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James Sallis
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Death Will Have Your Eyes: A Novel about Spies Kindle Edition

by James Sallis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 51 ratings
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Mulholland Books takes pleasure in restoring to print an acclaimed novel of espionage and suspense by the author of Drive.

David (as he's currently known) was a member of an elite corps of spies trained during the coldest days of the Cold War. For almost a decade he has been out of the game, working as a sculptor. Then a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him: the only other survivor from that elite corps has gone rogue. David is tasked with stopping him.

What ensues is an existential cat-and-mouse game played out across the American landscape, through the diners and motels that dot the terrain like green plastic houses on a Monopoly board. Both a suspenseful novel of pursuit and a thematically rich exploration of the mind of a spy, Death Will Have Your Eyes is a contemporary classic of the espionage genre.
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  1. Print length
    209 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Mulholland Books
  5. Publication date
    July 29, 2014
  6. File size
    682 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Sallis' Lew Griffin mysteries, although not widely known, are revered by many for their combination of New Orleans atmosphere and existential toughness. Both those qualities are present in this intriguing but overly introspective spy novel. David is a former CIA hit man, trained as part of an elite corps during the height of the cold war. Long retired from the agency and slowly constructing a human identity for himself, he is abruptly called back into action to track a former cohort turned rogue. What transpires is an elaborate cat-and-mouse car chase, moving to and fro across the American landscape and concluding in New Orleans. The real action, though, is internal, as David drives and broods, contemplating the spy's cypherlike lot. Much of this material is interesting enough, but the delicate balance between story, character, and idea is never quite right, leaving the reader impressed by the ingredients but slightly disappointed in the dish itself. Still, any Sallis novel belongs in all but the smallest mystery collections. Bill Ott

From Kirkus Reviews

A world-weary spy who's been out of the business for nine years is dragged back into the circus to catch a former colleague gone rogue. At least that's the summary that'll end up on the dust jacket. But it doesn't give you any idea of the flip, absurdist tone--part Thomas Berger, part Richard Brautigan--that subverts the conventions of the spy novel even more profoundly than Sallis's earlier novels (Black Hornet, 1994, etc.) deconstructed the detective story. When former spy David (not his real name), dragged back into the game by his old boss Johnsson, now blind, bids farewell to his second life as a sculptor by telling his Irish-Mexican girlfriend Gabrielle that ``Everything you know about me, everything you think you know, is false'' and asking her to move far away from him, her unquestioning cooperation gives the tale a dreamlike unreality from the start. As the plot thickens, Sallis spins out all the obligatory scenes--the tense reunion with the agency types, the ritual stalkings, the bouts of Gabrielle-free sex, the long-anticipated kidnapping, the climactic showdown with the obsolete killer Luc Planchat--but in prose whose telegraphic flights of noblesse oblige (``Finally I did manage to drop him without getting hurt myself or, more important, without having to kill or seriously maim my opponent, but it wasn't easy'') are guaranteed to keep readers from losing any sleep over the story. The characters David meets in his cross-country odyssey are properly memorable--from his old agency friend Blaise, now mute, to Jeanne, the Piltdown guitarist who fears that sex has reactivated her cancer--but at the same time they come across as wayward squiggles whose interactions with David are so elusive that you'd be hard-pressed to take a quiz on the plot five minutes after turning the last page. The reward for patient readers is a finely poetic quality to every understated scene--despite a cargo of allusions to Voznesensky, Cendrars, Pavese, Cavafy, MacLeish, Apollinaire, and Homer. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00DTUHJRU
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mulholland Books; Reprint edition (July 29, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 29, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 682 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 ‏ : ‎ 209 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0316403245
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 51 ratings

About the author

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James Sallis

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.

Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5 stars
3.6 out of 5
51 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

jjwylie@intermind.net
4.0 out of 5 stars It's Camus+Conrad+Hammett+Le Carre = an existential spy-hunt
Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 1998
A retired assassin, now an artist, gets a call he has dreaded for years. His former employers are reactivating him to hunt down a former colleague. But in the shadowy world of covert operatives, even the roles of hunter and hunted can shift without warning, and what ensues is a deadly dance along America's highways and through the psyche of a man whose carefully-constructed present has been shattered by his dangerous past.
Though it sounds like yet-another product of an oft-used premise (a la Le Carre), James Sallis's novel has more in common with the psychologically-complex narratives of Conrad, though this book is written in an understated and sparse prose reminiscent of the hard-boiled best of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op. And as David (as we come to know the artist) grapples with the enigma of his own identity, given his secret past and his fragmented present, we get a dream-filled reworking of Camus' The Stranger, even to the resonant (but no less final) climax in the streets of New Orleans.
Think of it as an espionage thriller without all the geopolitical baggage that (more often than not) dates the hefty tomes of Forsythe, Ludlum, and Le Carre. Think of it as a hard-boiled road-mystery with the P.I. recast as a professional assassin. However you think of it, read Death Will Have Your Eyes.
It's a fast-paced death-trip you'll nonetheless enjoy.
7 people found this helpful
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JPY
3.0 out of 5 stars Decent but not great or memorable
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2024
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Nothing like Drive; strong, enjoyable prose but the only character really is the main character, and the ending subverts and cheapens what the whole book leads up to, so not sure what Sallis was going for here.
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david radcliffe
5.0 out of 5 stars Wise
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2016
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A compassionate and wise reflection of life.
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SILVERBUZZ
2.0 out of 5 stars Was too long winded..
Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2021
I was expecting more action, not what I hoped for.
Too much emphasis on thought provoking ideas..
Other wise , was okay.
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S. Holmes
3.0 out of 5 stars A slow read
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2020
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A interesting story about travels across America, but a very uninteresting spy novel. Good writing but the plot is overused and the characters aren't fleshed out.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, existentialist spy story
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 1998
This is not your average spy story. The characters are so real, they seem to be more than real in comparison with the flat characters in most books of this genre. Sallis writes with a unique style. The only way to fully appreciate it is, of course, to read this book. Do it today. I have recommended this book to all my friends - they agree.
6 people found this helpful
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Peter
3.0 out of 5 stars Not everyone's cup of tea but that is not a bad thing
Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2016
James Sallis is not everyone's cup of tea, his work is very much an acquired taste as it is not clear in what he is meaning at times, he does like his diversions of poetry and fine literature, and his plots are sometimes a bit confusing.

That being said, Death will have your eyes, is a novel that is so different it is good.

David is a retired spy who is carving a life for himself in the real world when he is pulled back into the world of espionage when the remaining member of his elite force apparently goes rogue. We get to follow David in a journey across America in his search for the rogue spy.

Sallis does like to wax lyrical about life, people, art, literature, history, food etc. To read a Sallis book (and I have read most of them so far), one has to be prepared to take a journey into a different world.

I must admit that I prefer his Lew Griffin series above this standalone novel but the book was good enough that I finished it quickly (only a short novel) and found it interesting enough to give it three stars.
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caroline
1.0 out of 5 stars disappointed
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2012
My first Sallis read.Had high expectations,thankfully it was a very slim book.Long on the slow bits short on the fast bits.To me a lazy story
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Top reviews from other countries

Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Too cool for school
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2016
Verified Purchase
Love the sparse way he writes and the no nonsense description much like Cormac McCarthy.
If you haven't read either , treat yourself
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Matteo_B
3.0 out of 5 stars Nicely written but somehow unsatisfying as a thriller.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 22, 2014
Verified Purchase
I was put onto this book after looking for good thrillers set in small town America. I find it a very difficult book to rate because on the one hand the scene setting is absolutely superb and you do get a real sense of place from James Sallis' prose. On the other hand however the promised tension and drama that you are led to expect at the beginning never materializes and I got to the end of the book thinking "is that it then"? The book also has a lot of literary name dropping which is good if you know your poets but a lot of it does detract from the story. You are led to believe from the beginning that the main character is a tough character like Andy McNab's Nick Stone but as the book progresses he becomes more of an intellectual dreamer. I would say give the book a try is you like word painting and want an evocative description of back woods America from the road. However if you are expecting a tense thriller you are bound to be disappointed.
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Mr David Burke
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 8, 2016
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Another great read from this man
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Spider
1.0 out of 5 stars Meaningless waffle
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 2, 2020
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I like James Sallis and usually enjoy his musings. This is 90% musings and 10% story. I spent the last half of the book looking for speech to see if the plot had actually moved. Awful
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andre michuax
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 2015
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Awesome!
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