PORT ANGELES — Rummaging around in old bones apparently whips up a pretty good appetite.
In Sequim author Aaron Elkins’ latest Gideon Oliver mystery, Skull Duggery, the nerdy anthropology professor-cum crime fighter spends a great deal of time sampling the cuisine of his latest locale, Oaxaca, Mexico.
Like most of Elkins’ two dozen previous crime novels, this one features an exotic location and equally exotic food.
Elkins will read from Skull Duggery at the Raymond Carver Room at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., at 7 p.m. Friday.
The 74-year-old author, who has lived on the North Olympic Peninsula on and off for 25 years, and his real life wife, Charlotte, traveled to Mexico about a year and a half ago and stayed at the scene of the crime, so to speak, the tiny town of Teotitlan.
Thorough research
They also ate every meal depicted in the book, including “Oaxacan-style gazpacho, made with eggs and sour cream, garnished with jicama and cumin-coated tortilla chips,” and “caguesa,” a “pungent and delicious stew of chicken, tomato and toasted corn, perfectly flavored with garlic and served with melt-in-your-mouth fresh corn tortillas and rice.”
“My characters like fancy food,” he said. “And when you bring a notebook along and take notes while you’re eating, you get really good service.”
Perhaps that is also food for thought; fodder to figure out the complicated plots of the mystery novel and the mystery of writing.
“It’s magic — writing, isn’t it?” he said.
Elkins said he starts with the “kernel” of a story, the skeleton so to speak, and then fleshes it out.
“I don’t do an outline so much as a set of scenes, or episodes,” he said. “I don’t really know my characters until about 70 or 80 pages into the book.”
In this latest offering, Oliver and his wife, Olympic National park ranger Jane Oliver, take a “working vacation” to a small hacienda dude ranch/resort owned by her distant relatives in a remote Mexican village.
It’s not long before the bones start popping up –one mummy and two partial skeletons, plus one “fresh” death while they are there.
Elkins draws on his real-life past as a professor of forensic anthropology to pack the story with detailed descriptions of bones that go far beyond “the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone.”
Oliver’s wife jokes about giving him secret signals to let him know when he is veering into lecture mode and needs to pull back, but Elkins has no such cues when his character is inspecting skeletons.
He is free to indulge in lengthy lectures about skeletal maturation and sexual differentiation, or postmortem versus perimortem damage and how to tell the difference, while the reader has no choice but to follow along — or stop reading.
He balances this with the soap opera-like details of the dysfunctional dude ranch-owning family, going back to the ranch’s purchase in 1947 by the patriarch Tony, a three-pack-a-day smoker who eventually died of emphysema.
If at times readers wonder if Elkins may have finally run out of fresh ideas, they’re not alone — he fears that with every book.
“I always feel like the well has dried up — that’s it,” he said recently over coffee. “How many things can you do with bones?
“But I know something will come along. It always does.”
Sixteen books
Faithful readers have been following the adventures of Gideon Oliver for 16 books now, so he probably doesn’t have to worry about losing them.
One of the draws is the armchair traveler aspect, with each book taking the reader to locations around the world — including one, The Dark Place, set on the West End and at Lake Quinault.
It’s not a coincidence they are also highly desirable travel destinations.
“I don’t pick places I don’t want to go,” he said. “None of my books are set in Rwanda or Kosovo.”
Elkins began writing his first Gideon Oliver book, Fellowship of Fear, while still a university professor in San Francisco, working before and after classes.
That first novel took 14 months to complete. And how long does it take now that he is retired from teaching and writing full time?
“About 14 months. It’s not how much time, but how much psychic energy you have,” he said.
While Elkin’s books deal in murder, they are fairly gore-free.
“If I don’t like to read about it, I won’t write it,” he said.
He notes there is also no sex in the Gideon Oliver series. In the first two books, he thought he had to include it, so he added two gratuitous scenes per book.
But when Oliver got married in book three, Elkins decided writing, and reading, about marital sex was not going to be interesting to his readers.
Elkins’ first novel was adapted for a TV series called “Gideon Oliver,” in 1989.
The show starred Lou Gossett, Jr., who was a social — not forensic — anthropology professor at Columbia University, rather than the fictitious University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus in Elkins’ novels.
The TV Oliver was a widower, his wife replaced by a crime-fighting teen daughter.
“I said to my agent, ‘why are they paying me for this?’ He told me to keep quiet.
TV show ‘awful’
“It ran for one season –it was awful, it failed, deservedly.”
However remote the resemblance to the literary character Elkins created, the show made Gideon Oliver a recognizable name.
“I get people all the time at readings who say they saw the show,” he said.
Despite the years of steady fan devotion, Elkins said he remains unconvinced he is a “good” writer.
“I’m not that confident in my writing,” he said. “I think it’s garbage for about five years. After that I think it’s OK.”
His peers think otherwise. Elkins won a Best Novel Edgar Award — named after Edgar Allen Poe — for Old Bones in 1988 from the Mystery Writers of America, and his work has been published in more than a dozen languages.
He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times’ travel magazine, has written for Smithsonian magazine and has written five books in collaboration with his wife.
________
Features Editor Marcie Miller can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at marcie.miller@peninsuladailynews.com.
