James Sallis
James Sallis is the author of, among others, Drive and its sequel, Driven.
From his Q & A with Alex Dueben at The Daily Beast:
How did you end up writing a sequel to Drive?--Marshal Zeringue
One day my agent Vicky Bijur called. The producers were asking if there’d be a sequel to Drive. Of course not, I harrumphed—being an artiste and all. I hung up the phone and sat there with the image of a woman leaning against a wall, bleeding out. I wrote the first page and was hooked.
Driven feels very similar to Drive in that it’s a very taut, brutal book which at the end opens up to something bigger, almost mythic. Was that always your intent?
This time out, yes. Driven needed to echo, to ring against the original. But with Drive, that ending came as a surprise even as I wrote my way into it. I had worried over how I could end the book. Then when I got there, that ending—that opening onto the mythic—was waiting for me, just kind of hanging around on the street corner. “Hey, good to see you, man.”
Why did you end up setting the book in Phoenix? Coming out right after The Killer is Dying, which was released last year and also set in the city, they make the case for the city as a great noir setting.
If you remember...[read on]
