Eye of the Cricket

Lew Griffin #4

by James Sallis

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.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Noir, Audiobook, Detective, Mystery Thriller

196 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

James Sallis (born 21 December 1944 in Helena, Arkansas) is an American crime writer, poet and musician, best known for his series of novels featuring the character Lew Griffin and set in New Orleans, and for his 2005 novel Drive, which was adapted into a 2011 film of the same name.

Reviews

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Life is cruel, old friend, n’est-ce pas?”
“And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.”
“ Rien. ”

At the intersection of Gumshoe Avenue and Tin Pan Alley sits elderly detective Lew Griffin, drowning his despair in a glass of non-alcoholic beer while he listens to Son House singing Dead Letter Blues
He has just received news that his only son is dead.
The man has a right to sing the blues, if anyone can. His own life is slipping out of his grasp, all his friends and lovers are just memories, he is alone in an old and decrepit house and wonders what’s the point of it all?

Gone away as had David, my own son. Into the darkness that surrounds us all.

But Lew Griffin is something more than just a guy with a talent for finding missing people. He is, like his creator James Sallis, a teacher of literature, a cartographer of the decay of civilization, a musician, a poet and a published author of crime novels.
He is even familiar with the name Enrique Anderson Imbert, whom I never heard of despite being a huge fan of the South American literary scene. Imbert provides the epigraph and the title of this latest in the Lew Griffin series:

Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in the eyes of the cricket ...

Lewis is pulled back into the missing persons game, more or less against his will, and he eventually finds himself working three cases at the same time, plus a request from his neighborhood watch to help stop a wave of street muggings and theft by a gang of teenagers on bicycles. The first case also brings one of the most hilarious pieces of black humour in this novel that starts with such a heavy dose of anxiety:

He whistled a few notes and said, “You’re an unreconstructed cynic, Griffin.”
“I try.”
“A sad and unhappy man.”
“Indisputably.”
“Okay, so I’m afraid I have further bad news for you,” Richard said. “You ready for it?”
“I have a choice?”
“You’re missing.”
“I’m what?”

So Lew Griffin must find himself. How is this for an ironic twist on the classic noir opening gambit and for an existential metafiction challenge?
There is an explanation here, and it’s a doozy: a homeless man is brought to the emergency room after a savage beating that leaves him bleeding and unconscious. He only carries in his pocket a heavily annotated and well-thumbed copy of a long out of print first novel. When he eventually wakes up, the tramp claims he is the author, a guy named Lew Griffin.
Do you want to go deeper down this metafictional rabbit hole? Later in the novel, a penpal of Lew is unexpectedly released from a life prison sentence and comes to visit. One thing leading to another, this Zeke, who used to publish his prison newsletter, decides to write a novel and asks his host:
Calling the guy in my book lew griffin for now. That okay?
Just who is writing the damn novel? Can anybody point him out to me? Will the real Slim Shady Lew Griffin stand up and raise his hand?

>>><<<>>><<<

“Lew, you ever gonna learn to say no?”
“No.”

The second case comes knocking on Lewis’ door in the form of a black teenager, the sole provider for his impoverished family, who needs to find his missing younger brother, who might have got involved with some really dangerous people. There’s no money in the case, but Griffin is moved by the teenager’s pain. This boy is called Sam Delany and you don’t have to be a literary SF geek like me to spot the homage to another master storyteller.

The third case is personal. A quest to find out the whereabouts of his missing son David, whose absence might be self-imposed and whose death might have been misreported. David disappeared twenty years ago after giving up a good job in France. Lew believes he is the person who called twice on the telephone without saying any word and that David is finally trying to find his way back home.

>>><<<>>><<<

The city is New Orleans, for those readers who are unfamiliar with the series. You don’t need to be familiar with the previous books. Sallis uses an unconventional and unique approach to time that can be understood by paying a little attention to the lectures his MC gives at the university of Louisiana: Lew Griffin is well acquainted with all the classics of the noir genre, quoting extensively from Chandler and Hammett, but in his author and critic persona he is the most French of American auteurs, probably understandable for a native of New Orleans who holds courses on Queneau, Camus, Maurois et all.
Imagine a blend of James Joyce and Marcel Proust walking down the mean streets of night time Old Quarter and considering the nature of memory and existence. There are of course some pitfalls that the named authors didn’t have to deal with, like having the shit kicked out of you by three young thugs who didn’t like Lew’s face and his questions.

