Glacier National Park Mystery Series

Sarah Harrison  00:24
Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters  00:35
And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison  00:40
… but not a toxin … 

Carolyn Daughters  00:42
And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer. 

Carolyn Daughters  00:47
Sarah, we have a great episode today. Before we get too deep, I’d love to introduce today’s sponsor. Our sponsor is Grace Sigma, a boutique process engineering consultancy run by our own Sarah Harrison. Grace Sigma works nationally in such industries as finance, telecom and government. Grace Sigma uses lean methods to assist in data dashboarding, storytelling training, process visualization, and project management. Whether you’re a small business looking to scale or a large company whose processes have become tangled Grace Sigma can help. You can learn more at gracesigma.com.

Sarah Harrison  01:41
I love having these special guests on.

Carolyn Daughters  01:44
This was the greatest idea we came up with for 2024. We decided we wanted to start interviewing contemporary writers, because we’re all about the history of mystery. We’re now in the 1930s, which is an awesome decade. This allows us to come into the present day and talk to people who are writing really great mysteries and thrillers right now.

Sarah Harrison  02:02
Well, and that’s saying a lot, Carolyn, because I think we’re just overflowing with great ideas all the time.

Carolyn Daughters  02:09
You took the words right out of my mouth. Today, our guest is Christine Carbo. We’re really excited to have her. She’s a Montana thriller writer joining us via Riverside studio. Now she is the recipient of the Women’s National Book Association Pinckley Prize, the Silver Falchion Award, and the High Plains Book Award. She and her family live in Whitefish, Montana. And when she’s not teaching Pilates or writing suspense novel, she’s enjoying all that living in northwest Montana has to offer.

Carolyn Daughters
Christine has written four books in her Glacier National Park mystery series. We’re going to talk a little bit about all of the books, but we’re going to focus on The Wild Inside, which, I will say from my perspective, I loved. The Wild Inside. We also have Mortal Fall. The Weight of the Night, which I don’t have in front of me, but Christine does have a copy of it. I think this is the most recent one. A Sharp Solitude, is this the most recent one, Christine?

Sarah Harrison  03:16
Yes, that’s the that’s the most recent one.

Carolyn Daughters  03:19
Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin.

Christine Carbo  03:22
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Harrison  03:25
I’m gonna read a quick summary of the book and then we’re gonna have Christine point of her passages to us. So this is for The Wild Inside, the first in the Glacier National Park mystery series.

Sarah Harrison
“It was a clear night in Glacier National Park. Fourteen-year-old Ted Systead and his father were camping beneath the rugged peaks and starlit skies when something unimaginable happened. A grizzly bear attacked Ted’s father and dragged him to his death. Now 20 years later, a special agent for the Department of the Interior, Ted gets called back to investigate a crime that mirrors the horror of that night. Except this time, the victim was tied to a tree. Ted teamed up with one of the park officers, a man named Monty, whose pleasant exterior masks and all-too-vivid knowledge of the hazardous terrain surrounding them. Residents of the area turned out to be suspicious of outsiders and less than forthcoming. Their intimate connection to the wild forces them to confront nature and their fellow man with equal measures of reverence and ruthlessness. As the case progresses with no clear answers more than human life is at stake, including that of the majestic creature responsible for the attack. Ted’s search for the truth takes him deeper into the wilderness than he ever imagined, on the trail of a killer until he reaches a shocking and unexpectedly personal conclusion.” Welcome, Christine.

Christine Carbo  04:54
Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be with you guys, and I appreciate the invite. I’m going to read this, it’s a prologue almost, it’s not exactly a prologue but it’s back in time to fall of 1987 before the actual current day story takes place, so it’s back when Ted was a teenager in the park. So fall 1987.

Christine Carbo 05:29
“Paleness slipped into the dark sky and erase the stars as gracefully and peacefully as if nothing had happened. I struggled for breath, my chest shuttering, violently each time I pulled in the bitter air. My teeth clattered noisily, and I couldn’t feel my legs. I knew my jeans had been wet earlier, and they were frozen in hardest cement now that the fire had faded. I continued to stare in the direction he’d been dragged. All the noises had ceased except the sound of the gusting wind in the water lapping on the shore, but all the others, the screams, the grunts, the scuffling sound of the underbrush, even the small animals I’d heard scampering for cover, had not resumed their activity. In the fire, its crackles and pops had stilled to a pile of white ashes with small embers. I couldn’t remember starting it, couldn’t remember feeding it and keeping it stoked.

