(profile)

Guadalupe Gumshoe

Ex-ranger Nevada Barr may have packed a sidearm like the heroine of her best-selling mystery novels, but when it comes to capturing the beauty of national parks, she's a poet at heart.

By Les Line

Photo by Andrew Kaufman

Talk about changing times! in the fertile literary soil of mystery writing, hard-boiled private eyes are an endangered species; heinous crimes are as likely to be solved by lawyers, psychologists, or forensic scientists as by case-hardened cops; the most gripping plots often unfold far from the proverbial mean streets; and there's an even chance that the protagonist of the latest best-seller will be (as Mike Hammer would have put it back in the politically incorrect 1950s) a broad.

Consider Anna Pigeon, the invention of best-selling author Nevada Barr. Anna wears a ranger's badge, carries a Sig Sauer pistol, and might turn up anywhere in the immense national park system where the discovery of a corpse defies easy explanation.

She's also a lyrical observer of America's wild places, which helps explain why her adventures captivate outdoorsy types usually seen holding field guides.

Until Anna arrived at Guadalupe Mountains in Texas in 1993 (Track of the Cat), the national parks were literally unexplored by crime novelists. Like real rangers—including Barr herself, who worked in law enforcement for eight years at various parks—Anna has since led a peripatetic life. She has unraveled baffling murders at Isle Royale in Michigan (A Superior Death), Mesa Verde in Colorado (Ill Wind), Lassen Volcanic in California (Firestorm), Cumberland Island in Georgia (Endangered Species), Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico (Blind Descent), Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor (Liberty Falling), Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi (Deep South), and Glacier in Montana (Blood Lure).

Anna's latest exploit (Flashback, which hit No. 5 on The New York Times fiction list) finds her in Florida's isolated Dry Tortugas at a creepy Fort Jefferson, which was a Union Army prison in the Civil War era and held the alleged Lincoln assassination conspirators. The novel has one of the more unusual and lovely opening scenes—no dark and stormy night, no gunshots, no cadaver—in the history of the genre:

"Until she ran out of oxygen, Anna was willing to believe she was taking part in a PBS special. The water was so clear, sunlight shone through as if the sea were but mountain air. Cloud shadows, stealthy and faintly magical at four fathoms, moved lazily across patches of sand that showed startlingly white against the dark, ragged coral. Fishes colored so brightly it seemed it must be a trick of the eye or the tail end of an altered state flitted, nibbled, explored and slept."

Of course, the bodies begin to turn up several pages later, when a ranger goes missing on a nocturnal boat patrol. Crime, after all, is what Nevada Barr's books are really about.

The national parks, naturally, are not untouched by violent death, though they may be some of the safest places in America. In 2002 rangers investigated 14 cases of homicide and manslaughter. In 1996, a particularly bad year, the total was 24, including the horrifying slaying, only recently solved, of two young women at a campsite in Shenandoah National Park. And urban and near-urban parks are often used as dumping grounds for murder victims. Lake Mead, an hour's drive from Las Vegas, has seen more than a few mob-style executions of the shot-in-the-back-of-the-head variety.

But Nevada Barr's one-of-a-kind mysteries are the product not of headlines but of her vivid imagination. In last year's Hunting Season, for example, Anna is perplexed when the nearly naked body of a local man is found in a historic inn along the Natchez Trace, where she has been promoted to district ranger. Evidence suggests an S&M tryst gone awry, until Anna is shot at by deer poachers, her patrol car is crushed by an armored pickup truck, and an old slave cemetery is vandalized. In the grand tradition of the literary form, at the end of the book Anna narrowly escapes being killed—in this case, by a scheming male subordinate with pent-up anger over having to work for a woman.

And then there's the scuba diver whose body Anna finds in a sunken ship in Lake Superior's frigid waters; the fatal crash of a sabotaged drug surveillance plane on Cumberland Island; and the murder of a caver in Carlsbad's fabulous Lechuguilla Cave, where a claustrophobic Anna ducks gunfire in a dark cavern. These are definitely not run-of-the-mill homicides.

"I've dispatched more people by atypical means than have ever died that way in the parks," quips Barr. But, she points out, "a good crime novel needs a good mystery to be solved. And I'm not into psychos."

Barr was born in Nevada, which explains her unusual given name, and grew up at a small mountain airport near Susanville, California, not far from Reno, where her parents were U.S. Forest Service pilots. After college, Barr left for New York to pursue a stage career, "acting a little Off-Broadway and waiting on tables a lot," but gave up the theater "once the national parks stole my heart." However, Bittersweet, her first published novel, was not an Anna Pigeon exploit but a story she describes with a laugh as "a neo-Gothic lesbian western." It sold just a few hundred copies in hardcover, yet a recent paperback reissue has become something of a cult hit. In comparison, there are 95,000 copies of Flashback in print.

It should surprise no one that Barr based her popular heroine on herself, though Anna, she says, has evolved in a different direction. The author, for example, married her former ranger boss at Natchez Trace, while Anna, in Flashback, has fled Mississippi to escape a marriage proposal from her lover, the local sheriff. The locales in the Anna Pigeon series are, of course, very real—parks where Barr worked or has spent time absorbing the setting. It shows in the way she vividly captures a sense of place, whether of Ellis Island's historic ruins or Glacier's grandeur:

"Mountains, not green but blue, were still streaked with snow at the summits, and long mares' tails of water cascaded over the rocky faces in tumbles and falls tracing through stone and forest for thousands of feet. The canyon they labored so hard to climb out of was no exception. A ribbon of white water, now falls, now rapids, now fishing holes, appeared and disappeared as the mountain's magic act unfolded."

To quote a review of Blood Lure from the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, "Ms. Barr draws from her own experience as a park ranger to introduce the reader to another national park in each new Pigeon adventure, and because she explains her natural settings so skillfully, no reader will finish one of her books without knowing more than when it was opened. That's an added plus to a visit with Anna Pigeon and her complex world."

One significant difference between Ranger Anna and Ranger Nevada is that the latter never drew, let alone fired, her sidearm. "I had one bad scare at Mesa Verde when a biker went ballistic after I wrote him a ticket for parking in a handicapped zone," Barr remembers. "Otherwise, the job was mostly a piece of cake."

But recent reports paint a more dangerous picture, one of rangers being assaulted more often than any other federal law-enforcement officers and being called on to deal not with routine park matters but with methamphetamine labs, alien smugglers, and, now, potential terrorists. In August 2002 a ranger at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border was slain in ambush while assisting Border Patrol agents in a drug-related investigation—the third fatal shooting of a ranger since 1998.

The reports also cite critical shortages in ranger staffing—fewer than 2,000 officers to patrol 84 million acres in 388 park units. That wouldn't surprise Nevada Barr, who, in her Anna Pigeon guise, often takes swipes at the agency on issues like the second-rate status of naturalists, interpreters, and historians, who are now called "park aides" rather than rangers.

"Little boys and girls didn't dream of growing up to be aides," mutters Anna in Hunting Season. "They dreamed of growing up to be rangers."

And, perhaps, mystery writers.

Les Line was the editor of Audubon from 1966 to 1991.

© 2003  NASI