... this sort of thing never happened to Proust, never sullied his remembrances. Give me a madeleine any day.
Maybe the things that happen to us are things we make happen, things we somehow attract.
Maybe all failures are failures of will.
Maybe I ought to stop getting my butt kicked.

That’s the second good laugh I got from this novel’s unconventional approach. It put me in a much better mood when it came to switch from the hard-boiled Lew to his teacher and commentator persona:

The sadness, the dark, in Dublin late at night, Joyce wrote, is swingeing. People who do not want to go home, who will never go home, who have not got a home, lurch and stagger in the gloom, moths without a candle.

These are the images that remain with me: an anxious cricket, a moth without a candle, wet umbrellas drying in a stand like firearms at rest or like trees growing upside down - the metaphor where I expected a fistfight, the poem where I expected the wisecrack.

All a kind of temporal plaid.
Memory’s always more poet than reporter.
Proust at the barricades.

It doesn’t get much better than this for me. I have been reading crime novels for about five decades by now and I still think that literary critics are wrong to label them escapism or commercial entertainment. In the right hands, these stories transcend artificial genre restrictions and explore human nature with as much sharpness and insight as many a so-called high-brow literary prize winner. James Sallis belongs in the same category with names like Pynchon, Simenon, de Lillo, Eco, Greene – authors who ignored artificial borders and restrictions in order to freely explore all the possibilities and implications of their chosen theme.

“If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer. And this, he says, this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.”

The quote is used by Lew Griffin in a class about James Joyce, it is attributed to critic and biographer Richard Ellman, and is one of the keys we are offered here to unlock the purpose and style of the story. Which brings me to the second part of my review, the one that I enjoyed even more than the actual details of the three investigations. Here is Lew Griffin in internal monologue mode, stream-of-conscience confessional mode and writing journal mode, describing how his character is actually writing the novel we hold in our hands:

That’s how life happens: angles, sharp turns, snags. Never what we expect. Never the stories we tell ourselves ahead of time. So we’re always having to make up new ones.

We live metaphorically, striving always to match our lives to images we’ve accepted or imagined for them – family man, middle American, true believer, gangster – contriving these containers, a succession of them, that preserve us, define us, that keep us from spilling out and give us shape, but rarely fit.

Expand the concept of containers to literary genres and you begin to understand the author’s need to break free of constraints:

I had no idea any longer what it was I might be writing – memoir, essay, biography, fiction. And as the book progressed in following weeks I grew forever less certain. But I found, as well, that I didn’t care.

If indeed there’s something at our centers, how do we find our way to it? The doors that should lead there open into closets and storage places, onto dead corridors, back to the outside.
All our lives, every day, we constantly remake ourselves, reinvent ourselves, layer after layer, mask after mask. Maybe when finally we peel off all the masks there’s nothing left. Maybe Doo-Wop in his own timeless way is right: we’re nothing but the stories we tell ourselves and others.

We are all fiction. We rewrite ourselves every day, just as Lew Griffin does, hopefully experiencing less kicks in the face or personal loss. Hopefully we learn something from the exercise of self examination and we become better human beings.

Individually, collectively, we struggle to rise out of the slough of ourselves, strive upwards (like a man trapped in water beneath ice, swimming up to the air pocket just under, where at least he can breathe) towards something better, something more, then we truly are. That’s the meaning of grace given us. But few of us individually, and seldom does the collective, manage it.

For me, this is a reminder of Melville [ “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” ]
For James Sallis, it is an excuse to revisit Dylan Thomas and break our hearts all over again:

Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
To the fisherman lost on the land.
He stands alone at the door of his home,
With the long-legged heart in his hand.

