Crime novelist Dennis Tafoya is leaving bodies all over town

She saw a flier on a telephone pole for a haunted tour of Philadelphia that started at St. Peter’s Cemetery on Almond. There were blurry, much-copied photos of a pale girl in a top hat in front of the Poe House down on Spring Garden Street and perched on a headstone in Laurel Hill Cemetery. Frannie had an impulse to go, hijack the bus full of vacationers and drive them on her own haunted tour of the city. Here the Chinatown street where she got one of her best friends killed, here the motel on Westmoreland where a 60-year-old former teacher stabbed Frannie in the arm, trying to keep her drug-dealing son out of jail. Or they could just walk half a block from St. Peter’s and see the house where she’d grown up. Not the original house, of course, not as it was. That was gone.

—from The Poor Boy’s Game, by Dennis Tafoya

A robber of drug dealers gets in over his head in the Philly suburbs. 

A junkie tries to solve a heartbreaking murder on Roxborough Avenue. 

An escaped con commits a horrific act of retribution on the streets of Port Richmond.

They sound like newspaper headlines, but all of these scenes came from the mind of Philly area crime writer Dennis Tafoya. 

His third novel, The Poor Boy’s Game — which plays out that third scenario — has just been published by Minotaur books. Tafoya, a key member of Philly’s burgeoning hard-boiled author scene (which also includes former City Paper editor Duane Swierczynski and ex-cop Keith Gilman), seems poised for something bigger.

“Philadelphia does have a really strong crop of crime writers. Dennis is absolutely at the forefront,” says Jon McGoran, a local crime and thriller writer, and a friend of Tafoya’s. “He’s very, very highly regarded in the crime-writing circles, and I think it’s only a matter of time before a large audience catches on.”

In D.C., they have George Pelecanos, with his sprawling, interlocking world of cops, private detectives and crooks in a racially divided city, frequently soundtracked with vintage R&B and post-punk. In Boston, it’s Dennis Lehane, who has an intuitive grasp of his city’s working-class neighborhoods, and whose books have been brought to life on film by Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck. And Daniel Woodrell from the Missouri Ozarks has characterized his writing as “country noir” and received a boost in his profile with the 2006 film based on his novel Winter’s Bone.

These writers have made names for themselves by blurring the line between pulp and literature. Or maybe it’s that they just ignore that line, demonstrating that great writing transcends genre. Their books have their share of hard-drinking tough guys in dark, violent worlds, but their socially conscious, nuanced writing recognizes the limits of braggadocio.

Tafoya’s in the same game, but with a Philly-centric perspective. He understands the vibes and unique qualities of the city, from Roxborough to Fishtown, from Kelly Drive to Seventh and Bainbridge. Philadelphia is a distinct character in his books.

So it’s a bit of a surprise when you learn that Tafoya, 54, is not the kind of Philly guy who’s bounced around from neighborhood to neighborhood. In fact, he’s spent most of his life in Bucks County. And it’s equally intriguing to learn that the crime genre was not his planned destination. It practically happened by accident.

Asked to pick a quiet place to be interviewed, Tafoya came up with Port Richmond Books. Housed in an old movie theater on Richmond Street, it’s both a treasure-hunting bibliophile’s paradise and a neighborhood hub. The main room is crowded with rows and rows of shelves that seem to spill out an endless number of tomes. 

Sitting in a smaller office area where one can make purchases or just hang, Tafoya talked about his life and career over cold Kenzingers supplied by store owner Greg Gillespie.

Tafoya was born in 1959 at Misericordia Hospital, now Mercy Philadelphia, on 54th Street. Growing up, he lived in Upper Darby, and then Maryland for a bit. In 1972, he moved to Bucks.  (He currently resides in Lambertville, N.J.)

“I read precociously as a kid,” he recalls. “Always had an appetite for strange subjects. Read a lot of paranormal books. Science fiction was the stuff that I think really made me want to write when I was a kid.” Ray Bradbury’s work, in particular, made its mark. “It’s really poetic in a lot of ways. Even still I feel that as an influence: taking a particular kind of language and approach into the genre world.”

After high school, Tafoya went to Oberlin. Briefly. “Flunked out, came home, went to work,” he laughs. Over the years, he worked a number of jobs, including time spent as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) in the ’80s. But most of his day career, including now, has been in selling industrial controls. (“It’s business-to-business stuff.”)

For years he wrote short stories on the side, and submitted them to online literary magazines. When a Hollywood screenwriter/producer named Cori Stern discovered those stories in 2007, she contacted Tafoya and asked if he had a novel. Turns out, he was two-thirds through one he called Dope Thief.

The plot was inspired by his time as an EMT. 

“I worked in Doylestown at the hospital. And there was a fire in a meth lab. In Bucks County, back in the ’80s, biker gangs used to rent the farmhouses, run meth labs in them for a while and then abandon them. There was a fire in one. So we were getting calls all night in the hospital, people [most likely the drug dealers] trying to figure out how to take care of someone who’d been badly burned in the fire. They actually found his body a few days later in the woods. 

“But that always stuck with me; who’s in a burning meth lab in the middle of the night? Even though I did not get around to writing that story for 20, 30 years, it was always in my head. The kind of experience you have of the world on an ambulance — even though it was a very brief part of my life — you see people in that worst moment, one desperate moment. That stuck with me.”

He initially drew inspiration for his approach from writers like Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, authors who write “about people who are up against it, whose lives are unraveling, who are in difficult or desperate circumstances.” 

He quickly jettisoned any plans to make his characters act like slick, Elmore Leonard-esque movers and shakers. “People in those situations are not going to be the cool, witty, controlled folks. These are not people who are coolly figuring the angles. Their lives are coming apart. The things they’ve seen, the things that they’re trying to do, are more than they can handle, and it just destroys them. That’s the stuff that I find interesting. Even though I admire Elmore Leonard to no end, I can’t summon the sort of cool approach that he did so brilliantly.”

