Black Hornet
Authors: James Sallis
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Crime
The third part of James Sallis’
sequence of novels featuring Lew Griffin
In a time of anger, activism, and bitter racial tensions, a sniper has appeared to heat up an already sweltering New Orleans summer - by tearing up innocent people like paper targets. The shooter’s sixth fatality is cut down while she is walking at Lew Griffin’s side. The victim was white. Griffin is black - a reluctant young PI whose poet’s heart has already been hardened by amoral injustice and heavy drink. And though he had only just met his unfortunate companion, Griffin knows it’s up to him to find her killer - before a madman puts the final match to a volatile urban tinderbox.
James Sallis
has published foueteen 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.
SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS
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
Black Hornet
‘Haunting…
Black Hornet
is fast-moving, elliptical, and like a jazz trumpet solo, has a plaintive note of melancholy woven through it.’
–
Washington Post Book World
‘Wry… Powerful… A rich tapestry of social unrest and vividly evoked characters and settings… What Chester Himes did for Harlem… And Walter Mosley is now doing for Los Angeles, James Sallis is doing for New Orleans’
–
New York Times Book Review
‘James Sallis is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work in the field of private eye fiction. His New Orleans is richly atmospheric and darker than noir.
Black Hornet
is terrific’
– Lawrence Block
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 America 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
To
Joe Roppolo
Contents
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
James Sallis Collection
B
ACK
IN
BASIC,
WHICH
TURNED
OUT
TO
BE
FULLY
a fifth of my military career, there was a guy named Robert, a gangly young man from Detroit so black he seemed polished. We were all out on the range one afternoon. They’d hauled an old World War II tank out there, and we were supposed to step up to the line, assemble a molotov cocktail and lob it into the tank through the open hatch. My own toss, most of our tosses, missed pretty sadly. Then Robert toed up there. He stood a few seconds looking off at the tank and hefting the bottle, getting the weight of it. Then with an easy overhand, he dropped his cocktail squarely into the tank: just like a man walking through a door. His perpetual smile jacked up a half degree, no more. “Sort of thing come in handy back home,” he said.
I remembered that, I think for the first time since it happened, when I read about the sniper.
His name was Terence Gully and he was twenty-three. He’d been in the Navy, but things hadn’t gone well for him there.
Discrimination,
he told friends, ex-employers, would-be employers, people on the streetcar or at bus stops. So at eleven
A.M.
on a bright fall day Gully had lugged a .44-caliber Magnum rifle and a duffel bag full of ammunition up an old fire escape onto the roof of The King’s Inn motel half a mile from City Hall, taken up position in a concrete cubicle there, and opened fire. Tourists and office workers on lunch break started going down before anyone knew what was happening. A Nebraska couple staying at the motel on their honeymoon, returning from breakfast. A couple of motel employees. A police officer who’d heard the first shots and rushed over from City Hall.
Hours later, bodycount mounting (bodycount being a term we were getting used to hearing in those years,
grâce à
LBJ and General Westmoreland), they brought in a Seaknight chopper from the naval air base at Belle Chase. As they flew in low over the roof preparing to open fire, the pilot and police heard Gully ranting below them: “Power to the people…. You’ll never take me…. Africa! Africa!”