About the book: Sarah Jane (2019) is 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 runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos.
Her life takes an unexpected turn when she finds herself named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of her predecessor - and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends.
In the tradition of James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss and Ivy Pochoda's Wonder Valley, this kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail - a virtuoso work by a master of both the noir and the tender aspects of human nature.
About the author: Over the past sixty-plus years, while "mostly wandering about the house," James Sallis has published eighteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, poems and essays, three books of musicology, reams of criticism, a classic biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. Onetime editor of the London-based magazine New Worlds, Jim worked for many years as a reviewer for periodicals including the New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post; served for three years as books columnist for the Boston Globe; and maintained a books column at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He has taught at Phoenix College, Otis College, and the Piper Center and performed on multiple instruments with his band Three-Legged Dog, as sideman for other musicians, or solo. His novels include Drive, from which Nic Refn's award-winning film derived, the six Lew Griffin novels, Death Will Have Your Eyes, and The Killer Is Dying. Jim has received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière.
Born in Helena, Arkansas, in 1944, Jim spent his childhood on the banks of the Mississippi River along with his older brother John, a philosopher who was neck and neck with Jim as to published books. Just outside his bedroom window was a drive-in playing music all night: Jimmy Reed, Ferlin Husky, Arthur Alexander. Days he listened to Sonny Boy Williamson on The King Biscuit Hour on KFFA radio, over which he would later read some of his first stories. Jim played French horn in the school band and has written an essay about his band director, Robert Cinq-Mars, a vastly important influence. At home, his turntable regularly spun Mozart, Telemann, Mahler and Tchaikovsky.
As a child I began telling stories daily to classmates and, at home, filled page after page with plots, conversations, beginnings I could never continue, never go on with. More and more, with age, my life seems to exist to be turned into these quiet pages, into literature. People I have loved are put to rest in one or another novel or story; relationships are sorted out in poems, then abandoned, or the other way around; the deepest, most engaging and damaging moments of my life become notes, then pages and, finally, books.
—from the essay "Standing by Death"
What is left for us, here
among our families, books and friends,
but to go on as we must.
There will be no more Tolstoys.
There's only the chance to do
what remains:
Find beauty, try to understand, survive.
—from "To a Russian Friend"
James Sallis died on 27 January 2026 at the age of 81 in Phoenix, Arizona after a long illness.
Rating: 5/5
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