Dana Stabenow

• Born: March 27, 1952
• Place of Birth: Anchorage, Alaska

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; private investigator; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Kate Shugak, 1992-2023; Liam Campbell, 1998-2021; Silk and Song Trilogy, 2014-2015; Star Svensdotter, 1991-1995; Eye of Isis, 2018-2022

Contribution

Dana Stabenow won critical and commercial success with her first mystery novel, A Cold Day for Murder (1992), which won the 1993 Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best original paperback. The novel was innovative in two ways. First, it is set in Alaska, which is almost a character in its own right and, as showed, is almost creative in the many ways its environment can kill people. Although Stabenow is not the first mystery writer to use Alaska as a setting, she is the most popular of a new group of Alaska-based mystery writers, the first of whom was Sean Hanlon, who published The Cold Front in 1989.

Second, the main character, Kate Shugak, is both a female detective and an Indigenous American. Neither concept is original. Female detectives are at least as old as ’s Miss Marple, and there were Indigenous American detectives even before began to write his many books featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. Along with Jean Hager and her Molly Bearpaw series, Stabenow is one of the first mystery writers to combine the two groups into one detective.

Biography

Dana Helen Stabenow was born in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 27, 1952. Her grandfather was the first DC-3 pilot for Alaska Airlines. She grew up on a seventy-five-foot fish tender named the Celtic in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound and lived with her mother, Joan Perry Barnes, a deckhand. Her mother, an avid reader, could bake bread, skin and butcher a moose, pluck and cook ducks, and help maintain and run a fishing boat. Stabenow’s earliest memory is of her mother reading the story of Snow White to her, and Stabenow learned to read before entering kindergarten. She read all the Nancy Drew books in the local library’s collection in about a month; however, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951) hooked Stabenow on the mystery genre. She graduated from Seldovia High School in 1969 while working part-time for an air taxi service. Then she put herself through college working as an egg grader, bookkeeper, and expediter for Whitney-Fidalgo Seafoods in Anchorage. She received a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1973.

After graduation, Stabenow backpacked around Europe for four months. After her return, she worked in public relations for Alyeska Pipeline at Galbraith Lake and later for British Petroleum at Prudhoe Bay. In 1982, she enrolled in the University of Alaska-Anchorage’s Master of Fine Arts program, from which she graduated in 1985. She began to write seriously at this time. She sold her first novel, Second Star (1991), to Ace Science Fiction in 1990. It was the first of three books in her Star Svensdotter series, set in the near future when people are moving off the planet.

In 1991, Laura Anne Gilman, Stabenow’s editor at Ace, learned that she had an unsold two-hundred-page mystery novel that she had written two years earlier. After reading the manuscript, Gilman agreed to publish A Cold Day for Murder (1992) and offered Stabenow a contract for three books featuring Kate Shugak as the main character. When Gilman moved to another publisher, Stabenow started the Liam Campbell series. In 2006, she published her first thriller, Blindfold Game. Stabenow spent sixteen days on board the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley on patrol in the Bering Sea to collect background information. She became president of the Alaska chapter of Sisters in Crime and has written the travel column for Alaska magazine. By the mid-2020s, Stabenow had established herself as a prolific writer and had published several series. She continued her Kate Shugak mysteries, publishing Not the Ones Dead in 2023. Her other series include: Liam Campbell, 1998-2021; Silk and Song Trilogy, 2014-2015; Star Svensdotter, 1991-1995; and Eye of Isis, 2018-2022. 

Analysis

Like , Dana Stabenow regards the mystery novel as a kind of fantasy in which good always wins out over evil, and all mysteries are solved by the end of the book. This is generally true of Stabenow’s fiction. She tends to portray law enforcement officers in a positive light. They have flaws, but with few exceptions, they are honest and always want to do the right thing. She portrays her detectives as loners who often have problems with their relationships.

Kate Shugak Series

The Kate Shugak series originated when Stabenow visited an aunt moving from Wrangell-St. Elias National Park to take a job elsewhere. Stabenow tried to imagine what kind of person would want to live in the park and decided to write about an Aleut whose family had been displaced by the Japanese occupation of the islands of Kiska and Attu during World War II and forced to move to the interior of Alaska. She named the female protagonist Kate, after Katherine, an Aleut who was her childhood best friend. She then met several people who made negative comments about the National Park Service, which provided her with a plot involving the murder of a park ranger.

At the beginning of A Cold Day for Murder, the first book in the series, Kate Shugak is angry at the world. She has a severe scar where a child molester stabbed her, and she resigned from her position as an investigator a year before. In one scene, Kate attacks Jack Morgan, her former boss and occasional lover. The series continues for several books before she learns to accept who and what she is. Her relatives regard her as strange for wanting to live in the wilderness rather than with them in the village of Niniltna (population around four hundred) twenty-five miles away, but she is angry at them, too. In Blood Will Tell (1996), she is dragged, kicking and screaming, into Indigenous American politics when someone starts to murder the members of the Niniltna Native Association board of directors. In Breakup (1997), she becomes a tribal leader. In The Singing of the Dead (2001), Shugak is head of security for a political campaign when staff members start to turn up dead. Subsequent volumes in this series include Killing Grounds (1998), Hunter's Moon (1999), Midnight Come Again (2000), The Singing of the Dead (2001), A Fine and Bitter Snow (2002), A Grave Denied (2003), A Taint in the Blood (2004), A Deeper Sleep (2007), Whisper to the Blood (2009), A Night Too Dark (2010), Though Not Dead (2011), Restless in the Grave (2012), Bad Blood (2013), Less Than a Treason (2017), No Fixed Line (2020), and Not the Ones Dead (2023).