Loneliness and grief are his constant companions. Sleep refuses to offer its solace, and when it comes it throws a literary man life Griffin right into a suprarealist nightmare:

We turn to one another. His black mask above a white tuxedo. My own white mask over a dress of black silk. Beneath these unearthly buzzing streetlights. Lewis’s lips move without sound. I cannot make out what he is saying. I reach for him, my hand huge as a sky. His face recedes from me, like a train pulling slowly away.

“In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you,”

Before any kind of resolution, before he finds his three missing persons, Lew Griffin must once again descend all the nine circles of hell and lose himself in order to be found in his turn. It’s a harrowing experience that comes very close to ending the whole series in either madness or the death of the main character. But maybe this is the only way to let go of the ghosts of the past and start the whole miserable journey anew.

As always we go on living our lives forward, attempting to understand them backwards.

Somehow we go on being given new chances.

This is a detective novel, a letter to an old friend, an existentialist essay, a social study, a slightly soiled poem to a city and its people, a humanist manifesto, an autobiography and more ... and all of it comes in under 200 pages. What other writer you know who can pull such a magic rabbit out of his hat?

What I did here, in this extraordinary thing sitting beside me, is this: I quit trying. Quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures of my life into fiction. To tuck people I’ve loved safely away in the corners of novels. Quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch-can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days.
This extraordinary thing is my biography.
And I’ve no idea what to do with it, no idea at all.

We grow old, we often lose the people that are important in our lives and our sense of purpose. Still this is no reason to give up. Lew Griffin, like the Terminator, will be back.

I sip the tea. Supposed to stay off caffeine. Supposed to stay off damn near everything. As though I’d had enough of it. I haven’t. Haven’t had enough of anything yet, however long and hard the siege had been. Some nights I sit on the bench outside and I’m rendered mute, absolutely mute, by the touch of the wind on my face, by lights inside the house, how beautiful the world can be.

>>><<<>>><<<

I left out of my comments Lew Griffin the editorialist, social activist campaigner and racial struggle chronicler. He wrote the next passage in 1997 or so, but his words are still painfully accurate for 2025:

I thought again how, because of poverty, polarity and crime, we’ve become a nation without real cities – one, instead, of fenced villages shoved up against one another – and how because we have no cities, because increasingly we’re afraid to venture out and engage the world and have in our playpens toys like TVs and on-line computers that we believe connect us but instead render us ever more apart, ever more distracted and discrete, we’ve become a nation without culture.
I suspect, of course, in my liberal heart of hearts, that it’s all intimately connected. That losing sense of community and culture irrevocably erodes the soul.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Sallis's books are usually pretty short so you'd think I would be blazing through them. But they're so densely written and realized that it forces you to take your time while reading. This one is probably the densest of the existential Lew Griffin detective series so far. In this, the 4th book, we return back to the 90's section of Lew's life (so essentially a sequel to book 2, Moth ), where Lew is not only searching for the missing brother of one of his students, but also is struggling with the sudden appearance of his doppelganger, a homeless man claiming to be him, and what it could mean in the search for his own long lost son.

I had the hardest time reading this book out of the other Griffin novels, as it felt more uneven and unfocused than the others, and it was difficult to get a grasp at what was going on and what it all meant. I did like how this installment found Lew really trying to atone for many things that he regrets in his past, trying to make things right in so many ways. But don't start with this one. You shouldn't start with this anyway because it is absolutely necessary that this series be read in order, as it demands full attention of the reader across books to recall characters and situations, and the enjoyment of the novels are based on a frame of reference created by the previous ones. The series itself is a rich experience but this volume is the most maddening...

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publishers Weekly said of this book "The fourth book in the Lew Griffin series (following Black Hornet, 1994) proves once again that Sallis is one of the least conventional and most interesting writers working in the mystery genre."

Jim Sallis trained as a respiratory therapist and so is well versed in hospital jargon and opperation. Recovery from bad incidents in life cause fragile and introspective periods for those involved. I believe every Lew Griffin book I have read so far has a scene in a hospital due to Lew or some one Lew cares about being in distress/near death/horribly neglected. Mr. Sallis writes with empathy and insight of these incidents.

PW goes on to say "Readers who prefer plots that move straight ahead and fast may resist the spell of his talent, but those willing to untangle a twisted time line and go with the peculiar flow of Sallis's unique prose will find many rewards."

