Novelist pal strikes literary gold with ‘Border Songs’

I’ve had the privilege of working with some talented reporters who have remained dear friends over the ages. Two of them – Jess Walter and Jim Lynch, ex-mates from the early to mid-1990s at The Spokesman Review in Spokane, Wash. – have become literary-acclaimed novelists.
Lynch is out with his second novel, “Border Songs,” a 291-page tale chronicling the wars on drugs and terrorists at America’s most-porous border crossing, the Pacific Northwest. The novel features offbeat characters on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border and a protagonist who is a 6-foot-8, 232-pound, severely dyslexic and innocent young border guard with an encyclopedic knowledge of birds. Beyond funny and insightful, the book is a treatise on birds, dairy farming, marijuana growing and the U.S. Border Patrol.
If the novel sucked, I wouldn’t recommend it. But Lynch is incapable of crafting anything that sucks. No writer I’ve ever met or heard of takes more painstaking care or pride in his craft. He spent more than 15 years writing fiction before and after his day job, newspapering, to finally break through in 2005 with the acclaimed “The Highest Tide.”
How meticulous is Lynch?
In 1994, he and I spent six months reporting and writing an investigative project on the U.S. Forest Service’s mismanagement of public lands in the Pacific Northwest. The project was labeled “Our Failing Forests.”
After we sat down to begin the task of writing this monstrosity, Lynch and I spent nearly an entire day arguing over one word, “mange,” to describe what logging clear-cuts resembled from the air. “Mange on a dog’s back” was what we finally agreed to use. (He wore me down. But he was probably right.)
I just finished “Border Songs,” already an international best-seller, and found that it not only was engrossing, educational and entertaining, but fulfilled a dream of mine: to have one of my novelist pals pattern a character after me.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t expecting to be a drug lord – albeit one who grows arguably the best pot in North America.
First a little background: For 17 years, Lynch has called me “Toby.” Never “Todd.” That’s because I told him that back in 1989, a city councilman in Fort Beach, Fla., had mistakenly started calling me “Toby” and never relented. Lynch picked up the Toby mantle from the get-go and has run with it ever since.
So last week I’m reading “Border Songs” and get to page 52. “Toby” is introduced as a key player on the region’s cannabis-growing scene. He’s beefy, muscular and has dark curly hair. Hmmmm, I thought. When he gets nervous, Toby tugs at his curls. Hmmmm again.
Later in the book, Lynch reveals Toby’s full legal name – Tobias C. Foster.
I dropped him an e-mail on Wednesday. “If you’re going to be a drug dealer, be a kingpin,” I joked to my pal after congratulating him on his terrific read.
To which he responded: “Really appreciate you reading that crazy book, and sorry about turning you into a drug thug. I thought he’d be more fun and good hearted than he was. And by the time I realized what he was going to be, I’d already committed to the name and the looks and so I couldn’t much change it at that point. At some point in the future, I’ll cast you as a muckraker or some other offbeat saint, if I’m lucky enough to keep at this.”
Luck will have nothing to do with it. Lynch is too driven, too determined to ever fail.
He spent a decade and a half rising before dawn to write fiction – only to be rewarded with rejection letter after rejection letter – before penning a book, “The Highest Tide,” that he sold before he had even finished.
His success is the result of talent and dogged determination to pursue a dream.
“Lynch has broken through to the edge of literary stardom,” wrote reviewer Jeff Baker, of The Oregonian in Portland.
There will be no letdown for a man who tried – tried is the optimum word – to teach me literary patience and is the only person I’ve ever gone sailing with and long to go sailing with again – even though we nearly died on our last voyage, 1998 on the Puget Sound, after high winds battered our small boat.
We finally reached shore after Jim tacked a boat with an undersized motor against a headwind with the same determination he used to kick open a publishing house’s front door.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer or more hard-working guy.
Meanwhile, I’ve just cracked open pal Jess Walter’s latest novel, “The Financial Lives of Poets.” I’ll let you know how it turns out.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or 276-645-2513.