Alaskan author John Straley has a new novel. Big Breath In is a departure from Straley’s usual terrain of small-town Alaska mystery, and is instead a story about the intersection of science and crime in the Pacific Northwest. The novel’s protagonist is based on his wife, Jan Straley, a prominent humpback whale biologist. In Big Breath In, Jan becomes a part-time, motorcycle-riding detective named Delphine, who cracks an illegal child adoption ring in the Seattle neighborhood where she’s receiving cancer treatment.
KCAW’s Robert Woolsey recently spoke with John Straley about Big Breath In, and his decision to draw characters based so closely on his own life.
Note: Big Breath In is published by SOHO Press, and will be available in bookstores this month. Straley will read from the novel 4 p.m. this Saturday, November 16, in the Sitka Public Library.
KCAW: John Straley, I read your novel Big Breath In and I want to know how in the world did you get Jan Straley to agree to this?
Straley: Well, she wasn’t all that excited about it at first, but I just kept pestering her. I told her about this idea I had for a novel about a whale biologist who was looking for the commonality between animals with big brains and the ability to move freely in their environment. And then she gets caught up in a crime story, and I wanted to use her background as the basis for the main character, because Jan has led a pretty extraordinary life. And you know, I can have all kinds of opinions about extraordinary women, but it would be better to just write from observation rather than some fat-headed opinion about women. So I just used used the details of her life, and finally she relented. But she wanted to make up her own name, and so she chose the name Delphine. And I also didn’t want to write about myself, so that’s why I decided to have myself killed off in the novel. I killed myself off because I didn’t want to write a goofy memoir, and have my own life story getting it in the way of this of the story about Jan.
KCAW: She (Delphine) frequently reminisces about John and the things that he would have told her in certain circumstances. Did Jan participate in your work to the degree that’s sort of suggested in the story?
Straley: Absolutely. Back in the late 80s, we ran a business called J. Straley Investigations, when we both did science investigations and criminal investigations. And Jan was a criminal defense investigator along with me, and I helped her with her scientific investigations. Mostly, I carried gas cans and kept the outboard running and that kind of stuff. But then, as I wrote in the book, we went to a marine mammal conference in San Francisco, and Jan’s work in Seymour Canal in the early 80s was causing quite a bit of fuss, because people didn’t know about these large groups of humpback whales that were in Seymour Canal and Pybus Bay and around there during the winter. Anyway, we went to the Marine Mammal Lab, and I’m walking around with my beautiful wife, and scientists would come up and ask her about this, and I would answer, which just angered her no end. And so that night, we split J. Straley investigations into the crime division and the science division.
KCAW: John, it’s no secret that your protagonist in this novel Big Breath In is terminally ill. Jan is not terminally ill, by the way, but Delphine is. Are you kind of hitting your forehead a little bit because you’ve created a really remarkable character in this genre? I mean, this sort of biologist/detective/motorcycle-riding in a turnout coat filled with medical supplies badass person. And I want to read more stories about Delphine, but I have a feeling this is it.
Straley: Well, I could go back from the point she dies in near contemporary time. I could write about her in the past. And there are plenty more cases that she could be doing. Jan has had Parkinson’s for almost 20 years now, and Parkinson’s is just, to me, a frustrating and horrible disease. I had plenty on my plate with this book about marine mammals, about sperm whales, about goofy crimes and crazy people in the Seattle area, and I didn’t really have the emotional bandwidth to deal with Parkinson’s, so I gave her cancer. Yeah.
