In his novel The Killer is Dying back in 2011, James Sallis considered how a life of crime comes to an end, among other things. Essentially, it looked at a hitman who was not just losing his touch, but slowly losing his battle with a disease. There were other facets to the story too, including a cop’s tale, and I referred to the book as police philosophical, as opposed to procedural. Backwater is another police philosophical, if you will accept the term.
It’s told in the first person by an aging cop called Bishop. To be honest, his name is hardly used during the tale and it often feels like we’re hearing the voice of a cop as well as that of the author himself. Bishop is literate and sometimes his mind drifts back to the books he read years ago – including all sorts of mysteries, which will push your buttons for sure, if you’re a crime fiction lover.
Bishop is also a jazz guitarist and after a gig one night he sees a former colleague in the bar – Carson. His old partner from the force asks him to go back to a southern backwater called Anne’s Ferry with him and to help with a puzzling case. A car has been found, the interior covered in blood, but there’s no body and no weapon to be seen.
It just so happens that Anne’s Ferry is the town where Bishop grew up. One he left behind for the big city, where he became a cop, a detective and Carson’s partner.
Just as strange as the bloodied car is the way Carson disappears as soon as Bishop arrives. Nobody else there has much experience or leadership capability, so soon he’s running a small police department consisting of Felicia, a single mother who’s studying law at night; Hollis, the most capable deputy; and Raymond, who does the night patrols. Then another case crops up – it’s the disappearance of Beau Nelson, a young man who was troubled in his teens and has never quite clicked with his family, or the town in general.
Place is everything in this novel. Anne’s Ferry is the backwater of the title. It’s on the Mississippi and had a ferry at one time, but that has long since disappeared, along with some of the smaller settlements on its outskirts, its cotton gins, several farms that became unprofitable, and various other businesses. We don’t know what state Anne’s Ferry is in, but we’re in the South somewhere and it might be a place analogous with Helena, Arkansas, where James Sallis grew up, although that town is mentioned at one point.
There is a sense of decline and decay, like the town and some of its people are fading away. It always feels like there is something missing. Hope, maybe.
Plenty of things Bishop sees spark memories. He drives out to his grandparents’ old store, long since closed and now falling down. He thinks of his school years, kids he knew growing up, books he read, how he learned music and each vignette paints him as an intelligent, introverted outsider. In between the reminiscences, he works the baffling cases that have been left to him, and builds relationships with Felicia and Hollis, as well as a teenage musical virtuoso in the town, whom he tutors in jazz.
She happened to know the missing man, Beau Nelson, and where he hid in the woods. It’s talking to people, knowing when to ask questions and when to listen, that opens the case up for Bishop. Within his team, Felicia is good at this. Hollis and Raymond are useful in other ways.
And Beau wasn’t the one out there in the wilderness. Slowly, Sallis builds a cast of numerous interesting characters, many of which are outsiders just like Bishop himself. There’s the town doctor who is going blind, a veteran down on his luck, a homeless man, the useless mayor – at times they seem to drift into and out of the story like ghosts.
Backwater is far from being your typical crime novel. It was James Sallis’s last work and it carries that weight well. He passed away of pneumonia in January 2026. I met him once, in 2012, and at that time I believe he’d been fighting cancer. This is a contemplative story, an exploration of ideas in parallel with a meandering police investigation. It’s not particularly similar to the author’s hit novel, Drive. I’d expected it to share more with his Lew Griffin novels, but I’m not so sure about that either.
What it did remind me of was The Bramble and the Rose by Tom Bouman, for its outdoor and out-of-town settings. Although there is less hunting and less of a wilderness feel, the notion that some people end up living on the fringes of civilisation for whatever reason is an important one in this story. It’s also a little like season one of True Detective – without the gothic horror and ritual creepiness.
If you’re looking for a mystery or an investigation, Backwater might come up short. However, there’s something comfortable about cruising around Anne’s Ferry with Bishop as he contemplates life and the world around him. It’s a flawed world, for sure, but still a good place to be.
The UK release is in May 2027. See our video preview of Backwater here, or read our review of Others of My Kind by the same author.
Soho Crime
Print/Kindle
$7.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
