American author James Sallis dies at 81 | Culture | EUROtoday

The American author James Sallis died final Tuesday, January 27 on the age of 81. In an announcement on their web site they confirmed that he died “peacefully, with his wife Karyn by his side, after a long illness.” He was the creator of a sequence of novels that had detective Lew Griffin because the protagonist, and of Drive, the ebook that in 2011 was made into a movie with the identical identify, starring Ryan Gosling.

His profession started within the sixties when he wrote science fiction for magazines, a time wherein he bought a number of tales to writers similar to Damon Knight and Michael Moorcock. When he was round 25 years previous he was invited to London to work for the journal New Worldssimply when the work took a leap in the direction of massive format. It was at the moment that he printed Kazoo (1967), his first science fiction story.

“The crime novel is an essential part of American literature of the last century,” he informed this newspaper in an interview in 2019. At that point he was crucial of the scenario in his nation: “Racism is the great sin of the United States,” he acknowledged, including that the barrier of civility had been “broken.” “Now, after a long time, things are said that couldn’t be said before. Maybe there is no solution,” he mentioned.

During his profession he printed 18 novels, a number of collections of tales, poems, essays and musicology books; He was additionally a critic, biographer of the African-American author Chester Himes and translator of novels. He additionally labored as a reviewer for newspapers similar to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post; He was a literary columnist for Boston Globe and of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His profession earned him the Bouchercon prize, the Hammett for literary excellence in police writing and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière. In 2013 he acknowledged to this newspaper that his inspirations had been many: “I’m influenced by every thing. European and American science fiction movies from the fifties, Theodore Sturgeon, Julio Cortazar, Albert Camus (particularly The foreigner), Pablo Neruda, Raymond Queneau, Hammett and Chandler, Faulkner… You should see the cabinets of my library.”