Lew Griffin Books

Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. Following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets-- not only the urban ones he has conquered but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago-- to search for the runaway daughter he didn't know that his friend had. Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son. Moth is expansive, bursting with marvelous scenes and unforgettable characters, filled at once with the matter-of-fact violence of daily life and with redeeming human compassion.

A sniper appears in 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. Five people have been fatally shot. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. He's black and she's white, and though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading black journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and bail bondsman Frankie DeNoux. Yet it is the character of Lew Griffin that takes center stage, as in each of Sallis's highly praised books. He is by now, well on the way to becoming what he will be; violent, kind, contradictory, alcoholic. Both naïve and wise, he is a man cursed by unspeakable demons. Nonetheless, he is seemingly encircled by redemptive angels, awaiting an opening.

Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son...and himself in the process. Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.

As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he's just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes fully to, Griffin discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. What happened? Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the sniper? There are too many pieces missing, too few facts, and a powerful need to know why a year has been stolen from his life. Weaving Griffin's search for identity―one of the recurring themes in this magnificent series of novels―with a sensuous portrait of the people and places the define New Orleans, Sallis continues not only to unravel Griffin's past but to map his future…and our own. Somewhere in the Crescent City―and in the white supremacist movement crawling through it―there's an answer to the questions left by the shot that echoed through the night. But to get it, Griffin is going to have to work with the only people offering help, people he knows he should avoid: allies if he can trust them, and worse trouble for him if he can't. Bluebottle continues the mysterious journey begun in Sallis's The Long-Legged Fly and continues, too, to show the growth and mastery of one of America's finest crime fiction stylists.

"A man stands in a darkened room in New Orleans, looking out through a window, seeing the past. There's a body on the bed behind him; wind pecks at the window, traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. The man thinks that 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." Lew Griffin is alone...or almost so. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart; his son, David, has disappeared again, leaving a note that sounds final. His friend Don Walsh, who is leaving the police department, is shot interrupting a robbery. And Lew is He hasn't written anything in years; he no longer teaches...there's nothing to fill his days. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost.