A reporter-turned-novelist returns to his Adirondack roots

Christopher Mele’s career started in the Adirondacks, which led him to The New York Times. For his latest chapter: A mystery novel set in fictional Adirondack community that’s a homage to his profession.

By Lauren Yates

Christopher Mele had sent 100 typewritten job applications to newspapers as far as Alaska when he got a call from a small daily paper in the Adirondacks.

Mele, a Bronx kid fresh from New York University journalism school’s Class of ‘86, had never traveled further north than the state capital. 

“I truly, truly thought there was Albany and then Canada,” he said.

But he agreed to an interview and Bill Doolittle, then the Adirondack Daily Enterprise’s editor and publisher, flew him from LaGuardia to the Adirondack Regional Airport in Lake Clear. 

Mele remembers telling Doolittle he’d arrive at Gate 1. 

“Don’t worry – I’ll find you,” he remembers Dolittle saying.

They met for lunch at the old Dew Drop Inn, “hit it off like a house on fire,” and the graduate accepted his first real reporting job.

Mele’s come a long way since then. This year alone, he celebrated 10 years as a newsman at The New York Times, a promotion to deputy editor of The Times’ Express desk, his 60th birthday and the release of his debut novel – a mystery called “Goodwill’s Secrets” that’s brought him back to his reporting roots in Saranac Lake.

Enterprise days

Mele came of age during fraught times in New York City – the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, the violence-laced blackout of 1977, a “time when you really had to watch your back.” 

Saranac Lake was an immediate balm, even if he got some grief on his first day for wearing a tie in a newsroom where flannel was almost a uniform.

“The people of Saranac Lake, the people of the Adirondacks, they adopted me. There’s really no other way I could put it,” Mele said. “They could not have been more warm and welcoming to a complete stranger. I don’t know, truly, if I’ve experienced anything quite like it since then.”

He’d just finished an internship at New York Newsday, working under journalism “luminaries”  like Bob Green, who won the paper two Pulitzers in the 1970s. Mele helped Green’s team cover John Gotti’s ascension as an American mafioso and boss of the Gambino crime family. He remembers going to the Brooklyn courthouse to make copies of wire tap transcripts of Gotti, doe-eyed.

“I just thought this was the greatest thing since sliced white bread, right?” he said. “It was so incidental to what they were doing, but to be even on the periphery of that felt like something monumental.”

Reporting in Saranac Lake was a change of pace, to say the least – he traded shootings and stabbings for stories on stolen road signs and divers recovering a local baker’s cash register from the river (he got to throw in a few “dough” puns, too). But he said Doolittle also encouraged him to write enterprising stories, and he dug into big local issues like the redevelopment of the Lake Placid Club.

“I remember I had a fair bit of leeway, a fair bit of license to stretch my wings a little bit,” Mele said.

The Enterprise is where he learned the trade, made mistakes, got a crash course on the fundamentals of grassroots government and saw the direct impact of community reporting. And while covering the village’s annual Winter Carnival in the particularly “hardcore” winter of 1987, Mele learned that bitter cold freezes ink. 

Mele had to develop thick skin, and not just literally; he had to hold local officials accountable in a town where everybody knew everybody by “six degrees of separation, or less.” 

“I didn’t win any popularity contests,” he said.

He did, however, win an “Adirondack Pulitzer” for his responsible journalistic efforts from the local visitors’ bureau after spending two years at the Enterprise and a few years at the Plattsburgh Press-Republican. 

Newsman to novelist

Mele knew he’d be a newsman long before he ended up at the Enterprise – in the womb, according to his wife and fellow journalist, Meg McGuire, founder of online environmental news outlet Delaware Currents.

Mele does have early memories of sitting at the breakfast table, watching his mother hold a cigarette in one hand and the New York Daily News in the other. He used to pretend to be a newscaster, reading Daily News clippings into a voice recorder. By age 11 he was riding his bike, camera in tow, to calls he’d heard over the police scanner.

For Mele, journalism was always the “perfect confluence” of research, curiosity, adrenaline and current events.

“That set me on a trajectory that was pretty close to pre-ordained,” he said.

He’d never say the same about his fiction career. In fact, he calls himself an “accidental novelist.” But “Goodwill’s Secrets,” published this past May, is an homage to that journalistic confluence – as well as a “love letter to community journalism.”

The novel follows Alex Provetto, a middle-aged reporter who’s working in a small town after a successful career at a large news outlet. When he gets a tip about a missing girl, he’s resistant to picking up the thread on the story, believing it’s just another young girl who’s run away from home. But Provetto eventually gives into his instincts, and his investigation propels the reader through the story.

The reader gets a glimpse into the everyday life of small-town reporters – the board meetings, the constant blare of the police scanner, the often-uncomfortable methods of information gathering and the people who make up the communities they cover. The book is a celebration of the hard work it takes to keep those communities informed.

Mele has watched newsrooms empty throughout his career, starting in earnest with the 2008 recession, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s seen some of his former newsrooms slim down to a third of their former staff after downsizing and layoffs. 

More people are getting their news online, through social media, or from friends and family these days rather than turning to local newspapers as an average of 2.5 local newspapers are shutting their doors every week. More than half of U.S. counties are considered news deserts with no local news outlets.

“It makes me want to cry,” Mele said. “It’s a crime, it’s a sin that the outlets, the institutions that we as a society – we as a culture, a community – rely on for our news, for our engagement in our community, either don’t exist or are so hollowed out they’re a shadow of their former selves.”

More info about Mele and his debut novel can be found here: https://www.chrismeleauthor.com/.