My favorite detectives are involved studying their surrounding world as much as they are involved in solving crimes. Think of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles or Miss Marple in her garden. James Lee Burke in Montana. Think of Jim Hall or Carl Hiaasen in South Florida. I am drawn to detectives as naturalists, and I think I came by this preference honestly.
My mother loved to read. She read crime novels by the hundreds. Often one or two books a week. She also read mainstream novels and often read to me: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy boys or Nancy Drew. They all had the sharp minds of scientists and sleuths. My mother loved these books, and she wanted me to love them too. My father also loved reading, but he favored history and spy thrillers. He loved the James Bond books and he wanted me to read history as well, but The Federalist Papers didn’t take me into the dream world of what I had actually experienced in my life.
I’ve always loved wandering in nature. We lived on a big piece of property north of Seattle surrounded by woods. We had a large garden, an orchard, a berry patch and fields of grass. There was an old English gardener named Harry who forbade us from picking flowers to bring inside. My mother was afraid to confront him on this and she would send me up into the woods to pick wildflowers for the house. There was a muddy trail which went down a ravine past a bluff of light gray clay where one time I believed I saw the fresh track of a black bear. It frightened me a great deal but I dreamed I was a character in a novel. I kept candy bars and a pocketknife in my flimsy backpack when I went flower picking and when I saw the bear track I wished my dad would have let me carry a gun to protect me from danger but he wouldn’t.
Reality was scary, but crime stories helped. In 1963 I fantasized that I had managed to save President Kennedy’s life. I dreamed of being a national hero, girls loved me and other boys wanted to be my friend. I drove a sportscar, I solved crimes in my imagination but in reality I didn’t do well in school and my parents worried about me. I couldn’t spell and was a slow reader. I went to special classes which embarrassed me. My father read me stories from Greek and Roman mythology, which was fun. But he worried I was developmentally slow—I wandered in the woods and tried to read the tracks in the mud carefully. I imagined learning to fly using a pair of eagle wings, which spared me from melting if I got to close to the sun. I struggled with mathematics, I had a hard time learning another language. My parents worried about me. We moved to New York City which seemed like a bad place for a dreamy boy who liked to wander around looking for bear tracks. My dad knew some cowboys and mountain men who ran a pack outfit in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state and he turned me over to them. I became a wrangler and a guide in the wilderness. I sometimes rode a horse six or seven hours at a time, up long trails into the hills. My dreams of bears in the woods fused into my reality.
Later I married a beautiful woman who became a prominent marine biologist. We moved to Alaska. I worked in the woods continuing my dreamy life. Then I was offered a job with a bright young attorney, and I became a criminal defense investigator. I had been a cowboy and then a private eye in Alaska. Books fed my fantasies and I continued to merge my reality into my fantasies.
But working in real life crime was not like the novels, for the people who were accused of committing crime were often strange and complex. There were very few mysteries to solve or damsels in destress. The reality about crime is that there are many more people than we expect who simply have very little impulse control. People simply took what they wanted and were unapologetic. Although in the thirty years of my career as a private investigator I did run into a few factual mysteries and I was able to shed some light on them, mostly my clients ran straight into the brick wall of their own guilt. It was hard but I got to see a life of people who were not near as lucky as I had been and I started writing stories about them and their disappointments and dreams.
I gave them Cecil Younger, an alcoholic hero. A dreamy boy who himself was banging his head against the real world, and I came to believe that reality is more often than not a disappointment compared to the visions I continued to have in the wilderness. Wild country could be scary. This was why my mother spent most of her time reading Ngaio Marsh, or John D. MacDonald. Crime stories presented a reality of romance, swordplay and of moral rectitude which was much better than a world where presidents were killed or bears might rush out of the brush.
I actually lived the life of a kind of an investigator and naturalist. There were always wildflowers in the woods and big animal tracks in the clay … all these things were real. But nothing I did ever seemed heroic. I never saw much moral rectitude. My life was a hybrid between the beauty I found in nature, and the disappointment in how my fantasies came up short.
One time in my thirties I even had to kill an attacking brown bear. When a sow came charging from the brush I killed her with the gun I was carrying. While I was relieved that I survived, the reality of the dead bear lying at my feet haunts me to this day. Reality was not as satisfying to me as my little boy’s dream life where I walked in the woods without a gun.
This was why I became a writer. In my own books I was able to combine my love of the world I experienced in nature while creating the fictional dream of a hero’s adventure. My thirteenth novel, Big Breath In (out November 12) is a standalone and it tells the story of a woman much like my wife who is a scientist and falls back into her life as a sleuth. In it I brought my wife a bouquet of wildflowers from the woods. In it I openly declare my love for the fusion of crime and the naturalist’s vision to pay homage to my parents’ obsession literature. Think of the world surrounding Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple, then think of a dyslexic boy, smitten by books reading bear tracks in the woods. As strange as it might seem, this is where my life of crime began and where it continues to this day.
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