Christine Carbo
“A gust of cold wind slapped the smoldering smoke into my face. I flinched and tried to stand, my numb legs not wanting to work. I clenched a long stick and stared at it, as if my arm had morphed into an alien appendage. I quickly look back to the opening and the brush that I’d been watching for several hours, even when the light was syrupy dark, and I’d waited for amber eyes to come for me. The branches of bushes and small centered spruce were broken the skunk weed and bear grass, flattened and smeared with a trail of blood. I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured my mom and sisters at home in their warm beds. I ached for my mom for her arms around me. Then I heard the screaming again in my head, right between my ears, expanding and pushing against my skull. I started to run for stumbling then full force. I ran and ran, faltering and tumbling over the hard, lumpy ground, over the edges of buried rocks and exposed roots on the well-maintained trail. I ran until it all went black.”

Carolyn Daughters  07:29
This is a nightmare scenario. The Wild Inside is part of the Glacier National Park mystery series, and running into a grizzly is about is bad as it gets, right?

Christine Carbo  07:38
It’s a hard place to start the story, really. I felt like I needed that setup before I started the story. The fall of 2010 is when this takes place, so 14 years earlier. I start in with Ted’s voice. If I could reveal one particular thing about my way of thinking, it would be this and then it’s first person, and it continues to be first person, but he’s much older now.

Carolyn Daughters  08:15
This scenario, anybody reading this, I would think, would be able to at least briefly put themselves in his shoes and just feel that terror. I mean, a family member, somebody you love, really anybody, but then it takes it one level closer, it’s a family member. It’s his father, hauled away by this bear, and you are left helpless, feeling like, “what can I do? There’s nothing I can do.” And so he freezes. What prompted the beginning of this story? In writing the Glacier National Park mystery series, where did this idea come to you?

Christine Carbo  08:54
It’s a long answer. So it’s the whole creative process, right? For me, I had written a couple novels in my younger years that were non-genre, back in the days of sending query letters out snail mail to agents and trying to do that whole thing. And life just happened to me in between, and I didn’t get very far with it. I just I dabbled with it and ended up taking a long break from it, like a 10-year hiatus from from writing. And when I came back to writing later, I decided I’m going to really do this very deliberately. I was deliberate about it. I wanted to get published. I wanted to get an agent and do this traditionally. But I wanted to write what I love to read, and what I love to read the suspense.

Christine Carbo
And so I decided rather than trying to write that all-American great novel like I was trying to do when I was way too young to do it and way too inexperienced to do it, I thought, I’m going to write this genre crime fiction thing. When I decided to do that, the first thing that came to my mind was setting, like where should I set my story. In my mind, most of the crime fiction I’d read takes place in these really mysterious English countrysides or these really great cities. There’s actually a lot of danger in the cities, L.A. and New York. I was thinking, nobody wants to read about my small little town in northwest Montana. I went around and around in my head with it. And then I decided, why wouldn’t people want to read that?

Christine Carbo
That’s where the Glacier National Park mystery series was born. People like to read CJ Box and Craig Johnson‘s Wyoming stuff. Why wouldn’t they want to read? And then it dawned on me that I have Glacier National Park, which is in my backyard, it’s just 20-minute drive. It’s a beautiful place. I love Glacier Park, I’ve spent tons of time in Glacier hiking, and I thought, why not write what I know and set it in this beautiful place. There’s millions of visitors every year. It’s on federal land, so it was rich for bringing in federal agents if I wanted, and it’s also on county land. I had these different factions of law enforcement that could be involved. I thought that this actually would be a really great setting for a book.

Christine Carbo
That was my starting point. From there, I had to decide, what’s the plot, who’s my main character. From there, I wracked my brain on things that may or may not work. And one of the things that I thought about, which is just quintessential around the area that I live, because we do live with grizzlies, we do live around grizzlies, most of us who are smart carry bear spray when we go hiking. It’s unlikely you’re going to run into one because they’re like shark attacks. They’re not super in your face. They’re elusive animals, but you do run into them, and you want to be prepared. And so the campfire grizzly story is big where I live. There are a lot of articles in the newspaper about bear sightings, bear attacks, bear habitat, bear biology, just bear, bear bear. People just love a good grizzly attack story. People want to hear about them.