The "Long Legged Fly" the first book in the Lew Griffin series, gives us an arc of Lew's entire life. Now, the following books break out sections of that live and fill in the details. We learned in "The Long Legged Fly" Lew's son had disappeared under vague circumstances. In "Eye of the Cricket" Lew goes on a quest to find out what happened to his son.

"Eye of the Cricket" is a helluva book.

This is a re-read. First read January 2 - January 5 of 1998.

This copy is signed by Mr. Sallis.

[Lata · Rating 4 out of 5]

We return to Lew later in his life. He’s a prof, his son is still missing, and Lew seems full of regrets. Two separate people approach him to find missing persons, and though he’s been out of that game for a long while, Lew begins looking. Much of Lew’s feelings and thoughts about his life are kicked off my the discovery of a homeless man at the beginning of this book. The homeless man is nameless, and had a book in his possession that Lew had given David. Not weird at all, huh?
This precipitates a whole lot of reminiscing, and feelings of loss and sadness. Lew remembers Laverne, whom he clearly loved, a former wife, Claire, and David, of course. He also remembers how some other people came into his life, such as Don Walsh and Richard Garces.
In fact, as I was reading this particularly complex and narratively dense entry into Lew’s life, I felt regret suffusing Lew. This is not a book you can read without having read the previous books. The complex relationships and the way Lew has lost people over the years really drives his actions in this book, and I could feel Lew unravelling as the book went on.
The author evoked powerful feelings in me, and yet, this is still very much both a hardboiled detective story and a philosophical examination of a man’s life and relationships, and the effects he’s had on others. Sallis’ prose is wonderful, with many an insightful observation in his dry, often humourous and piercing style .
And that ending. I had tears in my eyes at how the people Lew had saved saved him.

[Tyler Collison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of Sallis' books (at least those in the Lew Griffin series), this has to be the most beautiful (thus far). From the onset, I've considered his writing to be a unique brand of detective fiction. After reading Eye of the Cricket and experiencing its extreme departure from the conventions of crime novels, I've finally realized what that uniqueness is.

Nearly every detective novel is driven by the action, the cases, the protagonist P.I. picks up. The better the novel, however, the more palpable and accurate the case's effect on the protagonist. This very technique is why I hold many of the "new breed"—Pelecanos, Price, even Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn—in higher esteem than the traditionalists. Sallis used to settle up inside the former, but with Cricket, he's taken a third path—one far less traveled.

Lew Griffin is a university professor and private investigator. But in the wide scope of this book, he is neither of those things. He teaches perhaps three classes (classes, not courses) and "solves" a case or two, but (SPOILER ALERT) that might take up a mere quarter of the narrative. Throughout the series, Lew had been mentioning his son, David, now and then. David had disappeared and Lew hadn't heard from him in many years. When Lew finds out that David might've been found in the book's opening pages, Lew's everyday (read: paid) responsibilities struggle to maintain a leading role in his life. Almost immediately, Lew's primary investigation ventures toward an infinite internal conflict.

Lew must discover what is important to him as an individual—his friends and people, he seems to have pretty well figured out. At numerous points he questions how much of life is taking action, and how much of it is the action taking you. It burns him for so long that eventually Lew drops everything and partakes in the most morose odyssey of self-discovery (this is about when it's official that what you're reading is certainly not going to end as a crime novel) that leaves an impression on you to the level that only something like Camus' The Stranger can.

I'll undoubtedly read this again, as what's lost in a brief summary of opinion and narrative are the contemplative, read-halting themes that lurk throughout Eye of the Cricket.

[La Lectora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es el primer libro que leo de la serie Lew Griffin y me ha parecido de una gran calidad literaria , el autor nos habla de temas como el amor y la pérdida y lo hace envolviendo la realidad cotidiana de un trasfondo casi poético. El ritmo tan ágil y la intriga que genera hace que enganche de principio a fin. Totalmente recomendable!

