The NFL is so pervasive in American culture, and the scandals that seem to follow it so huge in the American media, that it’s surprising there isn’t a regular flow of crime novels set in and around the sport. Christopher Harris an LA-based gridiron journalist who could well change that with his new novel, Pound Foolish, released 1 September 2026 in time for the start of the season on the 10th.
It’s the second novel to feature Mouse Morrison, an NFL pro who is now a detective. Mouse is hired to investigate when it appears that someone within the Detroit NFL franchise is killing women. From there, Christopher brings us a both a whodunnit and a warts-and-all exploration of what football means in today’s America. With a killer who leaves cryptic clues for the police to solve, it’s got a creepy edge to it. Then there’s the social commentary aspect – perhaps even an indictment on how the sport imposes itself on society in the US.
Having covered the sport for the broadcaster ESPN for eight years, and producing a popular NFL podcast for the last decade, Christopher knows how both the business and sporting side of NFL organisations work. For him, part of the fun of being a football journalist is that during the offseason he gets to delve into his creative writing, and Pound Foolish is a product of that.
We invited Christopher to join us on the site to find out more about Pound Foolish and all the ideas that went into it…
What are crime fiction lovers going to love about Pound Foolish?
The novel is a season-in-the-life of a pro football team… and it’s also a whodunnit for sure. The setup is: in Detroit, somebody is murdering women who are in the team’s orbit. As the season begins and so many men are working so hard to scale the mountaintop, someone in the organisation seems to know that the murderer could be a player.
The team starts an investigation by bringing in one of its former players, named Nick ‘Mouse’ Morrison. But do they really want him to discover anything? Or is a pro football season simply a careening unstoppable train that must go on at all costs?
Who is Mouse Morrison, what inspired him and how have you developed this character?
My first novel was called Slotback Rhapsody, and it was a pretty typical first novel – the first-person story of an undersized running back named Mouse Morrison trying to make it as a professional, while also seeking some type of enlightenment. At the end of that book, Mouse is suspended for PEDs but we leave him with hope for his future career. Now it’s a dozen years later, Mouse is retired, and the team for whom he toiled brings him in to observe the players and report anything suspicious to the organisation’s security arm. They seem to want to know if a player is involved in the killings, but don’t want the public to know of any links.
What’s he up against in Pound Foolish?
Mouse gradually gets the feeling that he’s not really supposed to be uncovering anything, that he may in fact be a fig leaf so that if the team’s connection to these killings come out, the organisation can claim he did a poor job investigating. So he leaks the possible connection between killings and players, as more women are killed, the people of Detroit begin to believe it might be a player. The story gets bigger and bigger, Mouse follows players around trying to unlock clues to who might be doing this, and soon the story explodes and becomes the only thing on all football fans’ minds.
Who are some of the other interesting characters we’ll get to meet?
We get inside the head of many of the Detroit football players – we don’t really call ‘em Lions, for copyright reasons. The quarterback John Radney appears to have it all, but is an insecure mess and might have unhealthy attachment issues with women. The linebacker Rob Flegel has a perfect adoring family but regularly suffers blackouts. The cornerback AJ Tovey is an incredible player who believes he’s an angel from the Bible. The slot corner Leroy Moorer is having an All-Pro season but is terrified of his sexual exploits becoming public. The left tackle Demetrius Choice is an extremely violent womaniser. The backup lineman Omar Cavell thinks of himself as a murderer as he considers euthanising his grandfather who has dementia. And billionaire team owner is – like all billionaires – shady in multifaceted ways.
Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I love watching football, I’m lucky to make a living covering it, I love the fact that it’s one of the few remaining ‘town squares’ that hold a big enough place to actually have wide resonance in the atomised American culture right now. So much about it is great, from the players themselves to the glory of watching their exploits. But the dark side is dark.
The league is run by feckless billionaires who were born on third base and think they hit a triple, and because the institution of football is so powerful, it runs roughshod over its communities. It holds them hostage for billions in tax breaks and thus removes funds that might go toward other public works, it scams fans out of money on PSLs and exhibition games and concessions, it looks the other way for as long as possible when violent crimes come to light, it suppressed concussion research for decades… It’s sometimes really tough to be a football fan! It requires a ton of cognitive dissonance.
The reason I brought back Mouse and put him at the centre of this particular story is: I was trying to invent a scandal just slightly cranked up from reality – a serial killer on a football team – to imagine exactly how a team and the league would circle the wagons, and then how different political actors would co-opt the scandal for their purpose. This is a whodunnit, we are trying to figure out the killer. But it’s also a look at the hold, good and bad, our most violent sport has on America.
What kind of atmosphere and experience did you want to create for readers?
I wanted a sense of the full team. There’s no one focal point in the book. Our perspective shifts to many players, around and around, as we hear their concerns, their excitements, their desires, though we do keep coming back to Mouse doing his internal investigation. Football is just so massive in every way. The stadiums. The budgets. The TV audience. The fandom. The roster size. The player size. It’s dozens of men who are supposed to band together, and the only way to do it right is, to some extent, band together in violence. And maybe some such men discover it’s hard to find the line between when violence is and isn’t appropriate, and then at some point they get the feeling they are pawns in wealthy people’s games. So I hope the experience of reading it is somewhat kaleidoscopic, somewhat a mosaic of what a season is like, but then in this case, murders of women in Detroit sends that season off the rails.
It’s described as a ‘season in the life of’ story. That sounds interesting. Can you tell me more about how it’s structured and how you approached the storytelling?
We definitely go chronologically, starting in the heat of training camp and following the team through a full season. The deeper we go into the calendar year and the season, the less ignorable the scandal is, until we get to the point that many people protest the team for days and weeks, while others adopt them as savage victims of a media conspiracy. And yet the dead bodies keep piling up.
Have people in the sport seen the book yet, and if so what have they said?
Some of my friends in football media have read it, and they’ve found the crime story aspect to be engaging. They’ve also appreciated a presentation of how complicated it can be to be a football fan, and how the sanitised version of Sundays doesn’t tell the story. I don’t think anyone in the actual NFL has seen it. I don’t think the commissioner would appreciate it very much! (He’s fictionalised in the book, of course!)
Which other crime books and/or authors have influenced you and what are you reading right now?
My favorite crime story of all time is London Fields by Martin Amis. Another big, sweeping, multi-perspective epic that’s definitely about a murder that’s going to happen and a writer who’s trying to chronicle it, and also an attempt at reflecting the culture of its time. It begins, “This is a true story, but I can’t believe it’s really happening. It’s a murder story, too. I can’t believe my luck.” It’s not an old-fashioned potboiler but it is a careful delineation of a crime and its larger implications.
Right now, I’m reading The Adventures Of Augie March by Saul Bellow, which isn’t a crime story at all, but rather one of the great bildungsromans of all time. Dunno if that’s interesting at all, but I’m loving it.
What’s next for Mouse Morrison and what’s next for Christopher Harris?
Poor Mouse. I don’t know if he needs to show up in any more of my books to be tormented. He might live out a happier life unchronicled in anything I write anymore. He’s left at the end of the book blinking and unsatisfied with a bookbag filled with a stack of photocopies of the same naked woman. As for me, first draft of another book is done, though I don’t get to work on them much in the second half of the calendar year.
You can check out Christopher Harris’s NFL podcast here, but we think as a crime fiction lover that his book might be of more interest! Just use the buttons below to order your copy.