Christine Carbo
Shamelessly, I just thought, why not capitalize on this thing that I’ve been thinking about pretty much my entire adult life. I hiked in Glacier because I’ve been living in Montana since the late 1970s. And so it just was something very near and dear to me. I mean, I respect the animal. I think they’re beautiful, amazing creatures. And so I was able to capitalize on the campfire bear story, as well as be able to revere the grizzly. And I think the grizzly that I have, in The Wild Inside is a gorgeous animal that I feel like I get to worship a little bit.

Sarah Harrison  13:34
That’s really interesting. First, the way you realize that what maybe is commonplace for you is a little bit exotic for the rest of the country, and it’s very interesting. A Glacier National Park mystery series is interesting because Glacier is not a place that everyone gets to go to all the time. But the other thing you mentioned that’s really interesting is how you got started. Maybe you were trying to write a non-genre or the great American novel. You put that away for 10 years and came back to suspense. Talk a little bit about, well, if you’ve always liked suspense, why didn’t you start there? And how did you how did you get into your writing career in the first place?

Christine Carbo  14:24
Gosh, my story is super unusual. For one thing, I feel like when you interview or when a lot of authors speak, they talk to you about how I knew I wanted to be an author in first grade, or I started writing my first novel or screenplay when I was in third grade or fifth grade. That kind of thing. Well, for me, personally, my third grade teacher told my parents, “Your daughter can’t read, and we want to hold her back.”

Christine Carbo 15:03
They didn’t hold me back, because my dad said, “Well, it’s not true. She can read. She’s just super shy.” Back then, the teaching style was to make kids stand up and say, “You, what’s five times eight?” “You. what’s nine times six?” You had to be Johnny on the spot. I was a deer in the headlights with that kind of teaching style. I would be told, “You stand up and read this page, or this paragraph,” and I would stumble my way through it very shyly in front of a group of kids in third grade. And so I came across, like I couldn’t read, which was partially true. I did have a little trouble with reading, but then the shyness exacerbated it with that type of teaching style. So I wasn’t held back.

Christine Carbo
But when you’re told you can’t do something, especially by a teacher, it tends to just embed inside of you like a seed. I had this voice in me that said, “You can’t read. And if you can’t read, you can’t be intelligent, because reading is the key to learning and even math.” So much of intelligence and education seemed to revolve around reading. And I had this voice in my head that I couldn’t do it because my teacher told me I couldn’t do it. But because of it, I had this approach avoidance thing going on with books, like I was a little afraid of them. To this day, I love libraries and bookstores, and I love the smell of them. And they’re just such wonderful places. But when I go in and see all these books, a little part of me is like, “Oh my God, so many books.” It can be overwhelming for me. I think it all stems from that background. So I wasn’t a really, really well read kid. I really wasn’t because I was afraid. I did read but just selectively when I wasn’t feeling like I was afraid of opening a big thick book.

Sarah Harrison  17:31
So if someone had told you as a kid that you would one day author the Glacier National Park mystery series, you wouldn’t have believed them.

Christine Carbo  17:36
No. Not at all. I feel like I had a lot of catch up to do by the time I got to college. I ended up getting a master’s in English. And so I did catch up, I did read a ton. But the voice was still there. When I had this little a dream of a little whisper that I wanted to write, which I don’t know where it came from. Steven Spielberg has that quote that he says your dreams whisper to you. They don’t shout. I had that I had this inkling, you could call it a whisper, that I wanted to write novels. It seemed like such an odd thing for somebody who felt like she was underread. Why in the world would I think that I can write a novel when I can’t read because that was the voice still there, you can’t read.

Christine Carbo
So I had to work through that. And once I realized that I had to honor this little whisper, that this was a dream and that I wanted to do it, it was just a matter of really forcing myself to get in there and and push myself to start writing. It’s not like I was a journaler. Even the Julie Cameron like Morning Pages thing I didn’t want to do. It was so strange. You want to be a writer, but you’re not. You haven’t read a ton and you’re not writing a ton. Anyone who’s a musician plays a ton of music, so what’s the deal? It was just an odd experience. So, no, I would never have thought I would be writing the Glacier National Park mystery series, or really anything. But I forced myself, like, Okay, you say you want to write, so you better sit down, and you better start writing.

