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James Sallis

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Drive: A Novel Kindle Edition

by James Sallis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 1,127 ratings

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"A PERFECT PIECE OF NOIR FICTION" NEW YORK TIMES * NAMED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST & ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"Drive is full of sly humor, poetic details and plenty of rude violence...The novel is a terrific ride." Los Angeles Times

I drive. That's what I do. All I do.

Originally written in 2005, Drive by James Sallis is the inspiration for the iconic 2011 film starring Ryan Gosling in the role of the man known only as 'Driver', a Hollywood stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night.

The gritty back streets of Los Angeles are the backdrop for what the New York Times calls "a perfect piece of noir fiction" in which the Driver is double-crossed in a burglary gone horribly wrong.

This beautiful new edition introduces a noir classic to a new generation of readers, featuring added materials, including a reading group guide and author Q&A.

From the Publisher

I drive. That's what I do. All I do. (image of book)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. I drive. That's what I do. All I do." So declares the enigmatic Driver in this masterfully convoluted neo-noir, which ranges from the dive bars and flyblown motels of Los Angeles to seedy strip malls dotting the Arizona desert. A stunt driver for movies, Driver finds more excitement as a wheelman during robberies, but when a heist goes sour, a contract is put on his head and his survival skills burn up the pavement. Author of the popular six-novel series set in New Orleans featuring detective Lew Griffin (The Long-Legged Fly, etc.) and such stand-alone crime novels as Cypress Grove, Sallis won't disappoint fans who enjoy his usual quirky literary stylings. Reading a crime paperback, Driver covers "a few more lines till he fetched up on the word desuetude. What the hell kind of word was that?" Lines such as "Time went by, which is what time does, what it is" provide the perfect existential touch. In this short novel, expanded from his story in Dennis McMillan's monumental anthology Measures of Poison, Sallis gives us his most tightly written mystery to date, worthy of comparison to the compact, exciting oeuvre of French noir giant Jean-Patrick Manchette.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics agree that James Sallis, author of the Lew Griffin mystery series, "may be one of the best mystery writers that most readers have never heard of" (Knight Ridder Tribune). In Drive, he combines murder, treachery, and payback in a sinister plot resembling 1940s pulp fiction and film noir. Told through a complex, cinematic narrative that weaves back and forth through time and place, the story explores Drivers near-existential moral foundations while revisiting its root cause: his hardscrabble, troubled childhood. Dark and gripping, Drive packs a powerful punch.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Sallis has a bloodhound's nose for noir. Whether in the celebrated Lew Griffin novels or in his several stand-alones, his characters are always trapped--trapped by their inability to effect change in a malign world, trapped by their own character flaws, trapped by the wrong girl, trapped by walking into the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes they know they're trapped, and sometimes they are the last ones to know, but Sallis always knows; he can smell it in their pores, and he makes us smell it, too. So it is with Driver, the antihero of this quintessential noir novella about a loner with a passion for driving fast cars. He's a Hollywood stunt driver by day and a getaway car driver by night, but he has no interest in either movies or crime: he just wants to drive. Life won't let him, of course, and eventually he figures that out, as he sits in a Motel 6 near Phoenix, "watching the pool of blood lap toward him." Sallis shows us how he got there in one crisply written, spot-on scene after another. At one point, near the end of the book, Driver reflects that we neither choose our lives nor have them thrust at us. Instead, "they're forever seeping up under our feet." You won't find a better definition of the noir worldview than that, and you won't find a more textbook example of how to express that view in fiction than in this hypnotic little story about driving circles around your life. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Sallis has a bloodhound's nose for noir...One crisply written, spot-on scene after another...[A] hypnotic little story about driving circles around your life.

-- "Booklist (starred review)"

"One stark and stunning tale of murder, treachery, and deceit...[Drive] packs a wallop...Sallis injects so much meaning and emotion into his carefully selected words that the power of his prose exceeds its volume...For those who have not yet had to chance to read one of crime fiction's most underappreciated writers, now is the perfect opportunity. "

-- "Boston Globe"

"Full throttle...Sallis' riveting novella reads the way a Tarantino or Soderbergh neo-noir plays...Drive is one lean, mean, masterful machine."

-- "Entertainment Weekly"

"Dark and gripping, Drive packs a powerful punch."

-- "Bookmarks"

"Full of sly humor, poetic details, and plenty of rude violence...a terrific ride."

-- "Los Angeles Times"

"Imagine the black heart of Jim Thompson beating in the poetic chest of James Sallis and you'll have some idea of the beauty, sadness, and power of Drive...Has more thought, feeling, and murderous energy than books twice its length."

-- "Chicago Tribune"

"[The] perfect piece of noir fiction."

-- "New York Times Book Review"

"Sallis won't disappoint fans who enjoy his usual quirky literary stylings...Sallis gives us his most tightly written mystery to date, worthy of comparison to the compact, exciting oeuvre of French noir."

-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

From the Back Cover

[headline]
Now a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, and Christina Hendricks

Driver works as a stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night. He drives, that’s all—until he’s double-crossed.

“One stark and stunning tale of murder, treachery, and deceit . . . [Drive] packs a wallop.”—Boston Globe

“A perfect piece of noir fiction . . . focus[ing] on those hollowed-out moments when a man’s moral landscape suddenly shifts and he’s plunged into darkness.”—New York Times Book Review

“Imagine the heart of Jim Thompson beating in the poetic chest of James Sallis and you’ll have some idea of the beauty, sadness and power of Drive.”—Chicago Tribune

An Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

James Sallis is the author of the Lew Griffin novels and more than a dozen other books, including the biography Chester Himes, a New York Times Notable Book. He has been short-listed for the Anthony, Nebula, Edgar, Shamus, and Gold Dagger awards. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

About the Author

James Sallis has published more than a dozen novels, several books of musicology, multiple collections of short stories, poems, and essays, and more. His works have been short-listed for the Anthony, Nebula, Edgar, Shamus, and Gold Dagger awards. Sallis is best known for his novel Drive, whichwas made into an award-winning motion picture.

Paul Michael Garcia, an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and former company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, received his classical training in theater from Southern Oregon University, where he worked as an actor, director, and designer.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07VPKRBHR
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Poisoned Pen Press; Large type / large print edition (December 31, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 31, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1486 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 169 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #33,872 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #136 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
- #153 in Hard-Boiled Mysteries (Kindle Store)
- #1,334 in American Literature (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.2 1,127 ratings

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James Sallis

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Jim Sallis has published fourteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the L.A. Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. In addition to the feature film Drive, the six Lew Griffin books are under consideration for development as feature films and Driven is optioned to the same team as Drive. Jim teaches novel writing at Phoenix College and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog. He stays busy.

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Jonathan D Allen

Machine Becomes Man

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2013

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You can learn just about everything you need to know about this story through understanding why Sallis never chose to bestow the protagonist with any other moniker than "Driver". It sounds like a gimmick at first blush, an attempt to a throwback narrative reminiscent of pulp works, and there may be something to that notion, but it's not the whole story. One grows to suspect that Driver's name is intertwined with the truth of Driver's life, that of a man with no real sense of identity and purpose, a living machine of sorts. This is an important point to understand his growth through the novella.

The story unfolds in a non-linear format, but we learn that Driver came from a dysfunctional background, one in which he learned to survive by divorcing himself from everyday, "common" life. Sallis shows this through Driver's recollections of his increasingly insane mother, a woman lived "just to the right of the life that everyone else lived", to paraphrase. These memories are key to understanding the character, and the character is key to the plot itself.

Let's reiterate that: without Driver's coping mechanisms, there is no Drive, or at the very least we read a drastically different tale. So much of the plot's action originates with Driver's attempts to live not just outside of mainstream society but even his own life. As with Ignatius J. Reilly, Driver experiences the consequences of attempting to sidestep life and live int he shadows. As the story progresses and Driver is drawn deeper into the underworld, so too do we see hints of a personality under that machine - a man that exists almost entirely in the shadows. It's no coincidence that his driving jobs begin to taper off as his personality (and the attendant emotions) emerge.

Even the most powerful members of the criminal underworld are crushed under Driver's wheels as he plows forward, relentless and unstoppable, a machine driven by long-repressed emotion. This is a hard-boiled crime story, and a violent one at that, but it's also quite a good character study and worthy of your attention.

5 people found this helpful

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Mito

Very different from the movie

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2023

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When I began this book, I thought it would just be the movie in writing form but I couldn't be more wrong. It's a very different story, a sort of character study if you will, that jumps around in time and often feels as though there's more under the surface. It's not a hard read, I finished more than the last half of the book in a single afternoon. It's not the neon-flashy 'literally me' type story really, I suppose I'm not very familiar with this genre but it did feel like a unique read to me, and not in a bad way.

One person found this helpful

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Browntrout2

Noir at its finest.

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2015

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Drive is my favorite American crime noir of the new millennium. Sometimes it’s hard to define noir from police procedurals and crime thrillers but, like the judge who said he doesn't know how to describe pornography but knows it when he sees it, this stylish hardboiled story has all of the attributes of the works of Cain, Chandler and Stark. Much like the man with no name in the spaghetti westerns or Richard Stark’s Parker, Driver’s first name or surname is never revealed yet he takes on a mystical quality. He’s a reactionary, and we can’t wait for his next reaction. He’s cold and remorseless yet capable of compassion. The dialogue is crisp and sharp. The settings and people are described so wonderfully each page becomes visual. This is a short read, less than two hundred pages, but nothing is missing. Nothing.

2 people found this helpful

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JCStreetSoldier

Something's Lacking . . .

Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2013

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I saw the film before the book, guilty as charged. The film was majestically dark, elegantly offbeat, with beautiful cinematography and it had the best soundtrack of 2012. The only thing the movie has in common with the book are the name of the characters, a line of dialogue in the beginning of the book, an action sequence in the motel where the chick from AMC's Madmen dies, and the ending of the book; that's not a spoiler by any means, that's just something that fans of the movie should know right upfront. Driver (the character's "name") in this novel isn't the quiet, cool guy that Gosling played in the film; this Driver is talkative, witty, smart, sometimes even obnoxious. I actually prefer the Gosling counterpart, but that's me.

Okay, so now let me talk about the book without comparing it to the movie. I think James Sallis was going for a Godfather-esque, noir story, but the plot was just so simplistic that the author had to scramble the scenes around like eggs; it wasn't necessarily hard to know if a scene took place in the past or present or future, but at the same, it wasn't necessary either. In fact, the first chapter in this novel was repeated in another chapter later on--word for word (or at least, almost word for word--because the narrative was repeating what had already happened in the beginning).

I think Sallis tries to write like McCarthy, but he ends up sounding amateurish. He tends to miss words in sentences; for instance: Instead of, "The dog ran into the street to fetch the ball," Sallis would write, "Dog ran into street to fetch ball"--some of that works, but Sallis overuses this writing method to shorten sentences . . . it was almost as if he was trying to get below a certain word count, so he deleted a lot of words.

Another problem I had is that most of the characters talked the same way. The character's speech patterns actually missed words too (convenient, huh?).

Ultimately Drive was a disappointment. I prefer Cormac McCarthy's prose, but I suppose he's impossible to compete with. I see potential in James Sallis's writing . . . but he needs to flesh out his paragraphs, flesh out his characters, flash out his plots, and write a story in chronological order instead of scrambled scenes.

14 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Crime fiction at its existential best

Reviewed in Canada on January 25, 2021

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Easily one of the best crime novels of the modern era. As good as the movie is (and it's bloody great) the novel is an altogether different beast: a bleak, sad, existential affair about a nomadic non-entity's search for place and meaning in a violent, complicated world he can't help but become entangled in, despite his better nature. I'll be giving this another read ASAP.

C. F. Nisbet

Better ending than the film

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 13, 2021

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Good book, gives more back-story than the film, and is a good read. Although the ending is similar to the film, there was a slightly better twist than in the film. Spare action, no padding. To those who say the book and film don't go very deep, which was my first thought, I would say that any amplification of the story would have quickly become repetitive, both in the book and film.

Highly recommended to those who have watched the film first.

Moreno Z.

Drive

Reviewed in Italy on February 11, 2018

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Prima mia esperienza con un libro in inglese, lettura per niente pesante (letto in un paio di settimane ad un ritmo di due/tre di capitoli al giorno).
Consigliato ai fan del film di Winding Refn, approfondisce il personaggio di Driver e presenta cambiamenti rispetto al suddetto.

3 people found this helpful

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Wen M

Loved it

Reviewed in Australia on May 30, 2019

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I have read many of James Sallis novels and enjoy every one of them.
'Drive' did not disappoint and am looking forward to reading 'Driven.'

Charles

Je n'ai pas vu le film...

Reviewed in France on January 13, 2014

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Mais je viens de lire le livre en Anglais (Américain). J'avais adoré la "Turner trilogy", plutôt difficile, mais Sallis est un auteur surprenant, qui colle à son sujet. Ici les phrases sont courtes, le rythme nerveux, tout va si vite... Fabuleux.

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