Murder They Wrote: How the Lake Superior Region Seduces Mystery Writers

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When Brian Freeman visits Duluth, he often has murder on his mind. The best-selling mystery writer, whose main series is set in Duluth, comes north to scope out venues for his work. The books feature hard-nosed Duluth police lieutenant Jonathan Stride, and Brian already has used up a lot of murderous spaces. In just one of his mystery novels, In the Dark, five people perish in and around Lake Superior.

But Brian’s not worried about running out of places to off a few characters. Since his first visit 30 years ago as a college student, Brian has envisioned mayhem in the lakeside city with its heavy-industry history and hardscrabble past. “I remember thinking that this would be a great place to set suspense novels. Duluth holds echoes of the past, the sorrowful echo of faded glory – it’s what I like about the area.”

Our Big Lake and North Woods seem to be inspiring quite a few mystery writers these days, some with national and international audiences and others very local, even self-published. But they all love the region’s attributes for a nice little murder or two.

Two authors – Steve Hamilton, whose main character, Alex McKnight, is an ex-cop from Detroit living in Paradise, Michigan, and William Kent Krueger, whose Sheriff Corcoran O’Connor frequents settings in the fictional Tamarack County in the Arrowhead of Minnesota – have developed a name for their special place-oriented genre. “We call it,” says Steve, “North Woods Noir.”

Mystery writers are always giddy to find extreme weather and natural obstructions, leading to increased unpredictability and drama. There’s no shortage of those here.

William Kent Krueger, who goes by Kent, echoes what other writers said about the Big Lake and its value in their work.

“When you write suspense or mystery, you’re always looking for obstacles, and Lake Superior certainly offers a whole range. … When you’re on it, it can create its own microclimate. It’s enormous, it’s very, very, very cold,” says Kent.

“It’s simply that you can’t trust it. What it presents to you in one moment is not how it’s going to be in the next.”

And if you make a mistake, the consequences can be, well, murderous.

“As you know, Lake Superior is basically just called a ‘lake’ out of convenience,” says Steve. “It’s the queen of the Great Lakes – deepest, coldest, it’s just a massive force of its own. You can really make it a character of its own. The Lake itself is a beautiful, cold-hearted killer. It will turn into a monster. … Just having that menace, just having it there always, it just adds something to a story – a really good atmosphere.”

In short, you just can’t ignore Lake Superior.

“If you set a story here and you don’t use the Lake, it seems odd,” said Pat Ondarko, co-author with Deb Lewis of the Best Friends Mystery series, set in and around Ashland. Deb and Pat, whose lighthearted mysteries are more Miss Marple than Philip Marlowe, live on the Bayfield Peninsula and since leaving their professional careers – Pat was a Lutheran pastor and Deb a family practice attorney – have been writing together almost daily in local coffee joints (one of which, Black Cat Coffeehouse, became the focal point of their first book, Bad to the Last Drop). While they have no doubts about the setting of their work, Pat admits a twinge of regret at the names they chose on a whim for their characters – which are Pat and Deb. “We can’t change them now,” Pat says, since readers know them.

Author Joseph Heywood also spends much of his time in the settings of his Woods Cop mystery series, which features conservation wardens who work in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “This is the place my heart sort of sank into,” says Joe, who moved to the U.P. with his family when he was a teen.

Joe sees Lake Superior as a barrier and a gate in his work; it puts limits on what can be done and where you can go and it opens possibilities for plot twists.

From his summer residence north of Newberry, Joe can feel and smell the change in the Lake’s moods. “The Lake is alive to me. With the snap of fingers, she brings something completely new.”

Joe’s main recurring character has been game warden Grady Service. In his latest mystery, Red Jacket, Joe keeps the U.P. setting, but tries a new take on a conservation warden’s work with the introduction of a new character, Lute Bapcat, and new time frame, 1913. In it, Joe’s characters contend with 300 to 400 inches of snow in 1913 Keweenaw Peninsula during the copper miner’s strike.

While Joe, Pat and Deb reside on Lake Superior all or part of the year, the other authors have to do homework here. For his third mystery, Stalked, Brian Freeman stayed in a cottage on Park Point in January. “I poured all of that into the story. The place is absolutely bound into the DNA of my novels and is really important to me that readers get that powerful sense of where they are in my books.”

Brian, who lives in a small community near the Twin Cities, says after he’s outlined one of his mysteries, he heads to Duluth to scope out place settings just as a film director might.

Steve Hamilton, who now lives in New York state, grew up “below the bridge” in lower Michigan by Detroit, visiting the “exotic” U.P. – a different world. The setting Up North makes great landscapes and the character quirks make great characters, he says. “Just like everybody else, you go up north for vacation. That’s how you got to know – especially in Michigan – it’s really two whole different worlds. … The people who were there were like these amazing pioneer-spirit people.”

Kent also discovered his favorite locale Up North, but in Minnesota. “I was vacationing in the Arrowhead region, at a YMCA camp north of Ely, when I discovered that remarkable geography and thought, ‘Somebody should be writing about this place.’” For Kent in his Corcoran O’Connor series, the Lake sets the mood – and creates mystery. “It’s vast, beautiful and an unforgiving and enormous spirit,” he says. “The wilderness is a frightening thing for most people. God knows what could happen … because it’s not just a setting. When you use Lake Superior, it becomes a huge element, it becomes a character. It’s so mythic, it suggests atmosphere, it suggests theme, it suggests history – it’s so wonderfully mysterious. It’s a very scary lake.” And so he portrayed it in Purgatory Ridge, when O’Connor dives on a wreck “down in this lake, so cold that if anything happens, you die down there and your body remains.”

Sometimes these mystery writers do allow the Lake’s gentler side to come out.

In Now & Zen, Pat and Deb begin their story on a ferryboat heading to Madeline Island – in sunshine. Pat says they wanted readers to think of the island as a magical place at the start. “We described that the boat kissed the shore,” she says. “We could have had the ferry come in in the fog and that would set a different mood – weather does that.”

While he uses the Lake to heighten fears and darken moods, Steve says he’s also set his novels during the U.P.’s most pleasant months, showing why his character feels so at home there. “A couple of them are right in the middle of summer, when it’s really the most beautiful place in the world. That’s what Alex believes.”

Where the books are set affects the characters as much as the authors. It’s the kind of place where people duck their heads and head into a nor’easter, Brian says. His moody, haunted Jonathan Stride “is much a character of the Northland. You can’t take Stride out of Duluth, and if you do, he keeps coming home.”

Steve says his retired Detroit cop Alex McKnight also found home in Paradise, a place to heal after the loss of his partner in the city. The character’s dad left him small rental cabins and the chance at a new career (along with becoming a private eye, of course). “There was just something about the place that felt like home to him, that he should stay there,” says Steve. “He’s not a yooper, he’s a troll. He’s not a true yooper, but he just belongs there. If you want to be by yourself, it’s a great place for that. … The more time he stays there, he belongs there.”

Alex also fits with the independent types the Lake seems to attract.

Joe agrees that the setting and the people blend. “People have to be tough to live here – there’s no lightweights living up here – and my characters reflect those qualities.”

Joe, who spends a month riding with conservation wardens every year, adds with a laugh, “This is an euphemism-free zone. People up here speak their minds.”

And speak their own language, Pat says. “Like ‘hotdish’ versus ‘covered dish’ or ‘cuppa’ versus ‘cup of’ – we incorporate the language of this Lake.”

Within the broader range of the Lake Superior region, the authors sometimes just find the perfect setting for action.

Kent, who lives in St. Paul, knew he wanted to set a story at Thunder Bay because he believes the name alone evokes mystery and wonder.

Steve’s newest book, Misery Bay, earned its name and setting from a chance encounter with the real bay. He stumbled upon it while traveling along M-26 on the Keweenaw Peninsula and noted the sign. “Misery Bay … that’s the greatest name for a place. It wasn’t on any map. It’s just a straight road that goes to a dead end and then you turn around. … I thought, ‘Sault Ste. Marie, it was just like Times Square compared to this place.’”