Christine Carbo
And so I did. I took a class through a community ed the college that I was teaching. I was teaching linguistics and English at a community college locally here in the Flathead Valley in Montana. I took a class from a really wonderful guy who offered a class called Start Writing Your First Novel. It was perfect for me. And so I took the class. All you had to do was write the first 30 pages of something. The first idea that came to me was just a regular slice of life story, not crime. Actually, I think at that time, even though I loved to read crime fiction and have been now for a while, I wasn’t reading a ton of it then. It’s something I did more as an adult. So I hadn’t read a ton of crime fiction back then when I took this class. I had read all the Oprah bookclub books back then. I wanted to write like an Oprah bookclub novel back then. That wasn’t such a big thing, right, the Oprah bookclub. And so that’s what I did.

Christine Carbo
I just started writing the slice of life kind of thing. And I wrote 30 pages. After the class was over, I wrote another 30, and another 30, and another 30. It took me like four years to finish this first non-genre novel, but I did. And then I started to write another. And that took me two years. That’s when I took this long hiatus from writing because I went through a divorce, and I became a single mom. Life just started happening to me in a way that I had to go into survival mode. I thought, who am I? I went back to that negative voice from the third-grade teacher, like, who am I to think I could have done this? I need to focus on working and raising a child. This is just a pipe dream. Who are you to think you can do this? That’s when I set that aside. But then, strangely, that whisper became a shout after I ignored it for a decade. That’s when I came back to it. And during that time was when I had read a bunch of crime fiction. By then, I made that deliberate switch. Like, I’m going to write crime. Super long answer your question.

Sarah Harrison  21:50
No, it’s a beautiful story, though. Thank you.

Christine Carbo  21:53
You’re welcome.

Carolyn Daughters  21:58
In The Wild Inside from the Glacier National Park mystery series, Ted is with his father in Glacier, he has not been in Montana very long, I don’t think. He had moved. I think as you in your life had moved, so you were in Gainesville. And then maybe when you were 11, or so, I think, you came from Gainesville, Florida, to Montana. And there’s a transition that can be challenging for really anyone of any age, but you at 11, or Ted at 14, there’s a lot of adjustment that needs to happen. He’s going through some stuff personally. Also, his father is trying to push him a little and saying you can do more, you can do better, you can believe in yourself. All of these things are happening.

Carolyn Daughters
And then that night, he and his father are out camping, and they have this heart to heart. That day, his father is hauled away by this bear. This affects him obviously. AThen we see in the present day that Ted is still grappling with some of these things. From your perspective, as an author, what what did you want him to still be grappling with in his present day, from all of those years earlier? He’s not going to reach closure, it’s not going to be tied up with a bow necessarily, but things that are going to raise to the fore in The Wild Inside in the Glacier National Park mystery series. What sorts of things were important to you for him to address and for him to really be grappling with in this book?

Christine Carbo  24:24
That whole scenario of childhood trauma and how it affects a person is, I think, so important in most writing. It can be a little bit of a trope to always go back on the childhood trauma that crops up that we all deal with in many books. Sometimes you want to roll your eyes. Like, oh my god, I gotta go back to the childhood trauma now to understand this character. I mean, Jane Austen didn’t have to do that. You just start with a character and move on.

Christine Carbo 25:00
Why does it feel like we have to do this with a lot, especially in the crime fiction genre? I think it is a function of when you get on a case, the detective just naturally becomes more interesting. There’s a famous quote out there about how it’s not how the detective works the case, it’s how the case works the detective. And I think a lot of us crime fiction authors like to tap into that. What is it? Especially if you’re going to write in first person, there’s a reason you’re doing that. There’s usually stuff going on with that character that you’re going to have to work through. That’s just life. It’s usually trauma from early earlier ages, young adult or childhood or whatever, that creates some of the scars in us, or some of the bad behaviors in us.

Christine Carbo
I was telling you about my third grade teacher, nowhere near what Ted experienced, obviously, but things that linger with you and give you problems as an adult. And I wanted to tap into that with him. And it’s a great question you’re asking. Specifically, I wanted him to have some unresolved anger. The counselor or the therapist says to him, “you’ve got the bear inside of you.” The angry bear is still inside of Ted on some level because of not fully coming to terms with the grief of that and the closure with it. You’re not going to get a nice, tidy bow for closure, but certainly there are different levels of working through trauma and grief. And I don’t think Ted had done that work yet. I needed him to do that a little bit in this story. And the case almost forced it upon him.

