In his debut novel, Dope Thief, Dennis Tafoya weaves an atypical crime narrative. Themes of forgiveness and redemption are threaded between scenes of violence and regret when career criminal Ray gets involved in a botched robbery. On the run through the bleak landscape of eastern Pennsylvania, Ray searches for what he needs to move beyond his mistakes and really live. Tafoya's prose moves easily between blunt and poetic, making Dope Thief a provocative, lyrical, fast-paced narrative. Ray's likeability comes not just from his genuine humanity, but his choice in books and music—can a person who listens to Stan Ridgeway and reads Amy Hempel be all bad?

You didn't think you were writing a crime novel.
Yeah, I thought I was writing a literary novel from a criminal's perspective.

Is there a difference?
Especially in the earlier drafts, the novel disregarded a lot of the conventions of the crime novel. When my agent said, "Oh, this is a crime novel," I needed to go back and make adjustments to the story to deliver more of the experience someone who picked it up in the mystery of crime section of the book store would expect. But to be honest, it just became a better book. I wouldn't have done anything that I felt compromised by. I didn't want to deliver a conventional experience, but I didn't want someone to put the book down and say, "What the hell was this thing?"

Did you have to do research to figure out how to restructure the book?
No, but the book in its original form was just kind of Ray's life, just a character study with a fairly weak ending. The book kind of just ended. I was never really happy with that. But by saying that this is a crime novel, there's an expectation that there will be a final upturn, it will be ratcheted up towards the end, and there has to be a resolution. And I wanted to do that, but in my own idiosyncratic way. I wasn't going to have the killers come back for one more try at him, or the dead villain's twin brother suddenly appear—not that kind of stuff—but I did want to have that final tension and the crystallization of the themes in the book. And so the way the book is now is my attempt to satisfy my imagined readers' expectations, and my own, and of course my editor's.

Was Ray less of a criminal in the original draft?
No, he just really didn't have anything to push against. He changes, but in the original version his new sense of himself isn't tested. So there's no expression of the ways that he has decided over the course of the book to change his life. The book is about somebody looking at his life and figuring out ways that he can be different in the world and charting a new course for himself. And, uh, that was an artistic failing in the original draft of the book. It was just like, "Well, I have a different life now," but there was no resolution to that. In this version of the book, that's put to the test a little bit more.

It sounds like the suggestions you got from your agent and editor solidified what the purpose of the book was in a more concrete way that it appeared in the earlier drafts.
Yes, I feel that absolutely. In no way did I feel like I compromised anything. In fact, I feel much better about this book as it currently stands than I did about earlier versions. I think that their suggestions made it a better book.

A lot of writers complain about things that agents ask them to do.
The great thing is my editor, Kelley Ragland, is ahead of me on these things, telling me to focus on the work, and what makes the work better and more interesting. She's the one who told me distinctions like "crime" and "literary" don't matter like they used to. You can do more in genre, and you can do more in literary fiction. Does my agent want me to write a bestseller? He absolutely does. But he knows who I am and he knows what I do, and he's totally with me as I approach things in my own frustratingly idiosyncratic way.

What made you want to write about these characters? They're not good people. Did you find it hard to make them sympathetic characters? The book begins with them stealing from children, essentially.
[laughs] That's all I'm interested in. That's the only question I'm interested in—the ways in which we're both bad and good, and how the potential for both of those things is present in all of us all the time. I hate reduction. I hate the impulse to say somebody is good and somebody is bad. People do good things and they do bad things. But I think people are just complicated, and to the extent that you understand and honor the complexity, it just makes for a much more interesting life, and it makes stories more interesting. Ted Bundy worked a suicide helpline. He's still Ted Bundy, as likely a poster child for capital punishment as you're ever going to find. But did the guy help some people? Maybe.

Maybe he convinced people to kill themselves! We don't really know!
That's a story. Who the hell wouldn't want to know? What did this guy say to people? Is there something genuinely possible in that exchange? Or is he so damaged and compromised that he has nothing meaningful to offer? But that's the only thing that I'm interested in writing about. In a sense.

So your next book will have similar elements.
The next book is a heroin addict trying to solve a murder. It's compromised people trying to engage with and recover their own humanity. I'm trying not to write Dope Thief 2.

What draws you to damaged people who are trying to learn how to be better?
Well, I think it's my own story. It's what I see everybody struggling with every day. Ray and Manny and the people around them only differ in the extremities of their situation, but I think their essential quandary is something that everybody faces. We all have good impulses and bad impulses, they differ from us only in the situations that their impulses get them into. They have poor impulse control. It's not that I'm interested in damaged or compromised people. I'm interested in the damage and compromise that's true of all of us. I think it's a way to explain myself and other people I know.

I noticed that there are very limited physical descriptions of people in Dope Thief.
It's something that I learned from Lawrence Block. Block, whose work I love, only describes what's necessary. Elmore Leonard does the same. Those are two guys whose work I greatly admire. I don't write like them, I don't try to emulate them, but I think I took it on as something that was empowering to the reader, in that it allows you to visualize these people as you need them to be.

I really like that. But it's going to make it hard to cast the movie.
Or really easy! You can insert anyone that you want. The characters have very definite appearances in my head. In fact I've seen them on the street. But I didn't feel like I needed to impose that.

There was only one character whose appearance I couldn't conjure—Shermie the dog. So how big was Shermie?
I pictured Shermie as not a little dog, but not a big dog—a sort of little dog that's corgi sized. Something with a little muscle, a little fight.

So he's a short-haired mixed breed. Because at first I saw him a sort of champagne colored toy poodle, but then as I got to know him better he morphed into a small pit bull.
[laughs] Whatever works for you works for me.

(June, 2009)

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