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

“It was the only thing in the room hinting towards any effort at decoration. Richard Garces had given it to me: a snapshot he'd taken of LaVerne when they worked together at Foucher Women’s Shelter, a month or so before she died. She’d stuck her head in the door to ask a question about one of his clients and been trapped there forever. Smiling and at the same time instinctively trying to turn her head away.” p. 5

Once again, I have found myself in Lew Griffin’s and James Sallis’ world. This is a place that I only visit with the two of them. It is not a world where I would be welcome or even comfortable. I am grateful to Sallis for writing about Griffin, a very charming, but damaged man. Thanks to Griffin and Sallis I have lived a life that is very alien to my white middle class life. I can’t say that I have been a black man because that would be a lie. However, I have seen and felt things that are not available to me except through reading.

Not only have I been able to enter Griffin’s New Orleans, but I also have a voice for him. G. Valmont Thomas is the reader for all the Lewis Griffin stories and his voice has become an integral part of my experience. Thomas has made my reading experience even more poignant.

I don’t know how Sallis wrote these novels since the books seem to wander around time, going both forward and backward through Griffin’s life. I am curious if Sallis has a timeline for all of the Griffin novels or if he just kept building Lew’s life as each book occurred to him.

There are not many Lewis Griffin stories left for me to read, but I am looking forward to all of them. I highly recommend these tales. They make this reader feel like she has been in New Orleans living a whole different life. If you are interested in New Orleans, our country’s history or just amazing writing, you should pick up one of these novels.

[Rob Kitchin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lew Griffin is a some-time English literature academic, some-time detective, and always melancholy with a self-destructive streak, scraping by in New Orleans. The fourth book in the series, Lew is now in his 50s and finds himself looking for three missing children: a teenager who has started to hang around with a wayward cousin; the troubled son of a cop friend; and his own son, David, who disappeared years before. The neighbours also want him to bring the reign of terror of teenage thieves to an end. Lew takes his usual meandering path through bars, restaurants, back streets, shelters, and philosophical reflections, meeting a new love on the way. But as usual he finds it difficult to keep everything on track as he wanders amongst the broken and lost, knowing that he too struggles to stay on a path. Sallis spins out the tale at a sedate, reflective pace, pausing to dwell on the nature and meaning of life and the social realities of being poor in the Deep South. Indeed, along with the exquisite prose, this is the real strength of the storytelling, blending philosophical asides and reflections on people and place with the long arc of Lew’s life and his quest to resolve his detection. I was captivated for the entire story.

[Mohammed Abdikhader Firdhiye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lew Griffin books is one of the most original,best written i have seen in detective fiction but this last book was more uneven than the first 3 books that was fantastic. There was the usual literary games,the unconventional PI story but the voice of Lew himself wasnt as strong and Sallis wasnt in his best writing form.

Good book,enjoyable story for most other crime,PI authors but Sallis is a great author and not just entertaining read, i expected more from this book.

[Rodolfo Santullo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Un misterio de Lew Griffin" dice en la tapa y eso me dispara varias reflexiones (disculpen desde ya). La primera es que, si nos ponemos puristas, misterio -lo que se dice misterio- hay muy poco en esta novela de James Sallis (que es la cuarta de siete que tiene publicadas con el personaje, un alcoholico detective amateur que es además novelista y profesor de literatura de a ratos). Sí, hay una persona -personas, en realidad- desaparecida, que suele ser lo que Griffin suele investigar, pero en verdad el relato no utiliza la estructura clásica de la investigación de un misterio. Por lo pronto, la novela tiene una estructura muy poco lineal, por completo libre, que va adelante y atrás en el tiempo y en la memoria de Griffin, en sus historias de vida y de las de aquellos que lo rodean. Si le pienso una comparación, no sería literaria. Sallis compone este relato de Griffin como quien zapa musicalmente o se pone a construir un free jazz, con la salvedad de que, al final, todo cobrará sentido y con el sentido forma y estructura. La segunda reflexión corre al respecto del mismo género policial. Pensar cuanto ha crecido, cambiado y evolucionado -no sólo pensando en su génesis como novela problema o lúdica, sino también a partir de su salto o transformación (parcial, que el anterior no dejó de existir) en novela negra- y como se ha transformado en un género mutante, uno que puede incluír otros géneros (humor en la obra de Donald Westlake, fantasía con John Connolly, etc), uno que puede ser radiografía social de su país (Michael Connelly, James Ellroy, Hemming Mankell, Petros Markaris, Chester Himes y un interminable etcétera) y uno que puede transformarse en una novela de vida, en la reconstrucción del viaje del héroe que planteaba Joseph Campbell, en la construcción mítica de un personaje y de una ciudad (Nueva Orleans) que termina por tener vida propia. Un cincuentón Lew Griffin recibe una llamada nocturna: a un hospital público acaba de ingresar un indigente no identificado, un hombre joven, con un único dato: carga en su poder "El Viejo", la primera novela publicada de Griffin, dedicada a David por el autor. David es el nombre del hijo de Griffin, aquel que no ve -del que no tiene el menor dato- desde hace casi 10 años. Este será el disparador para esta nueva novela de James Sallis, impredecible relato que no hay manera de adivinar porqué camino transitará, que está a la altura -si no supera- de las otras dos novelas que había leído antes de él -El Tejedor y El Avispón Negro- y que lo confirma como uno de esos autores imprescindibles en la biblioteca de cualquiera que se considere lector.

