I'm always on the lookout for new writers to add to the stack, so when I read Sarah Weinman's rave review of Christopher Goffard's novel, Snitch Jacket, I added it to my "to-be read" list. When I learned he was a fellow journalist, albeit one who had finished his novel and seen it published, I moved him to the top of that list.

I wasn't disappointed. Snitch Jacket is one of the most entertaining books I've read in a long while. By means of an endorsement, let me say that I plowed through it in the weeks after we brought our newborn son home from the hospital, forcing myself to stay awake long enough to find out what happened next. It wasn't much of a chore, as the bleary-eyed mornings were worth it.

Goffard is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, though, as he alludes to below, he has worked several places over the course of his career. While at the Tampa Tribune, his work made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Not all great newspaper writers can shift to long-form fiction, but Goffard proves himself adept at both. Snitch Jacket is full of writing from someone able to harness a keen eye for detail and recount that color in crisp, lively prose. As Sarah pointed out in her review, the book is "is a wonder of sentences that sing." I wish I had had a pen and paper at my side while reading the book, because there are so many lines that just knocked me out. Consider that a teaser: Read this book and prepare to be impressed.

I wasn't the only one impressed with Goffard's debut: It was nominated for an Edgar Award for best first novel by an American Author. He's up against fellow friend of TIRBD, Craig McDonald, whose Head Games was another outstanding, ambitious novel.

Oh, and the story? Well, I don't want to suggest that it is superficial, because it is a clever yarn, but it really is best seen as a vehicle for Goffard's characters. At the heart of the book are Benny Bunt, a smallish ex-meth addict snitch who uses his underwhelming nature to help him blend in and learn about the nefarious doings of his acquaintances at the Greasy Tuesday, a bar frequented by some of life's lower beings. He becomes fast friends with Gus "Mad Dog" Miller, a Vietnam vet with multiple tattoos and even more stories of his exploits. These two colorful characters put me in mind of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck from "Midnight Cowboy," though it's an imperfect analogy at best. There are crimes, a mystery of sorts and plenty of action, but don't come to this expecting a typical whodunit. The book is a rich character study that will leave you laughing, marveling and waiting impatiently for Goffard's next feat of prose.

TIRBD: Benny and Gus are very visceral characters. Did they emerge fully formed for you, or were they the accretion of traits, tics and details as you wrote?

CG: They morphed many times over the course of multiple drafts, and I was deep into one of the many rewrites before I even began to understand the nature of their relationship. The germ for Gus -- the would-be hit man who lives in the closet of a bar -- was a career criminal I met in jail in Santa Ana in the late 1990s, as a cop reporter. His glasses were missing a nose-guard on one side, which made them sag, and I gave the detail to my character. Years later, I met a charismatic homeless man under a bridge in Tampa who was holding forth to a bunch of other homeless guys, and I made a sketch of him -- right down to the way his sweat discolored his baseball cap -- and studied it as I wrote. And for the St. Petersburg Times I did some investigative stories on a VA shrink who, it turned out, was inventing these grisly stories about his experiences in Vietnam, and I gave my character that habit, too. So Gus Miller grew out of all these sources and probably a hundred more than I can't remember. Same for Benny Bunt: a piece here, a piece there, until finally he coalesced into a full and contradiction-riddled person. The crucial thing was getting his name right. It had to be something small and kind of sleazy.

This is being talked about as a crime novel, but the actual crime comes late and almost seems incidental to what is really a character study (and I mean that as a compliment). How did the finished product compare to your initial intentions in that regard?

I always thought of the plot as a vehicle to explore these characters and the world they inhabit and the moral stakes involved, and I thought, "The story will get started when it gets started." Which means a lot of the rewriting involved switching around whole sections to get it moving faster.

Speaking of genre, the book has been nominated for an Edgar Award. What are your thoughts about that accolade? Are you comfortable in the genre, and do you see yourself continuing in this vein?

Well, the genre has its masterpieces, like Night and the City and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and Chesterton's Father Brown stories -- to name just the first that come to mind -- and crime is central to the work of writers as lofty as Dostoevsky and Mailer, so the vein is infinitely rich. Of course, with the best of them, crime's just the launch-point for an exploration of larger questions. Look at The Wire, my current obsession: it's a work of unparalleled social documentation in the guise of a cop show. Because I've been a cop and courts reporter for years, crime is what I happen to know, so it's what I use. But I've been working on a novel about high school and the intensity of the friendships that form there and the pathologies that attend them, and so far no one has picked up a pair of brass knuckles.

As a fellow fan of “The Wire,” I'm heartened by the fact that, even if it is only moderately successful commercially, that success does indicate that there is a pretty wide audience for sophisticated storytelling about people very different from the viewers and with few happy endings. As someone who writes similar stories, are you similarly heartened that there is a larger audience for what you do?

I wish I believed there's a large audience for what I do, but I'm just not sure. I never wrote the book with best-seller expectations. If you're at your desk thinking, "What will people like? What will they snap up by the truckload?" you're doomed. So I'm just proud that I wrote the book that I wanted to write, despite a lot of people telling me to rehaul it this way or that way to make it more commercial. "Your characters aren't likable enough," and "The setting is too seedy," and "The prose is too dense" and blah blah blah. This was the wisdom of the American agents. If it hadn't sold, it would have gone into a drawer, and I would have written another one.

Do you feel your prose benefits from the attention to detail a news reporter must possess? How does that work when you're making things up, and is that a nice alternative to your day job where you must report the facts, no matter how much they might muck up the story?

There's an added pressure when you're writing fiction, because when you're making it up, your choices are infinite. Only your talent limits you. So if it doesn't work, if it flops, your meager imagination is what's to blame. Whereas when you're writing a news story, you're confined to the facts at hand, and they supply a comforting buffer against humiliation.

You made some interesting decisions here when one considers your profession. In particular, you decided to fictionalize the Burning Man festival, and you have a rather amusing take on true crime writing. What drove those decisions?

I felt like I could do a lot more with the festival if I fictionalized it, and the true-crime parody was just an attempt to poke fun at the over-the-top silliness of the genre.

You write for one of the largest newspapers in the country; at the same time, your novel was published by a small press. Do these experiences with size inform one another, or shed light on how the other half lives, professionally speaking?

Snitch Jacket -- most of which I wrote while working for smaller papers, actually -- was a hard book to sell. I couldn't even get a U.S. agent, because they didn't think readers would line up for the story of a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant who makes pocket money by snitching on his friends. It was just too dark for the smart money. Then I got a good agent in the U.K., where it sold immediately and got positive reviews, and that led to The Rookery Press in New York picking it up. So the Edgar nomination is a nice validation for a book that no one wanted to take a chance on for a long time.

Labels: crime fiction, Monday Interview