Red Means Run author Brad Smith: ‘I have an aversion to cops’

Brad Smith’s hands look as if they’ve done everything but pecked at a keyboard or held a pen. He’s worked as a farmer, signalman, insulator, truck driver, bartender, schoolteacher, maintenance mechanic, roofer and carpenter, but it’s only when you reach the last line of his biography that the fact that he’s a writer becomes apparent.

Between 2000 and 2007, Smith published four novels — the above-mentioned title plus All Hat, Busted Flush, and Big Man Coming Down the Road. He was marketed as a throwback, a bit of a roughneck, an outsider. Now, after a five-year-absence — Smith prefers the term “sabbatical” — he returns with a new publisher and a new book, Red Means Run, the first of two that will arrive in stores by the end of summer.

“I never stopped writing. It just seemed like the industry was kind of in a slump for a while,” says Smith, nursing a beer at a popular King Street West restaurant in downtown Toronto, a long way, mentally if not geographically, from the 80-year-old farmhouse near the north shore of Lake Erie he calls home .

“I didn’t have a publisher,” he explains — he parted ways with Penguin, who’d released his last three books — “and I wasn’t even really looking for a publisher, to tell you the truth, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I kept writing.”

Red Means Run introduces the reader to Virgil Cain, an ordinary man who constantly finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. Not long after the novel opens, Mickey Dupree, a slick criminal defence lawyer, is found dead on the local golf course, the shaft of a five-iron staked through his heart. Cain, a former minor-league catcher, is the only suspect, and with good reason: Dupree successfully defended the man charged with murdering Cain’s wife, Alan Comstock, a drug-addled music producer who likes his beer cold and his guns loaded. After realizing the police aren’t looking for anyone else, Cain breaks out of jail and goes on the lam, determined to find the killer before the cops find him.

“Virgil came pretty easily to me, because I know that guy,” says Smith, sporting a shaved head and a grey goatee. “He’s probably a more idealistic version of me. A better version of me.”

Smith, a fiftysomething native of Canfield, Ont., knows all about troubled men with checkered pasts; he’s had his share of run-ins with the law and is intimately familiar with the inside of a cell. In fact, it was time spent in a courthouse jail over 30 years ago that inspired the scene in which Virgil undertakes his own Great Escape.

Anna DeVries, his editor at Scribner in New York, believes Smith’s damaged hero, and the parade of miscreants that populate the novel, will ultimately appeal to readers.

“We are calling it country noir, but it definitely fits in with that tradition of writers, … in terms of Richard Russo, Dennis Lehane and Elmore Leonard, who have these characters who are a little more experienced in the life department, and may have a few bumpy roads behind them that they’ve come down. And I think that really appeals to readers — to see that this hero is flawed but resilient.”

Red Means Run marks the first time Smith has written a book with a series in mind. He’s been asked by publishers before, but has always refused. “To me, a series represents cops — you know, the savvy detective, whatever. It’s pretty procedural and, frankly, some of the stuff I read it like the same book over and over again.”

At the first meeting with his new publisher, the idea of a series was broached again, and again Smith said no. “I’ve been arrested a lot, so I have an aversion to cops,” he laughs. “But then I got thinking about it a few weeks later, and I said ‘what if I can do a series with an Everyman … just a blue collar guy that I know, like the guys I wrote about in One-Eyed Jacks or Busted Flush?’ There’s similarities there. None of them are dancing to ballet.”

Crow’s Landing, the further (mis)adventures of Virgil Cain, is due out in August; that novel finds Virgil reeling in a snowstorm’s worth of cocaine while fishing in the Hudson River. He’s under contract to write a third book, and is also developing a TV series, about a doctor who is sentenced to 500 hours of community service at a downtrodden downtown hospital after being convicted of drunk driving.

“It’s better than shingling,” he says.