[Mark Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a public service, here is a list of the writers, artists, and characters mentioned in Eye of the Cricket, the fourth entry in the Lew Griffin series by James Sallis:

James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Michelangelo, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Jimmy Reed, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Queneau, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, Andre Gide, Freud, Proust, E.T.A. Hoffman, Elmer Fudd, Raymond Chandler, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Art Tatum, Spike Lee, Carl Orff, Willie Dixon, R.E.M, Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, Tchaikovsky, Chris Smither, Homer, Turlough O’Carolan, Don McLean, Arlo Guthrie, John Lee Hooker, Hank Williams Jr., William Faulkner, Bobby McFerrin, Madison Smartt Bell, Chester Himes, Richard Wagner, Sisyphus, Jean Cocteau, Knut Hamsun, Arthur Rimbaud, John Berryman, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Smart, Sam Johnson, “Bertie” Russell, Chaucer, Fats Waller, Mozart, Arrested Development, Blind Willie McTell, and Bruce Springsteen.

I might have missed one or three. No doubt James Sallis buried some others, an obscure New Orleans street name or something like that.

But, two things:

First, the references are seamless. They are part and parcel of Lew Griffin’s head, his desire to understand language and story and point of view.

And, second, they allow Griffin to riff on the world around him—deep thoughts sparked by the case and deep thoughts sparked because Lew Griffin is always processing the world as a writer, a teacher, an ex-detective, a drinker, a reader, and a big fan of music.

Examples? Okay. My paperback copy of Eye of the Cricket was chock full of those mini Post-It notes by the time I’d finished reading, but this one said “whole page.” It’s the beginning of Chapter 34:

“The city had followed Rimbaud’s advice: Je es un autre. “I” is another. Or maybe it was just that I had become another. Which I guess was pretty much young Arthur’s point. Everything had changed because I had changed. The shape of the jar defines what is contained. We can say only what language allows us to say. And to say more we must change language itself. It was a quest Rimbaud finally fled, taking his sad, doomed refuge in Abyssinia. But he’d almost done it. He’d bent language almost, almost, into new shapes—before it sprang back.

“And now I was in a kind of Abyssinia myself.

“Soon enough I’d lost all sense of time; I might just as easily have been on the streets a week, six or eight weeks, months on end. Not that anything was lost. On the contrary, each moment was scored deeply into my memory. That very immediacy mitigated time’s flow. Days and time of day had become irrelevant. Only the moment mattered.”

Now that’s how you take advantage of a Rimbaud reference and turn it into something that hits all your themes—identity, language, time. And searching, both the interior self and around the seedy streets of New Orleans, frequently thinking about his relationship with the late LaVerne Adams.

So it probably goes without saying that Eye of the Cricket is not your straightforward mystery. The presence of Lew Griffin, ex-detective, suggests this is a mystery. There is a missing 15-year-old boy. There is a rash of recent armed robberies. And there’s the derelict who turns up in a hospital claiming to be Lew Griffin, carrying a copy of one of Lew’s novels, and soon disappears. And there’s all the thoughts, off and on, about Griffin’s son David.

