I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. But my parents were from Tennessee and moved back there when I was about two.
So I spent my boyhood through age twelve on a farm near the Tennessee-Mississippi border. I actually shot squirrels with a .22 rifle, picked cotton, rode bareback on a giant plowhorse named Bob, and raised a heifer that I entered in the county fair! The county in question, by the way, was McNairy County, notable chiefly for moonshiners and a sheriff named Buford Pusser, who busted the moonshiners and became famous in a corny movie called “Walking Tall.”
My parents, it turned out, had caught the Alaska bug, so we moved back to Anchorage when I was twelve and I’ve lived in Alaska ever since, except for a couple of relatively brief college-related absences spent “Outside,” as Alaskans call the rest of the United States.
My wife and I moved to the Inupiat Eskimo village of Kotzebue when I was in my late twenties. I found the lovely, barren Arctic landscape absolutely mesmerizing, the extreme climate a joy, and the Native culture fascinating. I landed Bush planes on the sea ice, drove snowmachines--or 'snowgos," as they're called in Kotzebue--over the tundra, hunted moose and caribou, and once helped paddle a sealskin umiaq in pursuit of a bowhead whale on the Chukchi Sea off Point Hope.
After Kotzebue, I lived in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and then Anchorage again, working as a newspaper journalist. I won several major national awards for investigative stories that led to impeachment proceedings against one of Alaska’s governors, and for coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
After I left Kotzebue, I found the country, weather and people of Northwest Alaska more interesting than ever, so I started the Nathan Active series. The fictional village of Chukchi is modeled on Kotzebue in many respects, and some of the characters in the series are loosely crafted around real people I knew.
Later, when I started visiting friends in Palm Springs, I was struck by the contrasts of wealth and poverty in the Coachella Valley. At the north end, the wealth and opulence of Palm Springs. At the south end, the poverty and problems of the huge squatter camp known as Slab City, the crumbling resort communities along the shores of the dying Salton Sea. In some ways, this part of the valley reminded me of the wilds of rural Alaska. And thus was born my new Dana Forsythe mystery series. It features a female private investigator whose cases take her from one end of this fabled valley to the other.
I live in Anchorage. I’m married to Susan Jones, a karate master and retired epidemiologist. We have two children, both adults.
I'm a wildly eclectic reader, but of course I have a special interest in the literature of the north. Some of my favorite authors in that genre are Charlie Brower, Hudson Stuck, Edgar Keithahn, Paul Green, Chester Seveck, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Edwin Hall, Ernest Burch, and Claire Fejes (who was also a wonderful painter of Eskimo life in Northwest Alaska). In addition, I'm a fan of nearly every form of classic literature, as well as my fellow authors in the procedural mystery field, including Tony Hillerman and Sue Grafton,
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