A few years ago now, I read the comic adaption of Perdita Durango, the second novel of the Sailor & Lula series by Barry Gifford, and I was sufficiently intrigued to pick up the books themselves, the first seven of which are collected in this volume. All of them concern, at least peripherally, the relationship between Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, a couple from North Carolina.

     "Ever'body got a past," said Red.
     "Just some got more future in 'em than others," Buddy said.
—Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula (1990)

If anything sums up the "mission statement" of Wild at Heart, it's that. Ostensibly it's a road trip novel. Sailor's just been released from jail for accidentally killing a man in a bar fight two years ago, and he and his girl Lula aim to pick up where they left off, only Lula's mom doesn't approve of Sailor, and sends a private detective to hunt the two of them down as they flee to California... but the couple's money is running out. Wild at Heart is an odd story, mostly consisting of characters telling stories to one another, or to themselves, in short chapters of 2-3 pages. Sailor and Lula both tell each other about their first sexual encounters (neither are very pleasant); the private detective, Johnnie Farragut, is an aspiring writer, and a couple of his attempts are embedded in the narrative; Sailor and Lula tell each other about movies they've seen, books they've read, and music they've heard; and plenty of the people they meet on their travels have their own stories they relate. The "plot" is largely irrelevant; the joy of the book is letting these weird and often dark stories about strangely named people wash over you, but it took me a while to realize this and get into it all.

     "Need funds to research," Romeo said. "Like the $1,925 some fundraiser withdrew without permission this morning from the First National Bank of St. Bernard's Parish on Friscoville Street in Arabi. Science needs money, just like everything else."
     "You tellin' me you're a grave robber or a bank robber? I ain't totally clear."
     Romeo laughed and stuck a fork into his stuffed catfish.
     "Scientists gotta eat, too," he said.
—Perdita Durango (1991)

I didn't entirely grok Perdita Durango when I read the 1995 graphic novel adaptation by Bob Callahan and Scott Gillis. I'm still not sure I do. Perdita was a side character in Wild at Heart, an accomplice in a robbery Sailor gets involved in near the end. This story follows her, alongside a crazed scientist/cultist/psychopath named Romeo; they kidnap a young couple to use in a blood sacrifice, and the story follows their cross-country flight, as they talk and have sex. Perdita is an interiority-free enigma, which is clearly the point, but not enough of a point to keep me interested even across 120 pages. Probably the least interesting and most unpleasant of the Sailor & Lula stories, no doubt due to the lack of the stabilizing influences of Sailor and Lula themselves. Some good jokes, though.

     "Ain't it somethin', though, Dal, how it's just one weird thing happens after another?"
     "Stay tuned," said Dal, opening the front door. "I got a powerful hunch there ain't never gonna be a end to it."
—Sailor's Holiday (1991)

Sailor's Holiday feels like Gifford regretted the way Wild at Heart ended. Minor spoilers: at the end of Wild at Heart, Sailor is sentenced to ten years in prison for his part in a robbery. The book has an epilogue where he's released, gets to meet his ten-year-old son Pace for the first time, and decides he's better off away from Lula and Pace. Which is an okay, if depressing, ending for a single book, but doesn't really work if you want to write more stories with these characters. Sailor's Holiday feels like it exists to walk back the events of that epilogue. Six months later, Pace gets kidnapped, which causes Sailor to come gallivanting back into their lives in an effort to save him. This is less interesting and colorful than most of the other Sailor & Lula stories, mostly serving to get the characters back into position for more tales about their relationship, I felt.

"The world's an awful cruel place, son. Worst place I ever been."
—Sultans of Africa (1991)

It's been about six years since Sailor's Holiday, and the Ripley family lives in New Orleans now, and young Pace has fallen in with a bad crowd, much like his daddy did around the same age. While Lula goes on a trip to see her mother, Sailor has to track down and save Pace without his wife finding out what's going on. As always, the plot is not particularly riveting, but it's not meant to be. There are some fantastic irrelevant details here, especially the brothers Smokey Joe and Lefty Grove Rattler, son of Pie Traynor and Mary Full-of-Grace Rattler, the latter of whom now resides in Miss Napoleon's Paradise for the Lord's Disturbed Daughters. Flimsy but full of fun.

