Book 1: Cypress Grove
Cypress Grove tells two stories simultaneously. In present time, ex- detective
Turner returns to the rural south to pursue a hermitlike existence. Soon,
though, he is drawn by the local sheriff into the investigation of the murder
of an anonymous homeless man who has been, in effect, crucified, with a stake
driven into his chest. Alternate chapters relate Turner's past: how he joined
the Memphis police department and more or less by happenstance got promoted
to detective, how eventually it came about that he killed his partner and,
sentenced to one year in prison, there was forced to kill again in self defense,
drawing down twenty-five years. In prison he turned to university study, earned
a master's degree in psychology and, released after nine years, practiced as
a therapist before returning to the hills in which he was born. Stories of
cases Turner worked as a detective in the city -- an unsolved series of
vigilante murders, the hospital orderly who abducted a brain-damaged young
girl he'd fallen in love with -- bolster the narrative of his personal history.
These in turn are reflected in memories of "clients" with whom he worked as
therapist: Jimmie the Machine, convinced that his batteries were running down;
a man who mutilated his infant son. Meanwhile, as Turner becomes reacquainted
with a life he fled long ago, the investigation leads him to a thirty-year-old
cult film and its mysterious creator. First brutalized, then numbed by what he
saw as policeman and as therapist as well as by his own pain, Turner came here
to withdraw from human contact. Instead, with the death of a man born to
apartness, the ultimate stranger, Turner is drawn ineffably back to life and
to a sense of community.
Book 2: Cripple Creek
In Sallis's beautifully written second book to feature Turner, an ex-cop and
ex-con (after 2004's Cypress Grove), Turner is working as a deputy sheriff in
Cripple Creek, Tenn., a small town where crime is minor and strictly local.
Then, late one night, Sheriff Don Lee arrests drunk driver Judd Kurtz with
0,000 in a nylon gym bag hidden in the trunk of his car. Kurtz breaks out
of the town jail, seriously wounding two officers in the process. Turner's
investigation leads him to an organized crime connection in nearby Memphis
that enmeshes him in a web of escalating violence. Sallis's working method
is to simply let the cameras roll, depicting the lives of Turner, his banjo-
picking girlfriend, his eccentric co-workers and Cripple Creek itself, as
everyone goes about their business. Small moments are recorded as faithfully
as large, and stories from earlier days mix with the ongoing crimes and
misdemeanors of the present. A structural sleight of hand toward the end may
at first confuse but is pretty amazing once the reader catches on.
Book 3: What you have left:The Turner Trilogy
Over the past five years, James Sallis has created three of the most acclaimed
mysteries published in America, each of them featuring the complex John Turner-
former cop, therapist, and an ex-con, trying to escape his past, yet ever
involved in the small community somewhere near Memphis where he has sought
refuge. The Turner Trilogy--concise, elegiac, memorable--collects these three
classics in one paperback volume.
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