And the world of detective fiction rolled on, Straley says, feeding market demand for characters who were also archetypes: the former cop, male or female, who is a fallen angel looking for redemption.īut has the genre finally rolled around to a complicated figure like Cecil Younger? SoHo Press thinks so. There were also some setbacks in his private life: His wife Jan, a noted biologist and authority on humpback whales, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Straley himself underwent several surgeries, but nevertheless lost vision in his right eye.
Straley was lukewarm on writing a seventh novel in a series that didn’t seem all that successful. Cecil Younger inhabited a dark, cultureless realm of addicts and thugs he struggled with alcohol and other problems. Straley says there was an assumption around his first book, The Woman Who Married a Bear, that he would weave his mysteries into the fabric of Northwest Coast Native culture - as author Tony Hillerman has done in the American Southwest.īut that was never Straley’s intention. The Cecil Younger series was launched with high hopes from Straley’s publisher, Soho Press, which later sold the rights to the series to the Bantam Books imprint of Random House. And then try to find another crazy person in the world out there who agrees with me, and then see how it goes.” To try to figure out what people are going to like, and to write to that. “I never thought to write about what would be popular. “I’m going to send her a box of chocolates,” says Straley.īut why has it been so long since Cecil Younger prowled the underbelly of crime in Alaska? Straley says he thought no one liked the guy. His recent nonfiction biography, Animal Nature: A Portrait of Burgess Bauder, is available in a limited edition only at Old Harbor Books in Sitka.Īlthough it’s been 17 years since we’ve seen Cecil Younger, the character’s creator John Straley has not been absent from the literary scene.* He’s published two other novels - The Big Both Ways and Cold Storage, Alaska - and plans for this latter book to become the first in an all-new mystery series about a fictional Southeast Alaskan town of the same name.Īmong the surprises for Straley after the release of “Baby’s First Felony”: a thumbs up from the New York Times mystery critic Marilyn Stasio. Note: John Straley’s novels are available anywhere books are sold. After a 17-year break, Sitka-based author John Straley has published the seventh installment in his series featuring fictional investigator Cecil Younger, Baby’s First Felony.
One of Alaska’s most prolific mystery novelists has returned to his roots. Anything can happen here.” (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey) “I love Sitka as a place to live,” he says, “and I love it as a setting for a story. Novelist John Straley in downtown Sitka, not far from the home of his fictional antihero Cecil Younger.
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