"Death and destruction ain't never more than a kiss away," she said. "Woman shot at the King of Sweden knew that much."
—Consuelo's Kiss (1991)

With Consuelo's Kiss, Gifford raises his rambling plots to high art: this was my favorite story in the book other than Wild at Heart, and I really enjoyed each of the following ones, too. Sailor and Lula go on a road trip for Sailor's birthday (it's been a dozen years since Sultans of Africa) to see Elvis's home in Memphis. Meanwhile, Lula's mother is at the bedside of the dying gangster Marcello "Crazy Eyes" Santos, a recurring character in previous books. Meanwhile meanwhile, a sixteen-year-old girl named Consuelo is hitchhiking her way to the college where her lesbian lover goes, but she attracts some undesired attention. Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, Pace now lives in India. Sailor and Lula give Consuelo a brief ride, and later return to help her when she ends up in jail (only they can't): that's about all these tales have to do with one another. But as meditations on different forms of obsessive love, they come together perfectly: we see the best and worst that human emotion has to offer, and not always in the way you might expect. Surprisingly moving at times.

"Lula used to always say the world is wild at heart and weird on top, and sometimes it's tough stayin' out of the way of the weirdness. Kinda like a tornado, you never know where it'll set down or what'll be left in place after it blows through."
—Bad Day for the Leopard Man (1992)

Fun fact: despite Sailor's claim here in Bad Day for the Leopard Man, Lula never said such a thing before, though she does think it to herself in Wild at Heart. She only says it aloud in the film version of the first book! Which is appropriate, as one of the many plots of Bad Day for the Leopard Man is a hack film director with artistic aspirations (Pace works for him as a PA) saying he wants to make a movie of Sailor and Lula's story. Meanwhile, Lula gets kidnapped and everyone sits around the phone worrying. This is probably the least effective of the last three Sailor & Lula tales, though I did still enjoy it. Especially the glimpses into the weird mind of the film director, but even moreso the bittersweet, brutal ending, which made me realize how much I'd grown to like these characters.

"I don't think the world is so wild at heart any more, Beany, just weird on top. Probably each generation on its way out thinks what's come after them is missin' a bulb and dimmer for it. Then again, maybe it's just us old folks can't see so good and it hurts us to admit it."
—The Imagination of the Heart (2009)

The first six Sailor & Lula novels came out in a three-year period; this one appeared seventeen years later. It's a bittersweet coda, with Lula going on a Sailor-less road trip with friends to see Pace in a post-Katrina New Orleans. (The timeline of these books is fuzzy at best.) Much of the book is made up of Lula's diary entries, which are nearly heart-wrenching, though between them come the usual Gifford weird stories and strange hijinks, some of them quite brutal. I really liked this one, and it sums up the relationship between the two leads perfectly.

This book is quite a monster. Even though I knew it was a collection of several novels, I still wasn't expecting this cement-block of a book to show up on my doorstep when I won it through the Early Reviewers program. This is a good thing, though, because these really are some brilliant books. Each time I finish one of the novels within the collection I get that old familiar pang of "I don't want this book to end." But then of course immediately upon doing so there's another story just waiting one page turn away.

I still haven't finished the full collection, but I feel confident in saying that this is some great stuff. The characters are all very vivid and intriguing, the scenery and other descriptions are lush and whole, and the stories feel at once urgent and relaxed. Most of all, I like that everything is divided up into these brief scenes and encounters. Even if you only have a few spare moments to read you can get through an entire short episode before putting the book back down. This sense of the books being episodic but also great odysseys is probably my favorite aspect of the collection. ( )

I admit that I wasn't aware of the Complete Novels until I saw it offered through Librarything. I had seen Lynch's version of Wild At Heart, and always wondered if he would create a future version of what happened to Sailor, Lula and the rest of those strange but hypnotic characters. Barry Gifford had already thought of that and I'm real glad he did. These are the kind of characters that all have demented lives of their own; we just meet them when the roads they're on cross. Written in short chapters, usually no more than 3-4 pages each, Gifford still defines the situations with a little of the individual's historical content and intense visualizations. Popular cult following of the movie aside, this compilation of stories stands on its own from beginning to end. ( )

An odd and interesting compendium. The first ofbthe seven novels is probably best known because it was made into a film by David Lynch. Sometimes pointlessly violent, nearly always lurid--one is reminded of the pulp paperbacks of the fifties. There is an initial nourish charm, that doesn't really sustain a complete reading. But for noir completistsban essential compendium. ( )

I'm left thinking I should have known about Barry Gifford before now. While I knew of the movie adaption to Wild at Heart, I didn't recognise Gifford's name nor that the film was based on his story. Though the quality of the writing and characters decline noticeably with each story, it's worth reading the full cycle rather than just the best individual stories. I sense that may in part have been Gifford's motivation for writing all of them, as well.