Stern hooked Tafoya up with her L.A.-based manager, who, in turn, found him a New York literary agent. And through this circuitous route, Dope Thief was published by Minotaur (St. Martin’s Press’ mystery/thriller/suspense imprint) in 2009. And it was really only then that Tafoya found himself in the hard-boiled underworld.

“When I sold Dope Thief, I thought I had written a literary novel with criminals. My agent said, ‘No, it’s a crime novel.’” 

Dope Thief was followed in 2010 by The Wolves of Fairmount Park, a deeper, more accomplished and sadder novel that burrowed further into Philly’s neighborhoods, and into a dark, crime-ridden side of the city. The book made Tafoya’s gifts as a writer even more apparent.

“He has this great grasp of character and a very poetic, literary quality to his writing,” says McGoran. “A lot of what he writes about is gritty crime. But he brings such a subtle and nuanced end to it that really — in part, maybe because of the contrast between the beauty of the writing and the starkness of the topic — makes it stand out.”

“These days, to stay published, to stay in the game, you need to be going bigger on a much faster trajectory than once was true. I think it’s very difficult now for publishers to justify printing a lot of small books,” says Tafoya, who says his first two books sold about 2,500 and 3,500 copies, respectively. So, instead of “another novel of little criminals slugging it out,” The Poor Boy’s Game features perhaps a more easily relatable protagonist and, both Tafoya and his publisher hope, it will be the first of a series.

Frannie Mullen is a U.S. marshal, born in Port Richmond, now living in Fairmount, whose career ends due to a botched sting operation involving the Philly mob. Her life is thrown into further turmoil when her estranged father, a former union enforcer with a murderous past and present, escapes from prison. Both the union and the feds are on his trail. Frannie and her sister are in the middle, targeted by forces they don’t fully understand while reckoning with their tragic childhoods. It becomes Frannie’s mission to find her father before anyone else does.

With The Poor Boy’s Game, Tafoya has further refined his writing. There are white-knuckled moments of suspense and bursts of sudden violence. There are also universal themes that haunt these characters. “How much am I me, and how much am I formed by the people that I came from?” asks Tafoya. “I think this is a question that some of us spend half our lives— longer, our whole lives — trying to sort out. How much we are our own actors independent in the world, and how much we are just the sum of these formative experiences?” Tafoya explores that question with particular resonance through Frannie Mullen, unique yet identifiable, a strong female protagonist, and definitely someone who could carry a series of books.

As always with Tafoya’s work, the city comes to life in The Poor Boy’s Game, whether it’s at the Art Museum or in the Northeast. The Toynbee tiles and the billboards of Zoe Strauss’ photographs appear as recurring motifs. He deftly reconfigures a bit of mostly forgotten local history — the ’80s corruption scandal involving the roofers’ union — into the plot. Considering that Tafoya himself has never lived there, it’s impressive how he captures Port Richmond — the union men, boxers, barflies and PCP addicts, but also a neighborhood in transition.

 “It’s really only been in the last 10 years that I’ve really come down here a lot and gotten to have a lot of friends in the city, hung out here a lot more than I used to.” He particularly credits Port Richmond Books’ Gillespie, who is thanked in the book’s acknowledgements. “He really did help me with details about the story, him being down here and knowing this area like he does. I find that the more you know about something, the more you’ll find. Unless you do the work and spend the time, walk around, look in the windows, you just don’t know. And you’ll get stuff that is way cooler than what you imagine from the outside.”

Wallace Stroby, another friend and a Jersey-based crime writer, says, “Obviously, he knows his territory and he knows the people. Sometimes I think, as an outsider, you can see things in a different way and describe them in a different way. But it’s always a matter of perspective. You pick up a lot of stuff from knowing it well, that someone just coming in and observing it wouldn’t know. There’s a certain thing about knowing a place well, like he does or like Dennis Lehane knows Boston. You hear the voice of the city — sometimes literally, with the accents.”

With The Poor Boy’s Game, Tafoya has written a substantial, solidly commercial book. How it’s received, however, is largely unpredictable. McGoran says, “Every time you have a book come out, first you hope that it is going to explode and immediately in one fell swoop take you to the next level. And then when that doesn’t happen, you hope it’s going to be another incremental step. Every writer wants to reach more readers, except for J.K. Rowling and James Patterson. And even then, if they didn’t want to reach more readers, they wouldn’t keep writing. And it’s a tough business, and you learn to kind of temper your hopes and expectations with a sobering dose of reality.” 

Tafoya says, “I have a million things I’d like to try, a million things I’d like to do. How many of them I’ll get a chance to get paid to write, I don’t know. Certainly, I’m not precious. I want to be in print. I want to do well. I want to deliver what folks are looking for.” 

And yet, he has ambitions to write even further beyond genre. “The things that I need to learn, I think, are more the kinds of things that are identified as literary fiction, even if they’ve got the familiar elements.

“When I’m writing, I am not purposeful enough to say, ‘I’m gonna deliver the thriller.’ I find the process so exploratory in its nature. It kinda goes how it goes. But I want to deliver a book that is the kind of book that anyone would pick up and read.

“I think even for folks like Pelecanos and Lehane, who you hope reviewers mention, they spent a lot of years writing stuff that were more narrowly defined and only later in their careers began to deliver audience-friendly thrillers. And, believe me, I want to do that. I want to appeal to a wider audience. Who doesn’t? 

“But I have to do what I have to do.”

The Poor Boy’s Game book launch reading and signing is Thu., May 8, 7 p.m., free, at Triumph Brewery, 400 Union Square, New Hope, 215-862-8300, triumphbrewing.com.