Eye of the Cricket was published by Walker in 1997, and it finds Griffin in his later years — teaching creative writing at a university, somewhat sober, somewhat settled, and still unable to resist the pull of investigation. Two cases draw him back: a homeless man beaten nearly to death, and a young woman searching for her father. Neither case promises resolution; both promise the kind of immersion in other lives that Griffin finds both painful and necessary.
Sallis uses Griffin’s academic position to explore the relationship between crime fiction and literature — Griffin teaches writing, and his reflections on narrative, on the obligation to make sense of experience, and on the inevitable gap between what happened and what can be told, become the novel’s secondary subject. The detective and the novelist, Sallis suggests, share the same compulsion: the need to impose meaning on chaos.
The prose is spare, almost skeletal — each sentence carries maximum weight with minimum words. Sallis has pared his style to essentials, and the effect is of a writer who has earned the right to silence: what is not said is as important as what is.
Collecting Eye of the Cricket
First edition (Walker, New York, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$12