Soho
Published September 1, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Reading James Sallis is like reading poetry, or having a dream that is vivid and tactile but yet somehow elusive. That’s the feeling evoked in his last, posthumous novel, Backwater. Though it is ostensibly a police procedural set in a small southern community – a backwater – it is really a series of ruminations about life, death, and music from the perspective of the narrator, a retired cop turned jazz musician named Bishop. He has reluctantly returned to his hometown, Anne’s Ferry, after his old partner tracked him down playing music in a bar and asked him to consult on a puzzling case. He now runs the cop shop in Anne’s Ferry and they have an odd one, an abandoned car, full of blood, but no body. Can he give their small police force a hand? He agrees, but once he gets to Anne’s Ferry, there’s another mystery: his partner has left town, and it’s clear he isn’t coming back.
Bishop falls into serving temporarily as the Chief of Police, overseeing the work of three cops. They track down what clues they can, bit by bit, on the bloody car, hoping to find out who likely died there. They soon have another murder on their hands, and a variety of other cases to handle. But don’t go into this story expecting a standard investigation. The narration is indirect, improvisational. As a fellow jazz musician once advised him on his musical style, “Got to put some confusion in it.” Which Bishop finds no lack of in Anne’s Ferry.
It’s a moody, meditative journey, with sparks of sharp observations and unexpected detours. “I was like a tumbleweed in old movies,” Bishop reflects, “blowing into town, rolling idly about the streets and past vibrant lives, unremarked, immaterial.” Bishop’s story is a record of his time back home, with the most important mysteries unsolved, including what his old partner meant by the fragments of gnomic writing he left behind, or what ever became of him.
It’s classic Sallis, and a reminder to reread his extraordinary body of work. The final words of Backwater seem an apt coda: “…sometimes the best ending is simply to remember, to go back, to just play the tune straight through as well as you can, this one moment in time.”