About Me

I was born in 1953 and grew up in Chugiak, Alaska, from 1954 to 1993. Not Anchorage — Chugiak. Rural edge of a wilderness, but not isolated. My dad came up to work at Elmendorf AFB and stayed 35 years, first as a civil contractor and later as an administrator. A lot of men in that neighborhood had similar stories. They came for work, stayed for the place, and built something from scratch. So did Alaska — it wasn't even a state yet when I arrived.

Most of the men in the neighborhood were veterans of WWII or Korea. Doc McGregor — he appears in Gold Miner's Daughter — landed in Africa, then fought through Italy, and came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day. My dad told funny stories about Korea and left the rest alone. My grandfather and his father before him served as well. That was simply the family I was born to. Hard men who didn't talk much about hard things.

My first paid job was yard work at age ten. At twelve, I was delivering the Knik Arm Courier. I helped neighbors put additions on their homes, cleared trees, and did whatever was available. Truthfully, I worked to support a candy habit until it became a car addiction. My mother didn't push me toward it. She didn't get in the way of my initiative either.

At Chugiak High School, I excelled at gym class and wood shop, with a 4.0 GPA. English and math, I got what was required to play sports. I played all of them — baseball, basketball, track, cross-country, and football. Six coaches shaped who I became: Hunk Patronovich, Lee Jordan, Tom Huffer, Andy Kirk, Harry MacDonald, and Don Sanders. I remember every name because the lessons stuck. In Denis Harm’s wood shop over four years, I built the required cutting boards, a crossbow, kitchen cabinets, and a hand-carved Fickled Finger of Fate. That last one probably tells you more about me than the rest of this newsletter will.

After high school, I served in the Army, 1972 to 1975 — Military Police, 15th MP Brigade, 94th MP Battalion, C-Company, 3rd Platoon, Germany. My dad's generation, my grandfather's generation. It felt like the natural next step. My service era doesn't appear directly in my books yet — I am still writing the early 1960s — but wearing the uniform, the badge, the blue collar, and the disposition all showed up in other forms.

When I came home, I worked security on the pipeline construction, oil fields, and later as a police officer in Anchorage. That job taught me something that has never left me. Almost everyone has a public face and a much darker private one. Occasionally — rarely — you find someone no one seems to know much about who is quietly successful and quietly generous. Those people fascinate me most.

One Sunday morning, I saw two young women dressed for church. Hours earlier, I had seen both of them working a corner on Spenard Road. Neither of them had a happy ending in their lives. I have never forgotten them. The women I write in my books are not naive, and they are not fragile, and that is not an accident.

I grew up in a neighborhood where I knew women of every variety — independent ones, fearless ones, nurses, artists, mothers, cops, and women who worked the streets of Anchorage in what we called the life back then. Mom was strong, smart, hard-working, and eventually worked from postal clerk to Postmaster in Chugiak. One woman, everyone in the neighborhood knew, started as a camp follower during construction of the Alcan Highway, swore in a way that would make a sailor blush, made no bones about how she got to Alaska, and spent fifty years turning a storefront business into a multimillion-dollar company by the early 2000s. For readers of my books who knew her, the name will be enough. She is in there. She earned her place.

If you want to know how those experiences shaped the way I write women, then read mystery novels. They come with unexpected twists and surprises and are very resilient. That should cover it.

After police work, I moved in and out of contracting, sales, and eventually earned a Computer Science degree and spent years as a network administrator. The office was never where I worked — I was always out with the equipment or with the people who needed help. Then my joints gave out and took my contracting business with it. The replacements were successful, but they are not original equipment, and construction work was no longer an option.

So, I wrote a book. At first, it was a bucket list item to publish one book, check the box. Then I discovered I had more stories than I will ever have time to write. When that first book arrived, and I held it in my hands, I thought I might actually be a writer.

The moment I knew for certain came at a book club at a senior facility, it was my first meet-the-author event. They came in with passages underlined and questions about specific characters. They had lived with the story. In a small group of readers, that was more rewarding than I expected and more than I will easily forget.

My series begins in 1960 in Chicken, Alaska, with the first book. Double-Sided Coin, set in 1961, has not been released yet. The third book arrives in 2027 and is set in 1962. There are two or three more books before the series reaches 1964 and the greatest natural disaster in Alaska's history, the earthquake, and I was present as a ten-year-old boy in Chugiak.

I write blue-collar characters because I am one. I write veterans, hunters, fishermen, miners, cops, and athletes because I know them. I write about independent and fearless women because those are the ones I have respected most, regardless of their morals by society’s standards.

My editor says the book is a product of who I am. I still think the real product is the book. But she may have a point.

— Rick Steeby