But these are slippery, loose bones to a story with precious little order. Eye of the Cricket is staunchly anti-plot. It’s firmly pro idea—big ideas. Because Lew Griffin is also struggling with writing a novel and he’s “quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures” of his own life into fiction. He’s “quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days.”

At one point early on, Griffin is teaching Ulysses and he refers to one sequence as “phantasmagoric, equal parts dreaming or nightmares or drunken carousing” and that’s a good description of Eye of the Cricket, too. It’s a novel that wanders, frequently in retrospective mode.

“The past is no insubstantial, thready thing, sunlight slanting through shutters into cool rooms, pools and standards of mist adrift at roadside, memories that flutter from our hands the instant we open them. Rather is it all too substantial, bluntly physical, like a boulder or cement block growing ever denser, ever larger there behind us, displacing and pushing us forward. And yes: in its mindless rocklike, solid, unstoppable way, it pursues us.”

Lew Griffin knows inertia. He knows forward progress, too. For a guy who understands the “phantasmagoric” elements of Ulysses and routinely contemplates Rimbaud, who pushed the boundaries of poetry and paved the way for surrealism (believe me, this isn’t my walking around knowledge; I looked it up), Griffin is deeply self-aware of his strengths and weaknesses. His own self-loathing. He’s aware of the holes in his life he’s lost to drinking. He’s aware of his own lack of direction.

Change. Metamorphosis. New skins. New beginnings. Lew Griffin regularly ponders his inability to change. He spends a lot of staring at the metaphorical mirror. “We drag our world along with us and we can’t let them go, can’t get rid of the damned things. Trapped animals have better sense. They’ll gnaw a leg off and crawl away. We just tell ourselves that once we get the furniture inside our heads rearranged it’s going to be a new room, a new world. Sure it is.”

Eye of the Cricket wouldn’t work as a straight up mystery. It’s not built for that. Griffin’s world is full of “angles, sharp turns, snags.” Why should the story be anything else? The story won’t force patterns, either, no matter how comforting and fetching that might be.

Griffin, in fact, knows he’s a story. He’s the story he’s telling himself. And he’s doing everything he can, even if it means doing nothing, to not feel manipulated by the storytellers in the sky.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in late nineties New Orleans.

"The storm came in over the lake, bowing the shaggy heads of young trees and snapping branches off the old, blowing out of Metairie where the white folks live. In my own back yard a hundred-year-old water oak at last gave in, splitting in half as though a broadsword had struck it, opening like a book..."

Blurb - Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. And he is a man subject to all of the frailties to which we are heir. 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.

Read by Ray Shell and Joe Karie.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid book in the series, but a little more meandering than the three books that precede it. And surprisingly more optimistic. Still a solid read (While I gave the others five stars, this is still a strong four-star read).

Lew Griffin remains one of the most fully realized and real characters to me in fiction. The character is so alive in my mind, it really is difficult for me to accept that he is a fictional creation.

The best of what can happen when an author approaches and embraces a genre, while at the same time brings in rich language, poetry, and literary technique. A modern novel and a hardboiled crime novel. A series that I intend to continue reading and eventually reread.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of James Sallis's Lew Griffin mysteries. Griffin is a black detective in New Orleans and is one of the most original hard boiled characters in the mystery/noir field. Griffin is a flawed character but with a lot of sympathetic elements. These are, to some extent, literary mysteries, and are as much of an exploration of character and setting as they are mystery. I highly recommend them. My favorite mystery series, next to the Travis McGee series.

[Bridget Weller · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's a tricky one, that Sallis. My latest theory is the whole crime-genre thing is just a cunning trick to lure in readers who would otherwise not read a novel that basically deals with themes etc. that would normally lead it to be called 'literary'. Cunning. I actually wept at the end of this one.

