Backwater

This final masterpiece from James Sallis (1944–2026) follows a jazz guitarist’s ruminative and disquieting homecoming when an old friend asks him to help investigate a suspicious death.

Perhaps best known for the neo-noir classic Drive, James Sallis explored the nature of violence, hope, and the strength of the human spirit in his existentialist crime and science fiction. Backwater places itself among these gritty themes with a complex, purposefully oblique work that honors Sallis’s origins in the rural Mississippi Delta.

When an old friend from his days on the police force makes a plea for him to come and help with what seems to be a murder case, jazz guitarist Bishop steps back into a former life. Two major problems, though. The job’s in the town where he grew up, to which he vowed never to return. And his friend disappears, leaving Bishop with responsibilities he never anticipated or wanted. Not to mention a couple more murders.

Bishop slips into his old role as easily as into well-worn, comfortable old clothes. Getting his bearings in the town’s close society and among his own memories is a different matter. As Bishop buoys the lives of the survivors around him, this police procedural becomes a poignant examination of human nature that ripples with hope and compassion of spirit in the face of indifference and despair. Backwater is the breathtaking swan song of James Sallis, an author who tirelessly invested dignity into all his characters—no matter how far on the edge of society they live, and no matter how unsolvable their inner mysteries may be.