'America's memory is short," writes James Sallis. "Abjuring any sense of history, the nation eternally improvises itself." The struggle against this wilful forgetting is a constant theme of Sallis's writing, and as he explores the American grain you can feel him raging against the feelgood factor. "You start whistling that 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' thing, I'll have to come over there and kick butt," states Lew Griffin, the protagonist of five Sallis novels. There, in a nutshell, is the Sallis aesthetic.
Sallis's quest to uncover neglected history blazes through his most recently published work, a biography of the novelist Chester Himes (1909-1984). Himes's life certainly makes for a compulsive read: having taught himself to write while serving a 25-year sentence for armed robbery, he went on to become the most eloquent and angry African-American novelist of the post-war years.
"Himes has no position in 20th-century US literature," asserts Sallis. "That, largely, is what I've been trying to correct. He is an immensely important writer, arguably our central African-American writer, yet again and again I must explain who Chester is."
Born in 1945 on the banks of the Mississippi river ("Faulkner country"), Sallis is a white Southerner - surely the kind of irony Himes himself would have enjoyed. But to Sallis it is quite straightforward: "I believe Himes is the true progenitor of much that's happening today. He was writing about the inner city and street life, about the intramural struggles of African-Americans, 30 years before others got on to it. Every rap artist, every movie like Boyz N the Hood, echoes, though seldom as artfully, what Himes was saying in books."
Sallis embraced writing as a career when he sold his first three short stories in a matter of weeks. This encouraged him to drop out of university. He landed in London in 1967, helping Michael Moorcock edit the sci-fi short-story magazine New Worlds.
"We published Ballard and D M Thomas in New Worlds, and helped change not so much science fiction as, I believe, literature. An obscenity case crippled New Worlds and I went back to America to try and save my marriage. I meant to return to London and have always regretted that I didn't."
Back in the US, Sallis edited two anthologies of science fiction. He constantly wrote poems, essays, short stories; when the market for stories collapsed, he turned to novels. He drank too much, got married and divorced again. A gifted musician, at one stage he was doing club gigs at the weekend and giving music lessons during the week, as writing wasn't paying.
"From the first, as writer, as editor and as critic, I refused distinctions between what is generally called 'literary' writing and genre writing such as science fiction or mystery," he says. "Critically I've striven to help tear down the barricades. Literature is not a table with three dishes: it's this huge buffet with all manner of dishes. You wander about it at will, take what you want or need, come back for seconds. Everything's there."
Indeed, Sallis is that rare thing, a true man of letters. Alongside the Lew Griffin novels, he has also published the avant-garde novel Renderings, the spy novel Death Will Have Your Eyes, and several collections of stories, poems and essays. Other works include literary criticism, musicology and translation. Still, it is his Lew Griffin crime novels that have gained Sallis his widest audience. Set in New Orleans, they follow Griffin's trail around the city as he attempts to locate the missing and find something of himself. Subtle and oblique in content, they are meditations upon America rather than tales of policemen and thieves; this marks them out from much of the crime genre.
"I came to crime writing in the 1980s. Quite simply, it seemed to me that the most interesting work was being done in that field. I love both literature - for lack of a better word - and detective fiction, so why not have an amalgam which combines the best elements of the two? I take the atmosphere and crisp dialogue from crime writing, and the pursuits and content of literature. In a sense I'm trying to write books I love to read but don't seem to find."
Another element that marks the novels out is the fact that Griffin is African-American. "I didn't elect to write a novel from an African-American's viewpoint. I began writing, as I always do, from a single image, a sense of a character, trying to draw this shadowy person out. I was many pages into The Long-Legged Fly [Griffin's debut] before I realised that Lew was African-American. So I went back and started over.
"It became a novel and I thought, 'Well, that's done.' But I was so intrigued with the character, with Lew himself, that I wrote another. Writing the second, I began to sense the shape of the whole thing: the last one would be number five. At which point BBC radio commissioned a short story from me, and as I wrote, it grew ever longer - too long. That became Bluebottle, number five. And now, finally, the sixth and last Lew Griffin novel, Ghost of a Flea , lurches towards publication.
"As you can see," says Sallis with a chuckle, "I was in control the entire time." And what happened to the BBC's commission? "Ah," he drawls, "I wrote the BBC another story."