Carolyn Daughters  27:11
Right. He didn’t he didn’t really have a choice. He’s thrust into this situation. Whether he likes it or not, he’s going to face some of his demons.

Sarah Harrison  27:28
You mentioned liking the suspense genre, wanting to write in the suspense genre. The subtitle of the book is “A Novel of Suspense,” which I thought was totally appropriate. The Glacier National Park mystery series are all suspense novels. As I was reading it, I was like, oh, my goodness, the suspense. It’s not even ebbing and flowing for me. It was just unrelenting, it kept going, it kept holding and holding.

Christine Carbo  27:50
That’s a compliment.

Sarah Harrison  27:53
I wanted to ask you, was that what you were going for? What was the sense you wanted to build in your readers as they read? How did you want them to travel with your story?

Christine Carbo 28:09
Obviously, all of us crime fiction writers, all of us thriller writers, suspense writers. And then there’s slight nuances in definition between thriller, suspense, mystery. But any book wants you to just keep turning, wants your reader to just keep turning pages. That’s the main thing. What’s going to keep my reader turning pages with this particular story? Obviously, when you have a mystery, it’s baked in — who done it? Who who did this? What is the deal? Obviously, it’s heightened, I think, when your main character is emotionally wrapped up into it as well.

Christine Carbo
So that it somehow heightens that suspense, to not just have the whodunit aspect, but the whodunit aspect tied to it is really screwing my character up. And my character needs to figure this out really badly if he’s going to have a chance of having any shot at normalcy or a balanced healthy life. The stakes get higher, because the main character needs to solve this. And that’s where I was coming from. That’s what I wanted the reader to experience and and to have that feeling like, not just who did this awful thing. But I want to see this through Ted’s eyes to know how important it is to figure out who did this awful thing. Is that answering the question?

Sarah Harrison 29:57
No, that’s great. As we’re going through, we’ve read a few different what I would call like police procedurals. The Wild Inside and the entire Glacier National Park mystery series have such a unique angle, in that they are set in an national park. And you really went into a lot of detail into how the different agencies are interacting there. What made you want to select that? Or how much research did you do to get all those details right?

Christine Carbo  30:24
I have no family members that are in law enforcement or anything. I just had to say, this is what I want to write, what’s the next step? I talked to a couple friends, and a friend said, well, I know the former chief of police, do you want to take him to lunch? And so I took the former chief of police out for coffee, and he was great. He was like, “This is how investigations work. This is how they work on federal land in the park.” From there, I did a bunch of research online. And I was able to find this position, just Googling “Department of the Interior,” “crime.”  It was like a gift. I got this series 1811 position, which federal agent who goes to national parks on federal land to solve serious crimes. And I was like, Oh, my God, this is so awesome. How did I just stumble across this position that actually exists? It was the perfect thing that I wanted for my character.

Christine Carbo
Rangers are fantastic. And they do all the law enforcement actually in Glacier National Park. And I took creative license by having a park police entity within Glacier, because park police are usually just in urban, national parks, like out in DC. Out here, in Yellowstone and Glacier and Yosemite, the rangers are trained in law enforcement, so we don’t have an actual separate faction of a park police. I write that in my acknowledgments page, because I want my reader to know that I’m actually aware of that, and that I am not just doing it not knowing about it, that I wanted to do that because I thought that it would create more conflict in my story. And that’s the thing, right, create conflict. I chose to have a park police force. But it’s funny. The four books that I’ve written, I call them an ensemble series. Have you guys read Tana French, the Dublin Murder Mystery series?

Carolyn Daughters  32:41
I haven’t. And I’ve not read Tana French, but I have wanted to. She’s on the very top of my list.

Christine Carbo  32:46
Yeah, she’s amazing. And she plucks a side character, brings that character forward. In the same world, but just hopscotches these characters. That’s what I wanted to do in the Glacier National Park mystery series. From The Wild Inside, I pluck a side character, his name is Monty, and bring him forward in Mortal Fall. And there’s a side character Gretchen in both of these books that I bring forward for The Weight of Night. And then there’s an FBI agent in The Weight of Night that I bring forward for A Sharp Solitude. It’s interesting because I created this park police just with my first book, not knowing, oh my god, now I’m gonna have to live with a park police that doesn’t actually exist in Glacier for the rest of my books if I want to keep things consistent.

