The 2008 Edgar Award nominees have been announced. Since I had a three-day weekend, I decided to see if any were available at the public library. I scored a hit with Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard, a nominee for best first novel by an American author.

If I hadn’t fallen asleep Saturday night I would have read it in one continuous session. I didn’t want to put it down; it’s that good. Before anyone scurries off to get a copy, let me warn you that it is not for anyone offended by profanity, crudity, low-life characters, and low-life situations. It is also very well written and darkly humorous. Goffard manages to make his first person narrator, Benny Blunt, likeable and sympathetic.

Benny is a hyperactive, unhappily married, ex-crystal meth. addict with a phenomenal memory (his Memory Mansion) for trivial facts, who can only find (and not keep) menial jobs and who only feels at home in dive called Greasy Tuesday. He puts on the “snitch jacket” after being busted for trying to sell pot to an undercover detective.

Into Greasy Tuesday comes Gus “Mad Dog” Miller.

The night I first saw him, he was throwing his war medals against the wall and wearing a necklace of human ears. I knew right away I wanted to be his friend.

Gus is a Vietnam veteran with a connection to the bar owner who becomes the hero of the bar with his war stories. He has an ancient jog that Gus claims can smell cops. This leads to a discussion of the olfactory skills of dogs that is, um, shall we say rich and colorful in imagery.

Benny does become his friend in spite of his fear that the dog will detect that Bennie is a snitch. The friendship places Benny in his current predicament: in jail awaiting arraignment on multiple charges of homicide and narrating the events that led up to his incarceration to his public defender.

There are crimes in the book but much of the pleasure for me is Benny’s stream of conscious observations and ability to get distracted telling his story. For example, he is describing his job in a restaurant when a woman customer reminds him of Spiderman’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, the love of Benny’s twelve-year old life. He goes on for several pages about her death in The Amazing Spiderman no. 121, in June 1973 and how:

For exactly 20 cents spent at a Van Nuys drugstore, I bought a broken heart, an awareness of human evil, and an adult’s sense of death’s finality and indiscriminate reach.

Also, there is a take-off on true crime writing that is hilarious as well as a barbed look at the Burning Man festival called Howling Head in the book.

Snitch Jacket is dark, twisted, and funny. I’d love to see it become a movie along the lines of Usual Suspects. Goffard is a writer I am going to watch. While I do not wish the burden of a series on him, I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more of Bennie.