For Murder Mystery Writer, Each Novel Is a Walk in a National Park

I would like to live Nevada Barr’s life. She has traveled or lived in some of the most beautiful corners of the country, and she has held jobs that are my idea of glamorous.

Barr has been an actress and a park ranger, and she is the author of 10 mysteries set in national parks. To research them she visits such places as Michigan’s Isle Royale on Lake Superior, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico and Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado.

Her most recent is “Hunting Season,” about sex, masochism, murder and mayhem along the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. I particularly enjoyed “Blind Descent” (Putnam, 1998) because it takes place in and around Lechuguilla Cave, a newly discovered underground maze near Carlsbad Caverns, my favorite dark place. I read “Ill Wind” (Putnam, 1995) on a trip to the ancient cliff dwellings of its Mesa Verde setting and just finished “Blood Lure” (Putnam, 2001), a tale about a mauling in Glacier National Park that wasn’t done by any bear.

The gumshoe in these books wears hiking boots. She is Anna Pigeon, a national park law enforcement officer stationed at the Natchez Trace Parkway. In 1993 Barr, her creator, started working along the historic, scenic corridor that runs about 450 miles from Nashville to Natchez. Anna is like Barr in other ways too; both have sisters named Molly to whom they can spill their souls, and both have firsthand knowledge of professional theater, Barr as a struggling New York actress in her salad days, Anna as an actor’s widow. But Barr is an ebullient best-selling author, while Anna has a passel of problems, including loneliness, misanthropy and alcoholism. Still, Anna can solve any murder Barr masterminds.

Along the way, readers learn about the national parks, their politics and bureaucracy, increasing crime in the wilderness, the debate about fighting naturally ignited fires or letting them burn and the long, twisted path that those who want a park service career must follow. I asked Barr about that in a recent phone conversation and got an earful. Here are some of the things she said:

Question: Anna Pigeon lives in dumps, transient national park housing. When you were a ranger did you get stuck in such places?

Answer: When I was at Mesa Verde I was low and little, so I didn’t get to live in “the tower,” a beautiful red stone building with a turret set aside for researchers, when I was there. The best places go to people who “homestead,” or spend their whole career at a single park. Promotions are hard to get if you homestead, though. Most younger park employees know they’re going to have to move if they want to get ahead. And they’re not paid much ... so they tend to live like grad students.

Q: How did you get into the park service from acting?

A: I got interested in conservation. I was acting in Minneapolis at the time, doing mostly radio voice-overs and industrial films. I found I could work ... in the parks during the summer. I started in 1989 at Isle Royale in Michigan and was just sold on it. Then the Guadalupe Mountains [in New Mexico and Texas] and two summers at Mesa Verde. After that, in 1993, I got taken on full time as a law enforcement officer at the Natchez Trace Parkway.

Q: Were you interested in law enforcement?

A: It was the best way to get a full-time job. In fact, I paid my own way through emergency medical training and law enforcement college. Later I found out that law enforcement officers in the national park service get to do all the fun stuff: search and rescue, emergency medicine, wildland firefighting.

Q: When did you start writing?

A: I started with a western, never published. Then I invented Anna, and her first book, “Track of the Cat,” came out in 1993. I found I could write and be a park ranger at the same time. I just had to get up earlier.

Q: But you’re no longer with the park service, right?

A: I left in 1995. By then I needed time to promote the books. But since I quit, I still spend two to five weeks in the parks doing research. I hang around with rangers and sleep on their sofas. Most of them have lists of people for me to kill off in my books.

Q: So are you Anna?

A: She was based on me, at the beginning. She was 38, working in the Guadalupe Mountains and tracking mountain lions when I was, for “Track of the Cat.” But Anna’s taller, smarter and braver than I.

Q: And much more messed up, I suspect.

A: [Laughs] I don’t think I’m ever going to run out of neuroses for Anna.

Q: What a great idea, detective stories in national parks. How did you come up with it?

A: Pure dumb luck. Because I was there.

Q: Anna Pigeon seldom has anything nice to say about park visitors. She seems to think they ruin the parks.

A: Anna is jaded. Not me. But think about it. When we wear clothes we wreck them. There’s nothing we can do about it, except exercise constant vigilance.

Q: And keep letting people in?

A: Yes. They belong to us.