Ghost of a Flea

The final part of James Sallis’ sequence of novels featuring Lew Griffin

In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone again…or almost. He and Deborah are drifting apart. His son David has disappeared again, leaving behind a note that sounds final. Heading homeward from his retirement party, his friend, Don Walsh has been shot while interrupting a robbery. Worst of all, Lew himself is directionless, no longer teaching, with little to fill his days. He hasn’t written anything in years. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters sent to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost.

Through five previous novels, James Sallis has enthralled and challenged readers as he has told the story of Lew Griffin, private detective, teacher, writer, port, and a black man moving through a white man’s world. And now Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Wind pecks at the window. Traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. He thinks if he doesn’t speak, doesn’t think about what happened, somehow things will be alright again. He thinks about his own life, about the other’s, about how the two of them came to be here…

James Sallis has published fourteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel
Saint Glinglin
. He has written about books for the
L.A. Times, New York Times,
and
Washington Post
, and for some years served as a books columnist for the
Boston Globe
. In 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. In addition to
Drive
, the six Lew Griffin books are now in development as feature films. Jim teaches novel writing at Phoenix College and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog. He stays busy.

Novels Published by No Exit Press

The Long-Legged Fly – Lew Griffin Book One, 1992

Moth – Lew Griffin Book Two, 1993

Black Hornet – Lew Griffin Book Three, 1994

Death Will Have Your Eyes, 1997

Eye of the Cricket – Lew Griffin Book Four, 1997

Bluebottle – Lew Griffin Book Five, 1998

Ghost of a Flea – Lew Griffin Book Six, 2001

Cypress Grove – Turner Trilogy Book One, 2003

Drive, 2005

Cripple Creek – Turner Trilogy Book Two, 2006

Salt River – Turner Trilogy Book Three, 2007

The Killer Is Dying, 2011

Driven, 2012

Other Novels

Renderings

What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

Stories

A Few Last Words

Limits of the Sensible World

Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories

A City Equal to my Desire

Poems

 
Sorrow’s Kitchen

My Tongue In Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

As Editor

Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany

Jazz Guitars

The Guitar In Jazz

Other

The Guitar Players

 Difficult Lives

Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator)

Chester Himes: A Life

A James Sallis Reader

Praise for James Sallis

‘Sallis is an unsung genius of crime writing’

–
Independent on Sunday

‘James Sallis is a superb writer’

–
Times

‘James Sallis-he’s right up there, one of the best of the best… Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy’
– Ian Rankin,
Guardian

‘[A] master of American noir…Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared down prose is distinctive and powerful’

–
Sunday Telegraph

‘Sallis’s spare, concrete prose achieves the level of poetry’

–
Telegraph

‘Sallis is a wonderful writer, dark, lyrical and compelling’

–
Spectator

‘Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read. There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work’

–
London Review of Books

‘Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they’re tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair’

–
New York Times

‘Carefully crafted, restrained and eloquent’

–
Times Literary Supplement

‘James Sallis is without doubt the most underrated novelist currently working in America’

–
Catholic Herald

‘Sallis writes crime novels that read like literature’

–
Los Angeles Times

‘Allusive and stylish, this stark metaphysical landscape will leave a resounding impression’
– Maxim Jakubowski,
Guardian

‘The brooding atmosphere and depth of characterisation mark this as superior mystery fare’
– Simon Shaw,
Mail on Sunday

‘I’m brought back, yet again, to my conviction that the best American writers are hiding out like CIA sleepers, long forgotten fugitives from a discontinued campaign’
– Iain Sinclair,
London Review of Books

‘Classic American crime of the highest order’

– Time Out

About the Author 
SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Copyright

AFTER A WHILE I got up and walked to the window. I felt that if I didn’t say anything, if I didn’t think about what had happened, didn’t acknowledge it, somehow it might all be all right again. I listened to the sound of my feet on the floor, the sounds of cars and delivery vans outside, my own breath. Whatever feelings I had, had been squeezed from me. I was empty as a shoe. Empty as the body on the bed behind me.

A limb bowed and pecked at the window, bowed and pecked again. Winds were coming in across Lake Ponchartrain with pullcarts of rain in their wake. I heard music from far off but couldn’t tell what it was, not even what kind. Maybe only wind caught in the building’s hard throats and hollows, or the city’s random noise congealing.

I seem never to learn that standing still doesn’t work. There you are with a smile on your face,
they won’t notice me,
and all the while all the things you fear keep moving towards you, their smiles a violent travesty of your own. “In your books you never write about anything that’s not past, done with, gone,” LaVerne had said years ago. She knew that was a way to stand still, too. And she’d been right—about that as about so much else.

Sooner or later I’d have to move. Go back out there, into the world, a world much smaller now, where it was about to rain. And where one of the coldest winters in New Orleans history like a bit player waited impatiently in the wings, strutting and thrumming, for its cue to go on.

I’d spent my life in rooms much like this. You move, like a hermit crab, into their shell. Then in time, as old clothes and mattresses do, they begin taking on your form. Their safe, familiar walls are a second skin. You and the room become of a size and kind, indistinguishable. The room, its surfaces, its volumes, diminish when you leave; and you in turn, away from the room too long, find yourself growing restless, edgy, at loose ends.

I peered out the window, a dim image of the room behind me superimposed there like a fading photograph or one taken too soon from the developing tray, suspended half-formed, neither wholly out of the world nor quite a part of it. The window had become a universal mirror. In it everything was reversed, turned about, transformed: light bled away to darkness, walls and corners bent to obscure, indecipherable shapes, the whole of the room lumpen, autumnal.

And out there in the window-world where a moth beat against glass, a man I knew both too well and not at all stood watching. A man dark and ill-defined, with the mark of lateness, of the autumnal, upon him too.

I remembered Henry James’s remark upon meeting George Gissing that he appeared to be a man “quite particularly marked out for what is called in his and my profession an unhappy ending.” Gissing had deployed his creativity as the single dynamic force in a life otherwise marked by doubts and indecision, discord, disappointment, disillusion. All of which had a familiar ring to it.

I must come to some sort of conclusion
, I suppose, I had written, years ago.
I can’t imagine what it should be
.

Now I knew.

All the people we’ve met, all those memories and voices, real or imagined, the hoarse whisper of our communal sadness, the beat of regret and sorrow in our blood, the haphazard apprehensions that have made us what we are—they’re out there now in the darkness, all of them, at these silent barricades. All the people (as LaVerne used to say) we’ve watched disappear out the back windows of trains. LaVerne, parents, Hosie Straughter, Vicky, Baby Boy McTell. Myself. This odd man Lew Griffin who understood so much about others and so little, finally, about himself.

Another moth joins the first. Together, apart, they beat soundlessly at the window’s periphery. This latecomer, a sphinx moth, has the body of a bulldog, colors like those of an oil slick in moonlight. Also called a hawkmoth. I watch the two familial insects, who could scarcely be more dissimilar, bump and bounce away from the window, skitter the length of its glass in long slides. Perhaps I should value my life more, that something else so badly wants in.

Because the volume has been increased, or because other sounds have fallen away, I can make out the music now. Charlie Patton’s slurred voice and guitar, like hands that have gone into water and come out with something shapeless, something that nonetheless coheres for just a moment before it begins spilling away.
Po’ Boy, Long Way from Home.

A long way indeed.

Here in this still room, then, in this moment before the world returns in a rush and bears me back into it, I will tell you what I know: It is not yet midnight. It is not yet raining.