Christine Carbo
At the end of each book, I have to say, I created this park believes this. I’m aware that it’s a creation and that it doesn’t exist. Here, the rangers are the ones that do the law enforcement. There’s those kinds of things that I had to deal with. Some of it was from the Google research machine. Some of it was just interviewing people from there. I think I interviewed Gary Moses, who was the lead ranger in Glacier National Park at the time. And he was super helpful. I talked to other rangers and just took drives up there and saw where exactly are the headquarters again. Usually when I go hiking, I don’t go looking for the Glacier National Park ranger headquarters. Going and finding them and seeing how it all works. It’s a lot of fun research, but you can go overboard on it. I do have a lot of information in that story, some debatable, sometimes maybe a little too much for some readers.

Carolyn Daughters  34:48
It’s interesting. When I was reading The Wild Inside, I made notes here of various characters who I wanted to know so much more about, and one of them of course was Monty, who is as good as soul as you could ever meet. There are a couple instances in the book, without spelling them out, where Ted is concerned about Monty’s loyalty. But Monty is real. Who he presents himself as, he is. And then there’s a character named Karen, and I wrote a quote here, “Ted wishes he could talk to her all day. She seemed in equilibrium, content with herself, her job, and her life. You could see it in her smile, not overbearing, but not timid, entirely genuine in the way that always made me feel like I lacked something crucial in my own life.” That really resonated with me.

Carolyn Daughters
Sometimes we see people and they just exude this aura of peace or oneness with whatever their life is or how they’re living. Periodically, I’ll see someone like that, and I will say, I want whatever that is. I was seeing that with Karen and Monty, both characters in Glacier National Park mystery series. And also there’s a character named Joe, and he also emanates this sense of contentedness with his his life. I could see how you could easily be pulling characters from this book, as you are already doing, or from these books, and saying, there’s enough potential life here to take this character and make them the springboard of another story.

Christine Carbo  36:27
I had a lot of fun with that. If you’re going to write a mystery, something darker, something more suspenseful, you’re going to have to mine them, even though they seem like they’re really well-balanced, a what you see is what you get character, you’re going to have to make them a little bit more troubled, right? Because they’re not going to be interesting unless they’ve got some baggage. It was interesting to take Monty, a What You See Is What You Get character and give him some mysteries in his background, and still have him stay true to being that person. I didn’t want to completely switch him around and make him different to have an edgier mystery. Mortal Fall was dealing a lot with some of the stuff that’s in Monty’s backstory that isn’t brought out in The Wild Inside.

Carolyn Daughters  37:34
Cool. And Sarah, you are really interested in various family relationships in Glacier National Park mystery series.

Sarah Harrison  37:39
Yeah, there were a couple of family dynamics, I wanted to ask you about. One was adult-child relationships. You have so many adult and then their adult children, so parents and their adult children in those types of relationships. A lot of the kids get engrossed in their drug habits, the family struggles with either enabling them or cutting them off. Children get divorced. And they either drift closer or further from their families. There were several times in the book where Ted really felt drawn back to the comfort of his mom and at the same time resisted that feeling. Talk about the adult children and their relationships with their parents, how you were thinking through all those different dynamics?

Christine Carbo  38:39
Well, that’s a hard question. I just feel like so much of who we are as people come from what we experienced growing up and what makes us who we are. We talked about trauma earlier, but it’s also just like, Who were your parents? What were your influences? Did you have good parents? Did you have neglectful parents? Did you have difficult sibling relationships? In Mortal Fall, Monty’s relationship with his brother is super fraught. He feels like his brother was a bully. His his brother did bully him. I have a lot of themes of working out sibling relationships as well as parent-child relationships in Glacier National Park mystery series, just because I feel like for so many people that’s the garden that they’re sprouted in when they’re growing up. I just wanted to tap into to that and play it out and see. I don’t have a psychology degree or anything like that, but it fascinates me to think about how things that you live through or things that are done to will play out in your psyche, and how that might affect you. And the person it makes you or the kinds of hang ups it gives you or the anger it might give you to carry around. And what happens when that anger isn’t sufficiently dealt with or tears aren’t sufficiently cried. What happens?