This omnibus edition of Gifford’s Sailor & Lula cycle contains “the complete novels”, apparently published in various editions (most of them collections of two or more stories). Generally the novels are short: all but two under 100 pages, written in chapters of 5 pages or less and dialogue driven, so they read fast. It’s fair to take them as novellas making up a single story cycle; I assume "novels" are easier to market.

Gifford's background in film noir and Hollywood reflects in his prose, the stories adopting a screenplay’s emphasis on pithy description and easy banter. His characters are predominantly from the American South, many of them mentioning by name Hollywood stars of the 1940s to late 60s, or popular singers of about the same era. It’s an interesting take on popular culture, for without a handful of clear indicators that the setting is the late 1980s to late 2000s, I would think the stories took place much earlier. Gifford’s South is situated in a selectively hip time warp.

One of the chief pleasures of the book is the love of storytelling. Gifford is telling a story, of course, but he also interjects tangential stories: very short, amusing or interesting anecdotes that provide a setting or character sketch. These are often unrelated to the plot. And then, nearly every character tells stories to other characters, and frequently. Lula, for example, is pretty much always telling one story or another. These side stories are great fun, like hanging out with the characters, and to a great extent the larger story arc could be ignored entirely and there would still be reason to read the book.

Wild at Heart - 128 pages
We root for the couple on the lam (Lula & Sailor), hoping they aren’t caught but distill from the experience an improved ability to make better decisions. The key question is whether they can do that without deep-sixing their intent to live with style when the world seems driven to bleed everyone dry.

Perdita Durango - 116 pages
This time, we fear the couple on the lam, Perdita and her current boyfriend, hoping they’re caught before those they torment are killed. Or worse. The obverse of the coin minted in the first novel, providing background for the next story. Sailor & Lula are mentioned but never appear, but Perdita was a key player in the first story, and rest assured she'll resurface later.

Sailor’s Holiday - 74 pages
Sailor's "holiday" was ten years in prison, while Lula raised their boy, Pace, back home in North Carolina. Now Sailor has to learn how to live on the outside, as a husband and father. Oh, and Pace is kidnapped.

Sultans of Africa - 76 pages
Pace is, uh, kidnapped. But that's a MacGuffin. The title is intentionally misleading, which is reminiscent of Gifford's chapter titles: they're usually clever double entendres, though not in the sexual sense.

Consuela’s Kiss - 66 pages
The road trip redux, this time with Sailor & Lula honorable citizens rather than gangsters on the run. Not ever really worried for any character we care about, rather it's a reflection on the change to their characters that 30 years make. This installment is heavy on deus ex machina, mostly in the form of murders by coincidence. At this point, I catch on to Gifford's running joke of accidental death by lightning: more side characters in this book have died by natural electrocution than in a thousand years in nature.

Bad Day for the Leopard Man - 72 pages
Foray into Hollywood, with a producer coming to New Orleans to research a movie. If Sailor & Lula hadn't been around as characters for Gifford, there's no particular reason this tale would have to include them. That's not to say they're ignored, and the events are consistent with what happened before and after. A surprise ending, with major events occuring offscreen.

The Imagination of the Heart - 80 pages
Gifford answers the question as to whether he could tell a story of Sailor & Lula, but from the perspective of just one of them. Lula finds Jesus, while her friend remains as wild as ever, at 80. Gifford numbers his chapters rather than providing the clever bon mots of previous stories, perhaps because some are entries from Lula's journal.

Another pleasure: Gifford's character names, which are unusual and wryly amusing without becoming farcical like some by Pynchon or Robbins. Well, mostly. ( )