The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

DuChateau, Christian. "Meet the mystery man behind 'Drive." CNN, September 18, 2011.

Levy, Lisa. "American Noir and the Outlaw Lit of James Sallis: In Praise of a Great American Crime Writer." Lit Hub, June 17, 2016.  

Why aren’t we talking about James Sallis? In fact, why aren’t we talking about Sallis (b. 1944) alongside his American contemporary paranoids and peers, Don DeLillo (b.1936) and Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)? Sallis is not the big name that these two are, but he certainly could be.

Rawson, Keith. "10 Questions with James Sallis." LitReactor, November 5, 2013.

Q: What's the biggest mistake you've made as a writer?

A: We could talk for quite a while about that word “mistake,” implying as it does that, like characters in poorly written fiction, we have simplistic, monosyllabic motives, i.e., that we know what the hell we’re doing and are in control of it.

Commercially, not sticking to one genre might be construed a mistake. Who is this guy? Poet? PI novelist? Avant-garde weirdo? Fish? Fowl?

The sole “mistake” to which I’d admit without reserve: Not writing enough. Though I’m pretty sure laziness accounts for that more than does misdirection.

Sallis, James. "Books: Tourists and Native Speakers." Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2018. 

We—the field, the genre, whatever this thing got called—we were avant-ier than avant-garde. Good old sf got up every morning thinking about matters that had rarely if ever before been thought about. Wondering how vastly different lives would or might be, connecting the dots of all manner of stars, prodding at the underbellies of social structures, thumbing its nose at received wisdom, stepping back from the usual frame to show mankind's place in the universe in far larger contexts.

On the other hand, hunkered down here in our cabin in comfortable clothes, we've always felt kind of safe and warm, dissembling at all talk of aesthetic issues, cranky with literary writers who dropped toes in our pond, thinking of them as interlopers and carpetbaggers. Magpies, they were, thieving shiny things from others' nests.

We fully believed we tapped into a greater reality, digging our way beneath the countless surfaces of dailyness. Outsiders, literary and otherwise, saw only distortions of that reality, distortions that were at best silly and at worst—since the arts are supposed to improve our understanding of the world, to help us engage more fully with it—dangerous.

---. "Manchette: Into the Muck." The New York Review of Books, June 18, 2014.

In America it was Hammett and Chandler: Hammett who took murder out of the manor houses and gave it back to the people who actually commit it; Chandler who fashioned of bus stations, diners, and cheap hotel rooms, at the frontier’s last raw edge, a mythology specifically American. In France the new maps were drawn by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995).