[Randall · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story is a sad one and quite believable. On the one hand I want to rate it five stars and on the other, three. It took me quite sometime to grasp Jame's writing style and cadence. He is exceptionally clever and deep. Each sentence is a package it's own employing a very unique style that forces a more careful read. At times the dialog felt confusing as it wasn't laid out in a typical fashion. Once the technique was grasped it flowed more readily. This was my first James Sallis book and I hadn't realized it was book IV in a series. I really liked the Lew Griffin character and do intend to continue reading James Sallis' work.

[Candorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewis Griffin is a well-drawn, interesting, engaging character and Sallis's writing skills are considerable. Not sure what all happened here and not sure a plot line was followed as much as an autobiography of the protagonist. Sallis creates a character I'd like to me over a café au lait at Café du Monde and about whom I want to know more. A good read using New Orleans as a visible setting, almost a minor character in the story and I always enjoy a book that incorporates realistically and vividly its setting.

[BrianC75 · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite authors who delivers novels in the crime noir genre - but that is a narrow classification and restricts the true scope of his work.

Sallis is a SUPERB writer per se who is up there with the very best. He mesmerises you gently and with such great skill. His prose is spare and tight, almost poetical at times. Page after amazing page of delightful dialogue and masterful plot rollout, laced with splashes of philosophy and moral insight, make him the master that he is.

If you like to read quality books - you should not miss out on James Sallis.

[Dom · Rating 2 out of 5]

The books before this are soooo good and interesting and this is interesting and has some beautifully written lines. Overall this just is soooo confusing and poorly written? Wtf is going on, what is the main story????? I just finished it and enjoyed it but really have no idea, Lew just walks around and has his thoughts and it’s all very like Proust and I enjoy it but this one is so disconnected and uneven. Will read the rest but this one was less interesting

[Theodore Kinni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had a tougher time following Lew thru this one. The last third of the book or so was a stretch for me and I don't get why he does the things he does. But I'm glad I stuck with it, because of the way Sallis blows past the boundaries of noir and drags you with him.

[Carlos Cano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro, muy bien escrito, no puede decirse para nada que sea el típico libro del género policiaco, pareciera que no pasa nada y la principal búsqueda que hace el protagonista es la de si mismo

[Herb Hively · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Sallis a great writer.

[Laird Heater · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wanders all over misc junk. After 70 pages, dumped it.

[Taju Noor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twisted timelines are thinkers. It keeps getting better and better.

[Jarrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

A scattered and literary detective novel set in New Orleans with several plats lines and variety of characters passing through the story.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stinks.
Sallis trying hard to write literature but it’s just a detective story.

Complete confusion throughout.

[Florita · Rating 1 out of 5]

New Orleans lingo. Scattered story. I had to stop reading at page226 or so. Read the last chapter and still did not get the whole story of this book.

[Guy Salvidge · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best word to describe this is 'diffuse.' The fourth Lew Griffin novel is beautifully written but it meanders hither and thither in maddening fashion. I barely understood the rudiment of the way it seemed (or seemed not) to progress. You could hardly term this a crime narrative. But Sallis writes such beautiful prose that it largely doesn't matter.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eyes out of focus

Slim title that is touted on the back-cover blurps as a mystery and its author as a "renowned novelist, poet, critic, essayist, editor, translator, and musicologist." Despite the tout, the story isn't taut enough to be a mystery, but the author--engaging in too many asides, elipitical changes of pace, location, direction, time, and narrative--does live up to his billing; someone with so many job titles certainly couldn't be expected to focus sufficiently to tell a mystery.

The writing style isn't bad, there are some nice turns of phrase, especiallly in the drawling and sketchy New Orleans dialogue, and Lew Griffin, Sallis's signature professor and erstwhile detective, is a deep and likable character.

Maybe if I hadn't thought it was a mysetery I'd have approached it differently. Also, the cover illustration of a guitar is a canard; while Sallis may be a renowned musicologist, there are just a few scant references to musicians,, and the story has nothing to do, either primarily or tangentially, with a guitar or music.

[Gail Barrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled on this atmospheric series set in New Orleans. This is #4 of seven so lots more to look forward to. Lew Griffin is tortured but charismatic, writer, detective, sometimes binge drinker, full of regrets bud seeking grace. A literary read. Best quote: Memory is a poet, not a journalist.