Novelist Plays Private Eye in His Ragged New Orleans

Veteran novelist James Sallis has a knack for pairing the laconic with the metaphysical, the cozily quotidian with the surreal. His eighth, just-published tale, “Ghost of a Flea,” draws the reader into a strange and richly populated universe. In twists and turns of bizarre incident and poignant human encounters, the story traverses the alleys and gator-tail joints, bars and hospital wards of one man’s New Orleans--a city ragged with the violence that proceeds from poverty and entrenched inequality, populated by homeless loners who fight back with whimsy, madness and wit.

“Across the street, someone dressed all in gray, as though wearing the tatters of the night itself, hove into view. He carried an old-fashioned red kerosene lantern, swinging it back and forth and shouting what well might have been ... All aboard! ... [Or] Bring out your dead, or searching for an honest man, or just seeking warmth.

“Surprising how we subtropical folk got used to the cold. ... An adaptable lot. I stood now, blanketless, chill, watching the plume of my breath stream out ...”

As viewed through 50-something Lew Griffin’s eyes, this New Orleans bears scant kinship to the hokey Disneyland tourists in busloads come hoping to find.

Griffin is a former college teacher, a black man with roots in rural Arkansas, a collector and lover of classic jazz and poetry from Blake to Apollinaire to Whitman, and an inveterate quoter of the same, a man with a weakness for strong beautiful women and, less felicitously, strong whiskey. Like his creator, Griffin has been a novelist and social chronicler of his city--although (evidently quite unlike his creator) all his books are out of print and his life has been weighed down for years by a massive, melancholy writer’s block.

Sallis (also a poet, biographer, translator and critic) plays openly with this alter-ego relationship--smitten characters lavishly praise the fictional writer’s books, while Griffin riffs to us, his audience, on the consumerization of art, on the lineage of black writing in America (“distress signals in code”), on the way a novel, once finished, blurs in the writer’s mind. He describes in detail (a mirror effect for this reader) his laborious approach to composing a book review. Sallis’ and Griffin’s agents even share the same first name.

Griffin happens also to be a former detective, which helps explain why certain folk in town still turn to him instinctively for help. In this, the fifth and purportedly final volume of a series, a number of disparate problems and puzzlers seem to converge on Griffin nearly simultaneously, ranging from an epidemic of fatal paralysis among park pigeons to a nameless, flayed and skinless corpse found in possession of Griffin’s runaway son’s wallet, to a series of anonymous, veiled threats against his adored goddaughter, who has just given birth.

For all their gravity, one senses that the troubles from outside afford Griffin some relief, some counterweight, to the long-festering troubles inside: the drinking, the depressive shadow connecting back to his mother and forward to his son, the gradual and triste dissolution of his current relationship, the pain of drifting: “ ... condemned without pardon to our own lives and minds, those islands of self.”

Does “Ghost of a Flea” boil down then to a first-rate genre novel, sub-category detective or suspense, as the jacket illustration of a bludgeoned lovely, along with other nods to convention, suggests? Certainly, in the sense that “Crime and Punishment,” “The Castle” or “Pale Fire” might also qualify.

On the other hand, Griffin (along with Sallis) would rest uneasily on the same shelf as Ross MacDonald or even Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith (both alluded to in these pages, the latter misspelled “Patrician” in a shameless, good-humored nudge). The poet Sallis betrays himself on every page with an inordinate desire to capture a nuance of light, essence of cat or waver of a farewell. His prose style is witty, elliptical and heady with image and allusion; his bedrock underlying purpose is nothing less than an exploration of meaning and identity.

No mistaking: Regardless of labels, “Ghost of a Flea” bears the marks of a fierce and original writer working at full power. Though the journey with Griffin can be jolting and leave one longing for maps, there is the pleasure of his warm heart and irrepressibly playful mind--not to mention stops for some wonderful New Orleans cooking along the way.

And just as you near the end of Griffin’s story and are preparing, reluctantly, to step off, the penultimate chapter explodes on the page, extending strands of light that tie together previously unconnected elements with stunning clarity. And still it’s not over, for there is one more short chapter to go, only the length of an afterthought, and yet, with the power to rotate this whole fictional universe, leave it suspended upside-down long enough for the reader to race back to the beginning of the story and ride it again.