eclectic nature of Sallis’s literary output. Although acknowledged as a crime novelist, Sallis emerged in the 1960s as part of the new wave of science fiction, having moved to London where, for a short while, he co-edited the avant-garde sci-fi magazine New Worlds with Michael Moorcock.
Over his lifetime, Sallis went on to publish more than 150 short stories, 18 novels, five collections of poetry, numerous essays, reviews and translations, a biography of Chester Himes and several books on guitar music. Not wanting to be defined by one mode or genre, Sallis set out to tear down these artificial distinctions and do it all, to be a true “man of letters”. As he put it: “If you keep moving, they can’t get a bead on you.”
Born in Helena, Arkansas, James was the son of Horace Sallis, who worked for Arkansas Power and Light company, and Mildred (nee Liming), a municipal clerk. Sallis described his family as “lower-class, southern stock” and attributed his love of reading to the influence of his elder brother, John Sallis, a philosopher.
After leaving Helena in 1962, Sallis went on to Tulane University but dropped out after two years to pursue a career as a writer. While consistently publishing short fiction between the 1970s and 90s, he largely supported himself by working as a neonatal respiratory therapist at a series of county hospitals across the US, a job he credited with keeping him in touch “with real life” and “real problems”.
Between 2003 and 2006 Sallis wrote a regular column for the Boston Globe. Settling in Phoenix, Arizona, he taught creative writing at Phoenix College for more than a decade before resigning in 2015 following a dispute over a loyalty oath , which public employees in Arizona are required to pledge to state and country – a demand that Sallis found “both absurd and profoundly unconstitutional”.
He also played regularly in a band called Three-Legged Dog, which specialised in an eclectic mix of “old-time mountain music, vintage country, Cajun, calypso, blues, early jazz, western swing, devotional music, civil-war era songs, bluegrass, [and] originals that sound like all those”.
The complete collection of his short stories, Bright Segments, was published in 2024. World’s Edge, a “mosaic novel” of several linked stories, set in a dystopian, near-future US is due out in February 2026, and a crime novel, Backwater, is scheduled for publication in October.
Sallis was divorced from his first wife, Jane Rose. Their son, Dylan, predeceased him, as did his brother, John. He is survived by his second wife, Karyn Smith, whom he married in 1991.
• James Chapelle Sallis, writer, born 21 December 1944; died 27 January 2026