Liam Campbell Series

Stabenow originally considered creating a series around Jim “Chopper Jim” Chopin, a state police officer who is a recurring character in the Kate Shugak series and one of Kate’s lovers. However, the publishing rights to the character were held by Berkeley, and Laura Anne Gilman, the editor who had requested the new series, had moved to ROC/Dutton. So, Stabenow created a new character, Liam Campbell, based on a state trooper who was responsible for the deaths of three people in one of the national parks. In the first book in the series, Fire and Ice (1998), Campbell is demoted and posted to the fishing village of Newenham (population two thousand) as punishment for his negligence in allowing five people to die of exposure.

Shugak and Campbell differ in many ways. The most obvious is their gender. Shugak is an Alaska native whose family has been in Alaska for centuries; Campbell moved there as an adult. Campbell tends to become involved in more action than Shugak does. For example, in So Sure of Death (1999), Campbell jumps out of a Super Cub airplane in flight while chasing a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle driven by the novel’s villain. Campbell is also involved in more sexual encounters as he is a good-looking, highly masculine officer who would not be out of place in a genre romance. Although Shugak loves Jack Morgan, their relationship is strictly on her own terms. Conversely, Campbell is not in control of his relationship with Wyanet Chouinard, a female bush pilot. Finally, Shugak is more of an outlaw, and Campbell is more of a straight arrow. In Blood Will Tell (1996), for example, Shugak commits identity theft against Jack Morgan’s former wife and breaks into the office of a prominent Anchorage attorney; Campbell would never break the rules like that.

In Better to Rest (2002), Campbell has the opportunity to return to Anchorage from his exile and advance up the ranks of the state police but has to decide between Wyanet, who does not want to move from Newenham and his career. Her family is from the area, and she has an adopted son, Tim, whom she would prefer to raise in a small town. In this novel, Stabenow uses multiple points of view, although all of the point-of-view characters live in Newenham. Stabenow added to this series in 2021 with Spoils of the Dead.

Blindfold Game

Blindfold Game (2006), a thriller, is not part of the Shugak or Campbell series. Much of the story is set in Alaska and the surrounding waters, but the action also takes place in Thailand, Hong Kong, North Korea, London, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Russia. In Blindfold Game, terrorists set off a bomb in Thailand and seek to explode a “dirty” nuclear bomb in Anchorage by firing a short-range missile from a hijacked freighter. However, killing thousands of people is only a means to their end, as their ultimate goal is to provoke a war between the United States and North Korea.

The female protagonist is Lieutenant Commander Sara Lange, executive officer on the Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth. The cutter normally patrols the Northern Pacific and the Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia, looking for Russian trawlers fishing illegally, protecting legal fishing boats from organizations such as Greenpeace, and rescuing victims of storms and other accidents. Lange is married to Hugh Rincon, her high school sweetheart in Alaska, but is now an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. Their long separations have put a strain on their relationship, and they are contemplating divorce.

The villains are two North Korean brothers, Ja Yong-bae, aka Smith, and Ja Bae-ho, aka Jones; a half-Norwegian, half-Chinese maritime shipping expert named Mr. Noortman; and a Chinese pirate named Fang. Noortman and Fang already have a business relationship, and Noortman identifies ships for Fang to hijack. Hugh discovers their plot from a CIA informer, but his superiors do not believe him because they are focused on Arab, not Asian, terrorists. Luckily for Hugh, he finds an ally in Kyle Chase, a friend from high school who is now a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent based in Anchorage.

Principal Series Characters:

• Kate Shugak is a five-foot-tall Aleut who was once an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney’s office. When the series starts, she lives in a cabin without electricity or running water on a 160-acre homestead in a fictional national park based on Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska. She inherited the place from her parents, and her only companion is Mutt, a female half-wolf, half-husky. Her acquaintances, friends, and lovers include miners, hunters, trappers, anglers, bush pilots, park rangers, police officers, and petty criminals. She has relatives nearby but prefers to avoid them.
• Liam Campbell is an Alaska state police officer. Although he was an Air Force brat, he is afraid of flying, much to the disgust of his pilot father, a colonel still on active duty. His life is a mess at the start of the series. His son was killed and his wife put in a coma by a drunk driver; he was demoted after an entire family died on his watch; and he feels guilty that, shortly before the auto accident in which his wife was injured, he had fallen in love with another woman.

Bibliography

Baxter, Adelyn. “Dana Stabenow Talks about her Latest Crime Novel, her Writing Career and her Support for Women Writers.” Alaska Public Media, 6 Feb. 2021, alaskapublic.org/2021/02/06/dana-stabenow-talks-about-her-latest-crime-novel-her-writing-career-and-her-support-for-women-writers. Accessed 24 July 2024.

Dahlin, Robert. “Movable Authors, Stationary Backlist.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 245, no. 42, 19 Oct. 1998, p. 39.

Dana Stabenow – The Official Blog, blog.stabenow.com. Accessed 24 July 2024.

Doran, Leslie. “Dana Doubles the Trouble: Stabenow Busy with Two Series.” Denver Post, 12 Dec. 2004, p. F12.

La Plante, Jane. Review of The Singing of the Dead, by Dana Stabenow. Library Journal, vol. 126, no. 8, 1 May 2001, p. 132.

Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley. Great Women Mystery Writers. 2d ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Lindsey, Beth. Review of Blindfold Game, by Dana Stabenow. Library Journal, vol. 131, no. 1, Jan. 2006, pp. 102-103.

O’Brien, Sue. Review of A Deeper Sleep, by Dana Stabenow. Booklist, vol. 103, no. 4, 15 Oct. 2006, p. 33.