Death Will Have Your Eyes: A Novel About Spies (Hardcover)

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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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 183 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (July 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312155131
• ISBN-13: 978-0312155131
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #981,485 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's Camus+Conrad+Hammett+Le Carre = an existential spy-hunt, April 14, 1998

By	[e-mail] (Henderson NV) - See all my reviews

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, existentialist spy story, February 8, 1998

By	Antony Meadley ([e-mail]) (London, England) - See all my reviews

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.

0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Long on atmosphere and short on plot, August 26, 1999

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Long on atmosphere and short on plot or action, this slim novel ultimately disappoints. The plot follows a retired government assassin who is called upon to abandon his life as a sculptor to track down a former colleague who has turned freelance. Sallis captures the depressing bleak atmosphere of small-town strip-mall America, but there's not enough a a story to make it all worthwhile.