The Mean Streets

*Salt River

by James Sallis

Walker & Company                           

ISBN 0-8027-1617-2                         

* Full Review first published in Mystery News (February/March 2008)

“So many stories leave you standing at the altar. The crisis has been met, the many obstacles averted or overcome, most everything’s back to the way it was before or has righted itself to some new still point. You always wonder what happened to these people. Because they had pasts, they had lives, before you began reading. And they have futures, some of them, once you stop.”

Marvelous things really do come in little packages. Think of that diamond engagement ring or that heirloom gold locket, for example. Add to the list Salt River the latest book by James Sallis, one of America’s best but (at least in mainstream circles) most unheralded novelists. Weighing in at well under two hundred pages, this little beauty has been cut, polished and fashioned into something that glitters and shines like a rare gem. Tomes with two or three times the number of pages have neither the depth nor the clarity nor anywhere near the value.

Two years have past since John Turner (Cypress Grove and Cripple Creek) witnessed the murder of his girlfriend, Val Bjorn. Turner, ex-cop, ex-con, ex-therapist turned reluctant acting-sheriff of a small town on the edge of nowhere in rural Tennessee still mourns his loss. Turner’s a survivor, however, and, in the end, he’s decided that it’s enough simply to “see how much music you can make with what you have left.” And that’s a fitting question in Cypress Grove, a town on the ragged edge of economic depression and eventual dissolution – “the storm is coming in. And the town, in its last hour, is waiting.” Waiting anxiously also for the winds of change to blow is a way of life that Turner has come to love. He’s not sure how much more in the way of loss he’ll be able to withstand. It’s that largely philosophical/existential quandary – for which the fate of the town itself functions as a metaphor – that fuels the real tension and drama in this story.

Turner is sitting on a bench along Main Street discussing such matters with his pal, Doc Oldham. The two men watch transfixed as a car driven by Billy Bates slams into the front of City Hall. Billy, the ne’er-do-well son of the former sheriff, dies from injuries sustained in the crash. But questions remain. What, for instance, has the young man been doing since leaving the town without a word a few months earlier?  Why do two men – clearly “muscle” from out-of-town – attempt to kidnap Billy’s estranged wife? And what does any of that have to do with the nearly simultaneous reappearance of Eldon Brown, Turner’s banjo-playing friend and Val’s former accompanist? Brown’s barely half-step ahead of a Texas lawman who figures the black man to be responsible for the death of an eccentric attorney down Arlington way.

Since the author is Sallis, after all, the various threads ultimately fit together with grace and precision. When you get right down to it, however, that’s really not the point. Plot is subordinated to character and setting. The story line – compelling as it is – becomes in the end a vehicle for the author to meditate on the ravages of time, on loyalty and honor, as well as on sin, on redemption, on death and, hopefully, on rebirth. And meditate he does, with the economy and power of a poet: “I smelled dust, and rain. And I felt all about me the sadness of endings.”

 Few novelists could pack so much into such a slim volume. More than just a good “mystery,” this is a book filled with absolutely splendid writing and enough ideas to keep you thinking months, hell, maybe even years after you turn the last page. Singularly devoid of the kind of thing that generally passes for “action” in the genre, Salt River nonetheless packs the kind of firepower that really counts – the kind that touches the heart and recharges the soul. Size matters not one whit. Marvelous things sometimes really do come in small packages!

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this