In January 2025, the crime fiction world lost one of its greats with the passing of the American author James Sallis. However, when he passed away of pneumonia aged 81, the author left behind one last manuscript – Backwater – and it’s coming out in September 2026.
Today on our YouTube channel, Video Evidence, we preview that novel and pay tribute to James Sallis, whose work was riveting and tyre screeching, like his big hit, Drive; noir-tinted and mysterious, like his Lew Archer novels; but also poetic and philosophical like The Killer is Dying and Others of My Kind.
Backwater takes place in the American South, in a fictional town which has been a backwater ever since its ferry stopped working in way-back-when. It’s not a stretch to say the setting is based on the area where Sallis grew up, in Helena, Arkansas, on the banks of the Mississippi.
Bishop, a retired cop, is feeding his muse by playing jazz guitar when Carson, an old friend from the force asks him to help out with a case the next state over. A late model Honda has been found near an old gas station, its interior covered in blood, but there’s no body. Bishop had a reputation working homicides, so Carson ropes him in but there are two tricky aspects that give him pause early on.
Firstly, it means Bishop has to return to the town where he grew up. Secondly, when he shows up to help the local police, Carson has already disappeared.
What’s struck me reading the first few chapters of the advance reading copy of Backwater is its sense of nostalgia. Of course that’s to be expected in a homecoming story, and there are his memories of growing up. But Bishop also recalls old cases he worked on, bands he used to play with, records he loved and books he used to read. It’s kind of neat that this character was drawn to solving murders by reading Conan Doyle, Josephine Tey and John Dickson Carr, among others.
If you liked the Lew Archer mysteries and Sallis’s more philosophical reads, which go deep into the human condition, this is somewhere in between the two. I didn’t realise it at the time of recording the video, but this book also has strong Southern Gothic tones, with its setting, dark memories from the past and dark deeds in the present. It’s gentle, sensitive and textured, with a shadow that spreads across it.
We’ll be bringing you a full review in due course.
Watch for Backwater, out 1 September from Soho Crime, by James Sallis – rest in peace.
