Defiance Press: Rick, your background in law enforcement clearly influences your writing in profound ways. You spent time as a Military Police Officer, worked pipeline security, and served as a detective with the Anchorage Police Department. How does this experience translate into your fiction?
Rick Steeby: Having been a detective and crime scene investigator, the police procedural mystery is the easiest genre for me to conceptualize. But it goes deeper than just knowing how investigations work. Police work teaches you about people – what drives them to make terrible decisions, how they react under pressure, what they’re capable of when they think no one’s watching.
As a Military Police Officer, I wrote reports and learned to type – this was back when that wasn’t a given for men. Then as a security officer on the Alyeska Pipeline and later with APD, I wrote similar reports on a MAC Plus computer. I owned and used one of the first word processor programs. So I was comfortable with the mechanics of putting words on a page long before I tried fiction.
Defiance Press: You’ve mentioned working crimes against children. That must have been incredibly difficult work.
Rick Steeby: Those two years working crimes against children at APD probably burned up all my enthusiasm for police work, honestly. It’s work that stays with you. A part of investigating those cases is not victimizing the child again by revealing to the world what happened to them. So as an investigator, you cannot discuss your day at the dinner table or at parties. You carry those stories alone.
I wrote a scene in my second manuscript, Getting Home, that brought me to tears because it touched on a subject that haunts me to this day. The main character Jake, based roughly on my life, has an encounter with a street walker named Jody. She discusses her past, and not surprisingly to Jake, the abuse she suffered as a child and the family dynamics that led her to the streets.
Jake – and I – realized that it might have been better to have seen someone for help processing all of that. Writing about it actually helped me deal with some of those experiences, even though it was written two decades after leaving that job.
Defiance Press: How does your law enforcement background influence the way you approach mysteries and crime fiction?
Rick Steeby: I know how investigations really work, especially in the time period I’m writing about – 1960s Alaska. Back then, we didn’t have DNA testing, no instant forensic results, no computer databases. Complex cases in Alaska tended to drag on from winter to fishing season because of limited resources and communication challenges.
When I write about my character Wyatt dealing with a murder in remote Alaska, I know what the limitations would have been. No backup is coming quickly. There’s no crime lab to process evidence. You’re dealing with people who might not trust law enforcement, or who have their own reasons for not cooperating. The isolation changes everything about how a case develops.
Defiance Press: Your stories are set in an era when Alaska was still transitioning from territory to statehood. How did that affect law enforcement?
Rick Steeby: It was the Wild West in many ways. The state government and state law enforcement were still figuring out how to transition from federal territory to statehood. We didn’t even have a Medical Examiner’s Office or a state crime lab when I was growing up there.
I want to portray how things really played out when Alaskans were still in that transition. Sometimes the law was what a man carried with him, especially in remote areas. The badge meant something different then – it carried more personal responsibility because you might be the only law for hundreds of miles.
Defiance Press: You’ve mentioned that the badge itself is almost a character in Gold Miner’s Daughter. Can you explain that?
Rick Steeby: The weight of Wyatt’s badge – not the physical heft but the implied responsibility – is amplified by his family legacy and what he perceives as past failures. His father and uncle were Texas Rangers. That’s a lot to live up to, especially when you’ve already failed once as a police officer.
The badge is far more meaningful to Wyatt than he realizes until he’s stripped of everything else. When he’s faced with trying to stay alive, the one thing he can’t give up is the badge. It represents not just authority, but duty, family honor, and his own sense of who he’s supposed to be. At the climax of the story, it all comes full circle.
Defiance Press: How do you balance authenticity with entertainment in your crime fiction?
Rick Steeby: The crucial part for me is that I want to be entertained first. I don’t want to be preached to about anything. Life and books have politics, religion, and moral questions, but they should be secondary to the story. When a story pounds on a moral or political view, you lose me as a reader.
I read lots of Tom Clancy, and no doubt there’s a political backdrop in his work, but it never gets in the way of an entertaining story. The authors don’t let it break out in song and dance, if you know what I mean. The authenticity serves the story, not the other way around.
Defiance Press: Speaking of influences, who are the crime writers that have shaped your approach?
Rick Steeby: Lee Child and Craig Johnson, hands down. When I first wrote Escape from Playa del Carmen, a writer friend said it sounded like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. I said, “Who?” Well, I went to the library and found out. Then my best friend read one of my stories and said I wrote like Craig Johnson. I said, “Who?” “The guy who wrote the Longmire books.” “There are books?” Back to the library!
Both authors now occupy a lot of real estate on my bookshelves. I’m also impressed with the work Marc Cameron is doing with his Arliss Cutter books – mysteries set in modern-day Alaska. His success and Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak series make me hopeful there’s a place in the market for my Alaska mysteries.
Defiance Press: What’s different about writing crime fiction set in Alaska versus other locations?
Rick Steeby: Alaska changes everything. The isolation, the weather, the type of people who choose to live there – it all affects how crimes happen and how they’re investigated. In the Lower 48, you might have backup twenty minutes away. In Alaska, especially in the ’60s, backup might be a day away, if it comes at all.
The people are different too. Many came to Alaska to escape something or to start over. They’re self-reliant by necessity, suspicious of outside authority sometimes, but they’ll also risk their lives to help a neighbor. That creates unique dynamics for both criminals and law enforcement.
Defiance Press: Any advice for other writers wanting to write authentic crime fiction?
Rick Steeby: Write what you know, or get to know what you want to write. I have friends who were old timers on APD and Alaska State Troopers who can advise me about procedures and attitudes from different eras. Research the specifics – what technology was available, what laws existed, how communication worked.
But most importantly, remember that crime fiction is about people first. The crime is just the catalyst that reveals character. Focus on why people do what they do, how they react under pressure, what they’re willing to sacrifice or compromise. That’s what makes a story compelling, not just the puzzle of whodunit.
Experience authentic crime fiction rooted in real law enforcement experience in “Gold Miner’s Daughter” – coming soon from Defiance Press and Publishing.
