The Long-Legged Fly was published by Carroll & Graf in 1992, and it introduced Lew Griffin — an African-American private detective in New Orleans who is also a novelist, a teacher, an alcoholic, and a reader of Camus and Borges. Griffin is unlike any previous detective protagonist: his investigations are less about solving crimes than about understanding the damage that crime leaves behind, and his narrative method (fragmented, non-linear, philosophically reflective) owes more to the French nouveau roman than to Raymond Chandler.
The novel is structured in four sections, each set in a different decade of Griffin’s life, telling four cases that are thematically linked rather than narratively connected. This structure allows Sallis to explore how a man changes over time — how a young man’s certainties become an older man’s questions — while maintaining the detective novel’s essential activity: the investigation of hidden truths.
Sallis’s New Orleans is not the tourist city of jazz and Mardi Gras but the real city of poverty, racial violence, and cultural richness that exists beneath the postcard surface. Griffin navigates this city as a Black man in America — which means that his relationship to the law, to white institutions, and to the very idea of justice is fundamentally different from that of the typical white detective protagonist.
The title (from Yeats: “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence”) establishes the novel’s literary ambition: this is crime fiction that reads like poetry.
Collecting The Long-Legged Fly
First edition (Carroll & Graf, New York, 1992): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $10–$25