Looking onto the bay in Lake Superior, at a spot tourists in the know consider a remote “gem,” Steve, being a mystery writer, had a whole different set of thoughts: “What could happen here? What’s the worst thing I can imagine happening here? … That’s really where that whole book came from.”

Despite the often remote, little-known settings of these mystery books, the authors are finding audiences around the world.

Brian’s discovered that Italy loves Duluth and Jonathan Stride. The readership there has been strong.

Steve’s books, too, have had international circulation. He is amused by the reactions of those “who don’t even know how big the Lake is, who think you can see across it.”

When he tells them the lake is bigger than 13 of the states, “it just sounds like the most exotic place to them.” Now that his novels are in Chinese, he adds, “I just can’t imagine what some kid in China, reading these in Chinese, thinks about Lake Superior.”

Quality writing helps to get these novels circulated wide and far. Steve’s first book set in the U.P., Cold Day in Paradise, got into print after it won the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA)/St. Martin’s Press Award for Best First Mystery by an Unpublished Writer. Once in print, it won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel and the PWA Shamus Award for Best First Novel.

While these authors bring the Big Lake to the rest of the world, they also can remind locals of what mystique our giant blue horizon carries by giving us a new perspective.

In Thunder Bay, Kent has Ojibwe elder Henry Meloux, “the oldest man” O’Connor knew, recount his first airplane flight.

“To see the earth as an eagle would, what magic,” writes Kent. “Near noon, a great shining water appeared ahead of them. The plane began its descent. Wellington finally spoke to Henry. ‘Lake Superior.’

“‘Kitchigami,’ Henry thought. He’d never seen the big water, though it was well known to him.”

Brian Freeman

Main character: Police Lt. Jonathan Stride

Main locale: Duluth, Minnesota

No. of books: 12, with 7 in Stride series

Latest release: Goodbye to the Dead

More: www.bfreemanbooks.com

William Kent Krueger

Main character: Tamarack County Sheriff Cork O’Connor

Main locale: Minnesota Arrowhead

No. of books: 16, with 14 in O’Connor series

Latest release: Windigo Island

More: www.williamkentkrueger.com

Deb Lewis & Pat Ondarko

Main characters: Pat Kerry and Deb Lindberg

Main locale: Ashland, Wisconsin

No. of books: 4 in Best Friends series

Latest release: Murder on the Bridge

More: Best Friends Mysteries’ Facebook page

Steve Hamilton

Main character: Retired Detroit cop Alex McKnight

Main locale: Paradise, Michigan

No. of books: 13, with 10 in the McKnight series

Latest McKnight release: Let It Burn

More: www.authorstevehamilton.com

Joseph Heywood

Main characters: Game Wardens Grady Service and Lute Bapcat

Main locale: Newberry, Michigan

No. of books: 15, with 10 in the Woods Cop series

Latest release: Buckular Dystrophy

More: www.joeheywood.com

More Big Lake Mystery

The bodies are piling up around the Big Lake as the mystery & thriller genres thrive in our North Woods settings. Here are a few additional books – big press, small press or e-press, released recently:

Superior Run by Tom Wells

Paul Findley comes to the aid of his friend Rich, who seems targeted for murder by a ruthless foe as the two race for Canada across Lake Superior in Paul’s yacht, Pipe Dream. www.createspace.com/3649470

Latent Lives by Larry Parr

After a brutal murder, Linda LaVaque, the daughter of Duluth’s mayor, seeks help from former police detective John Stauber, himself on the skids. First in the series. www.blueoakbooks.com

A Superior Mystery by Carl Brookins

A P.R. (that’s right, NOT a P.I.) agent and avid sailor tumbles into a northern Wisconsin mystery involving two bodies, timber salvaging and an unexplained fire. This is the second in the Michael Tanner series. www.carlbrookins.com

Superior Dilemma by Matthew Williams

A champion musher with a troubled past, an ex-FBI agent obsessed with an unsolved case, a woman whose daughter went missing 14 years ago – small-town reporter Vince Marshall ties it all together on “Apostle Bay.” Third in the series. www.webpages.charter.net/mshsswim/mysterymatt.htm

Julie Buckles is a freelance journalist who lives and works in Washburn, Wisconsin.