Ghost of a Flea: A Lew Griffin Mystery
(Libby/OverDrive eAudiobook)

"All man's problems, Pascal said, derive from the simple fact that he is unable to remain quietly alone in his room." Through five previous Lew Griffin novels, all set in New Orleans, Sallis has largely abandoned the conventions of the crime novel, allowing his brooding black hero to philosophize at will, firing literary allusions like bullets as he struggles with a melancholy streak as wide as the Mississippi. The tension in the books comes from Griffin's forays outside the quiet of his room and into the chaos of the racist world. This series finale reprises much of what has gone before and is both experimental in form (dramatic shifts in point of view and time frame come and go as suddenly as Louisiana thunderstorms) and powerful in emotional impact. Griffin's latest romantic relationship is crumbling, his son has disappeared again, and the daughter of an old friend is receiving threatening notes. Attempting to address each of these issues, Lew finds himself sorting through the detritus of his own perpetually unraveling personal life. Readers new to the series won't have a clue what's going on here, but for those who have followed Griffin on his journey through a life of unanswered questions, this unconventional conclusion to the genre's most unconventional series will strike a typically atonal but haunting chord. --Bill Ott

The enigmatic saga of the likable New Orleans private eye Lew Griffin draws to a satisfyingly convoluted closure in this sixth and final installment. Evoking a stark metaphysical landscape where time hovers on the verge of midnight and the sky is pregnant with rain, Sallis (Eye of the Cricket; Bluebottle; etc.) explores similar concerns over identity and the role of the detective as those found in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. In what is sure to become an equally classic set of novels, he keeps it closer to the everyday with the very human exploits of Griffin and a detailed use of the streets and characters of the Delta City. But Sallis pushes the poetry of noir further than Auster and most other practitioners with such images as "another of society's makeshift facsimiles of dreams, rags and tatters of movies, media, popular literature, this new mythology, that my homeless soul had taken for its own and worn into the street." As Griffin faces his own mortality, his son is once again missing, and a cop friend is shot during a robbery; but these crime elements seem merely ornamental the big action sequence actually centers on pigeon-killers. Readers who enjoy more average PI novels may find Sallis's highly allusive style a bit much, but fans of particularly sophisticated writing will love the experience of being drawn deeper and deeper into circles of narrative complexity. Agent, the Vicky Bijur Literary Agency. (Jan. 10) FYI: Sallis is also the author of Chester Himes: A Life (Forecasts, Jan. 8). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This stirring series finale examines various father-and-son-like relationships. Black New Orleans private detective Lew Griffin is searching for his son, David, who has drifted away from home again; one of Lew's acquaintances, a man in a park, has been taking care of a mentally disturbed child who gets ill after the pigeons he feeds are poisoned; and Lew's comrade Don, a retired detective, takes home the teenaged robber who shot him. Meanwhile, Alouette, another acquaintance of Lew and a new mother, has been threatened at work, and police discover a mutilated body carrying David's wallet. This stimulating mix of evocative imagery, learned literate references, earthy observations, and philosophical/existential speculations mark an unusual detective's swan song. Strongly recommended for all mystery collections; Sallis is also a poet, critic, and author of Chester Himes: A Life. [Walker is also reissuing in paperback the first novel in the series, The Long-Legged Fly, currently out of print. Ed.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

With this sixth Lew Griffin novel, Sallis brings to an end one of the genre's least conventional series (Blue Bottle, 1999, etc.). Teacher, writer, boozer, lover, never more than part-time shamus, Griffin is first and foremost a philosopher, albeit a two-fisted one. Given sufficient provocation-often only an eyedropper's worth-he can level a bad guy as effectively as Spade, Marlowe, or Hammer. But his real metier is thinking, thinking, relentlessly thinking, as opposed to Sherlockian sleuthing. This time out, for instance, the central crime is the poisoning of pigeons in a neighborhood park. Griffin, a black man trying to find a place in the white man's society, finds that his life has become by now a case of "too many lost battles." He's been beaten by cops, jailed, and banished to the streets, until melancholy suffuses his speech like a Louisiana miasma. "Everything got worse," he says. "Always. The world's single immutable law." The traditional mystery plot receives but a lick and a promise here: Griffin finds his long-lost son, loses him again, breaks up with still another woman, lumbers around the seamy side of New Orleans and, through day-trips back and forth in time, investigates himself-for the most part, as things turn out, unrewardingly. The reader makes out a lot better. Though despair eventually triumphs, it does so over luminously evocative prose and a protagonist of great charm whose wit flashes defiantly, and whose refusal to surrender is as gallant as it is heartbreaking.