| View Larger Image | Moth (Lew Griffin) | Paperbackby James Sallis (Author)
| List Price: | $8.95 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Walker & Company | | Page Count: | 205 Pages | | Publication Date: | January 01, 2003 | | Sales Rank: | 687,203th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. Following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets-- not only the urban ones he has conquered but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago-- to search for the runaway daughter he didn't know that his friend had. Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son. Moth is expansive, bursting with marvelous scenes and unforgettable characters, filled at once with the matter-of-fact violence of daily life and with redeeming human compassion. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 4 reviews)
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Noir detective story with a lot of feeling by Chris Greenwood (Los Angeles)  5 Stars
February 07, 2008
At the outset Lew Griffin's former lover, Laverne, has just passed away. But she leaves a message for Lew asking him to find her recently pregnant and drug addicted daughter who has disappeared. Lew feels that he has to fulfill this request and gets pulled back into the work that he used to do, like a moth to the flame. This is a New Orleans college professor, missing work to go intimidate thugs and break some faces in the process of finding Laverne's daughter. What really made this story so intriguing was Sallis' ability to pack a lot of meaning into just a few words. None of the words felt unnecessary, and Lew emits such an aura of understanding people that he creates a lot of powerful moments without saying much. I loved this book and have since been seeking out all of Sallis' other Lew Griffin novels. How this series could slip so far under the radar is beyond me.
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A Private Eye Looks at 50 by Kenneth Stenger (USA) 5 Stars
August 12, 2007
I ordered Black Hornet and Moth after reading Cypress Grove and Drive. What I didn't realize at the time was that I would be reading bookends of the career of Lew Griffin, an accidental private eye fumbling foward into maturity without an immediate need to know why doing what seems right is improbably its own reward.
And the writing. This is the reward. There is the plot. There are the characters. And there are the sentences.
This book is about Lew Griffen taking stock and making sense of what took him from the Black Hornet to 50 as an adjunct professor in French literature who still finds himself the moth drawn to the flame.
The man understands how to break a jaw, remembers the difference between drinking and drinking, mixes in the difference between French and Amaerican fiction, and, finally accepts that being alone is neither noble nor romantic, although ineveitable, all while not resorting to a single cliche or allowing tedium to cause a page to be turned.
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Detective Work with Depth...and, uh color! by K. Bowman (Los Angeles, CA) 5 Stars
July 13, 2006
Yes, James Sallis seems to have gotten it right. This detective story featuring private eye, Lew Griffin, presents more than your typical follow-the-trail-of-clues but rather it offers social commentary on the state of America (without being didactic), depth of character, as well as insights into how characters perceive themselves and the worlds in which they live.
Ironically, Sallis is described as a white author, and his protagonist is African American. As an African American myself who has read Walter Mosely, I have to say that Sallis' writing is more meaty.
Kudos to Sallis! I've already started collecting the rest of the books in this series.
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A tragic PI novel with cool lyricism and lucid despair 5 Stars
March 30, 1997
This is the second appearance of Lew Griffin,an Afro-Amrecan private detective in New Orleans. In Moth,Griffin searches for missing daughter of late LaVerne,his ex-lover. Griffin interviews and tracks daughter's trail,though,Mr.Sallis seems to be not interested in who done it nor why done it nor what is hiding behind the case. Instead,Mr.Sallis forcuses deep into Griffin. Mr.Sallis writes about despair and trauma of a person who chose to be a PI,a profession to inevitably touch and face the dark and evil side of the human soul. Mr.Sallis's previous novel,The Long- Legged Fly,was wrote on Lew Griffin's fall,how he fell into the dark pit of despair. And its sequel,Moth,is a story of recovery.In searching for a missing person,
Griffin struggles to search and grab for the lost part of himself.
Mr.Sallis's prose has cool lyricism,and with that,he draws Griffin's despair and the portrait of lonesome detective who tries to get over the despair. Not only the protagonist,but other characters are also well portraited,their life get resonant with Griffin's,and the sound of resonance must hit the emotion of readers. In the groomy rain of New Orleans,Mr.Sallis presents us a well-crafted story of a depressed man,a story of desperate hope. A private-eye novel played in blue note. Very original
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Black Hornet (Lew Griffin)
by James Sallis (Author)
A sniper appears in 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. Five people have been fatally shot. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. He's black and she's white, and though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading black journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and bail bondsman Frankie...
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| Eye of the Cricket
by James Sallis (Author)
Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son...and himself in the process. Now a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.
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| The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Mystery (Library Binder)
by James Sallis (Author), G. Valmont Thomas (Reader)
As black private detective Lew Griffin pursues a seemingly hopeless missing-person case through the steamy French Quarter of New Orleans, he realizes that his own life has come to resemble those of the people he is attempting to find.
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| Bluebottle (Lew Griffin Mysteries)
by James Sallis (Author)
Lew Griffin's fifth outing begins when someone fires a shot towards him. When he fully comes to, Griffin discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. Somewhere in the Crescent City there's an answer . . . and some very strange allies . . . if they can be trusted.
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| Ghost of a Flea (Lew Griffin)
by James Sallis (Author)
The mystery of Lew Griffin is revealed in the concluding novel of an honored series. In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone...or almost. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart, his son, David, has disappeared again, leaving a note that sounds final. His friend Don Walsh, who is leaving the police department, is shot interrupting a robbery. And Lew is directionless: he hasn't written anything in years; he no longer teaches...there's nothing to fill his days. Even...
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