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Letter to the editor

Learning how to put on the snitch jacket

By Chris Goffard, Special to the Times
Published October 25, 2007

Chris Goffard will talk about his debut novel, Snitch Jacket, at the Times Festival of Reading at 1 p.m. Saturday in the Poynter Institute Amphitheater.

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Editor's note: Christopher Goffard is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a former reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. Here, he writes about some of the sources he used in writing his first novel, Snitch Jacket:

As a rookie reporter in Costa Mesa, Calif., in the mid 1990s, I told the story of an unusual contract murder plot. In the janitor's closet of a storied dive bar lived a gregarious, hard-drinking handyman - a career criminal - who had drifted around the country for years with his dog in an old van. One day, as police told it, he turned to a drinking buddy and said, "I need your help with a murder."

As it happened, the drinking buddy was an informer, an inveterate schemer himself, who wasted no time telling the cops. The plot was foiled, but the handyman refused to say who had hired him or why. He had a code. "He doesn't want to wear the snitch jacket," a detective told me.

So I went to interview the would-be hit man at the Orange County jail, a 25-year-old reporter speaking through Plexiglas to a bearish, companionable man in his late 50s who didn't seem surprised - or all that bothered - that he would probably die in jail.

He had an aura of resigned doom about him. He'd beaten cancer and been "barbecued" by radiation therapy years back, so he figured he was on borrowed time anyway. He missed his dog. He spoke of swimming in Mexican rivers with his dog, of Mexican children delightedly pulling its paws through the water, which seemed one of his happier memories.

He wore wire-rim glasses with a missing nose guard, so the lenses sagged a little over one eye, a detail that struck me as the kind of thing a novelist might invent to suggest a character's particularly twisted perspective.

I'm not sure what happened to the would-be hit man, but his presence - and the story of the murder plot - lingered in my head for years. What also lingered was the phrase the cop had introduced me to, snitch jacket, which sounded musical to me. Those things would become the seeds for my novel, though it would take 10 years before I knew enough to execute it.

I wrote it mostly while covering the Tampa courthouse for the St. Petersburg Times, sometimes putting in a couple of hours before work and sometimes, fueled by espresso or ephedrine-laced weightlifter drinks, after long shifts at the paper. From the start, I decided to tell it from the snitch's point of view, and I saw him as a tragicomic, self-delusional figure, a hopelessly alienated misfit. I gave him a name, Benny Bunt, that seemed to underscore his thwarted smallness.

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Snitching, in the book, came to serve as a metaphor for what writers do. They eavesdrop. They tell on other people. They traffic in betrayal. As Joan Didion said, they are always selling someone out.

Over and over, agents would tell me that no one wanted to read about a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant who snitched on his friends, that Benny Bunt wasn't "relatable" enough, as if the purpose of reading books is to meet people you admire enough to bring home for dinner.

But a number of my favorite novels - The Gypsy's Curse, A Confederacy of Dunces, Money, Light in August, to name a few - feature protagonists who are either physical or moral grotesques and/or models of alienation. That made me want to read about them more, not less. So I kept Benny raw, and I still like him.

Though the snitch is a staple of crime fiction, he's rarely the hero, and his motives rarely go deeper than purely mercenary ones: He has a charge to work off, or he wants revenge, or he's in it for the cash. I thought there might be more at work, psychologically. By coincidence, during the writing, I started chatting with a mover I'd hired to haul some furniture, and the guy started telling stories of busting drug dealers in Philadelphia. He made it sound as if he'd been a cop. He was not. He was an informer. But he spoke of himself as a kind of dashing figure, a spy recounting his missions.

And then I understood Benny. I made him a failed cop.

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There were a couple of other serendipitous moments. I became friendly with a homeless man who sold the Tampa Tribune outside the courthouse and who described for me his years in the grip of methamphetamine. I gave Benny such a past.

At the St. Petersburg Times in 2001, I investigated a Veterans Administration shrink who made up elaborate stories about his nonexistent Vietnam service, which got me researching the (amazingly widespread) phenomenon of people fabricating war stories to endow their lives with a layer of drama and tragedy. It meshed with a theme already percolating in the book, which is the improvisatory and cobbled-together nature of identity. So I envisioned a Vietnam vets support group in which the whole crowd consisted of phonies and gave the hit man, Gus "Mad Dog" Miller, a chair there.

I floundered through many drafts trying to understand the novel's central relationship, the one between Benny and the hit man. Finally, a friend sent me a copy of a Dateline NBC episode about a reporter who got too close to a killer he was covering.

Much was made of the fact that the reporter was wearing the killer's jacket. A form of seduction had taken place.

The jacket was the clue I needed. For the book to have emotional resonance - for it to transcend the level of a standard crime thriller - I realized there had to be something like love between the hit man and his betrayer.

[Last modified October 24, 2007, 19:24:36]