Former Park Ranger Nevada Barr has made her name writing contemporary murder mysteries featuring the beautiful scenery of various national parks. But her latest novel, Flashback (Putnam), takes readers on an unexpected turn into 19th-century American history. Sure, the narrative features an exploding speedboat and park ranger Anna Pigeon's angst over the possibility of marriage; but it also highlights a mystery involving Dr. Samuel Mudd, a prisoner at Fort Jefferson who, in 1865, was accused of aiding and abetting John Wilkes Booth. It's a piece of history few people know about.
"I didn't know about it until I got there," admits Barr during a recent interview at her home in Clinton, Mississippi. "It's a big chunk of American history that I was abysmally ignorant of." The author is beautiful enough to be a model or an actress (which she once was), and her petite frame is still thin and wiry from her days of hiking the back country in various national parks. Her voice bubbles with humor and enough energy to power a dozen cell phones. Asked if she stuck to the facts when writing the historical part of her dual-narrative mystery, Barr says facts are something she "played pretty fast and loose with. There was a yellow fever outbreak, and Dr. Mudd actually got a pardon for [caring for the ill] so beautifully. So I stuck to important facts, like who the historical figures were and where they were. But nearly everything else they did in the book, I made up."
To date, Barr has written about 11 different National Parks in her Anna Pigeon mystery series. Asked why she was drawn to Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles off Key West, for her latest novel, she replies, "Because it's a fabulous place, and because the history there is a huge part of that world. I love historical mysteries. So I thought, to refresh me and Anna, and to capture the Dry Tortugas properly, I needed to write a historical mystery. That way, readers would look at it as an extra treat—rather than an annoying deviation in the narrative."
This isn't the first time Nevada Barr has gotten the urge to write historical fiction. In fact, her first novel, Bittersweet, published in 1984 by St. Martin's, was a historical western. Barr (who claims she was born on a proscenium) was living in Minneapolis, doing industrial films and the occasional play. "I was getting tired of the fact that women's roles weren't what I thought they should be," Barr says. Being young and naïve, she wrote a novel featuring two women, thinking that after the book was published, she could star in the movie. When the movie never happened and the book didn't burn up the bestseller lists, Barr found herself following a former spouse into the Park Ranger Service. She continued to write, seeing novels get rejected and selling the occasional short story. Then, in the early '90s, "I was wandering around [a park in] Texas," Barr recalls. She was frustrated over the rejection of her last two historical novels (one based on her parents, who flew aircraft for the Forest Service while fighting fires; another based on a 1913 coal strike in Colorado). Worse, she was angry at two coworkers. "There were these persons that I felt really ought to die," Barr says with a laugh. "And I had all this time in the back country to think about it. So I plotted ways to kill them and get away with it." Thus was born the first Anna Pigeon novel, Track of the Cat (Putnam, 1993).
Oddly enough, Barr didn't plan on writing mysteries. "I chose to write that book, and it turned out to be a mystery," says Barr. "So then I had to research how to write mysteries—'cause I didn't know anything about them. But it was just going to be that one novel." Then Track of the Cat was awarded both the Agatha and Anthony Awards for best first novel, and Barr found herself with a steadily growing audience. Now, she has become a full-time writer. She only recently had a writing room (where she still writes long-hand) added onto her ranch-style home. Good thing, since she has become a staple name on bestseller lists with titles like Deep South (Putnam, 2000), Blood Lure (Putnam, 2001) and Hunting Season (Putnam, 2002). It's a development that took Barr, who retired from the Park Ranger service in '97, by surprise. "The whole situation sort of blows my mind," Barr says. "But I love it!"
For Barr, a more recent surprise came in the shape of a nonfiction book, Seeking Enlightenment, Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Look at Religion (Putnam, July 2003), which she just completed. The book was suggested by Susan Kirk, a friend of Barr's and an editor at Scribner, who once taught a "spiritual writing class" with Barr. The book, Barr says, is a collection of "short pieces on love, death, lust, grief, hope." For Barr, it's also a bit of a roadmap tracing her own spiritual development. She admits that she "started out as an atheist and slithered over into agnosticism." Barr also admits that her "brand of Christianity" is "pretty metaphorical." The book, says Barr, isn't meant as a guide to living. It's meant to evoke discussion.
Asked if the historical elements of Flashback presage a return to writing historical fiction, Barr admits that the idea remains in the back of her mind. There is something about historical fiction, she says, that allows her "more in the way of imagination and less in the way of cell phones and computers. I also liked being totally transported to another era. I was born in the wrong time," says Barr, quickly adding, "but I wouldn't live in any other [than the present]." Before the question can be asked, Barr adds, "Because there's not a tooth in my head that's not filled or crowned—in any other time, I wouldn't have any teeth!"
