The Long Legged Fly

Description

There are those who vanish into the steaming New Orleans night - and it is part time Private Investigator and blues aficionado Lew Griffin's job to find them. A prisoner of the bottle, his past and his skin, Griffin knows every hidden corner of Hell. But the disappearance of a militant woman activist is about to carry the brilliant, tormented P.I. ever closer to a nightmare that threatens to hit him where he lives...and more brutally than he ever imagined possible.

James Sallis has published sixteen 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 LA Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. He has received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Litterature policiere.

A hard-boiled PI investigates missing persons cases in New Orleans's French Quater over a span of three decades in this uncoventional suspense novel. -"Publishers Weekly" Black detective Lew Griffin skips his father's final illness (New Orleans, 1964) when he's hired to find a missing person--well-known black leader Corene Davis. Successfully finding Davis, he repeats the trick three times--searching for runaway teenager Cordelia Crayson in 1970, his friend Jimmy Smith's kid sister Cherie in 1984, and finally his own long-unseen son David in 1990. The searches are understated, variously successful, and seasoned with increasingly elegiac glimpses of Lew's erratic home life (his unlikely romance with British nurse Vicky, his repeated return to his obliging friend LaVerne); and readers waiting for first-novelist Sallis (the story collection A Few Last Words, 1970) to drop the connections among them will wait in vain. But an unexpectedly poignant sketch of the detective emerges t