Carolyn Daughters  40:31
And Ted is an insider-outsider, because he knows the town. And he lived there. He comes back, and he’s ostensibly this new guy. Hey, we’ve got to show you the ropes. And there are all of these different people with all of these different hierarchies of authority. There’s a lot of angling to figure out who’s supposed to do this? And who’s supposed to weigh in on that, who do we turn to for this? At some point, he reveals to a character or two who he is. “I grew up here, and my father, you may have heard, died from a grizzly attack.” Then other characters find out one way or the other. For a while, we’re not sure how they found out. He has this really interesting, insider-outsider role, which I think plays a big role in the book. And it is The Wild Inside, and I think like this insider-outsider thing is, I’m guessing an important theme for you. A lot of people I know, including a writer in Boulder, Sheri Caudron, will say, everybody has the story only they can tell. I feel like this is probably a theme for you or something that you’re really interested in, this insider-outsider thing in Glacier National Park mystery series. Can you speak to that?

Christine Carbo  41:58
Sure. Like I said, in my childhood, I made a pretty big move from the state of Florida, to northwest Montana, to the mountains, from the water and the beaches to the mountains, just a huge move. At a pretty impressionable age to be making a change, making new friends, and going into a new school. I think I was a little older, I think you mentioned 11, but I was more like, 12 ish, going on 13, I think, when I made my switchThere’s that, again, how your childhood even plays out in your writing. And it’s not that I felt like I was treated like an outsider or anything, when I came. In fact, it was the opposite. People were super inviting, and people were honestly really great when I moved here years ago. People were very welcoming in that way that small towns could be. But, at the same time, there’s this sense of the ambition on my parent’s level to make this move, to make this change, this go west almost Manifest Destiny feeling theme. Like we’re going to go west, our family is going to pack up and drive across the country and move move to Montana. Back in the days when Montana hadn’t been discovered.

Christine Carbo
Most people that I told I was moving to Montana were like, where? They didn’t even know that was a state back in those days. Glacier Park was like our own private playground because not even that many visitors used to come, not many people knew about it. People knew about Yellowstone and they’d go to Yellowstone, but Glacier National Park …  whatever. Maybe Night of the Grizzlies put that on the map a little bit. I think on some level it’s a theme for me, this “go west” theme. I have it in Mortal Fall, which is part of the Glacier National Park mystery series. Monty is a local, and he’s born and raised in this area. But I have one of those therapy schools that are not regulated, where things go dramatically wrong. It’s fictional. In my book, I make it up. It’s called the Glacier Academy or the Glacier Wilderness Academy or something like that. And we do have a number of those schools in Montana. We also haven’t been Idaho and Utah. I did the research on that and saw all the horrible things that have gone wrong with those types of schools where really wealthy east coast. I don’t want to pick on East Coasters but often really wealthy people out east will think the “go west” thing. They send their teenagers out here for mountains and fresh air and flowers, and that’s somehow going to cure the drug addiction, right? And there is a healing effect to nature, no doubt. But it’s going to take a lot more than that, than just being out in the fresh air.

Christine Carbo
I tap into that “go west,” and we’re going to solve our problems or go hide and hide out in Montana theme or theTed Kaczynski go hide in Montana theme. I like to play with with that a lot. So you are correct. Those are themes. For me, the insider-outsider thing is big in the Glacier National Park mystery series. Ted, I wanted his voice. I think his voice can even be annoying, too, sometimes, because he’s an outsider, but he’s an insider too. And so he’s like, I know these things. You don’t have to tell me, I know these things. He’s kind of cocky. But the same time, it’s like, No, dude, you’re not totally in the know about everything. Which puts him a little bit on edge even more. I like to play with that.

Carolyn Daughters  46:24
I was even thinking about when you were telling us the story of walking into a library or bookstore in your younger years, you’re the outsider. Everybody sitting inside that space is the insider holding a book and they’re reading a book. And now you are a professional writer, and you have four books now. You’re like the ultimate insider-outsider in the sense that this profession itself, by all intents and purposes, should be completely outside of anything you would be doing. And yet, it’s actually what you’re doing. So for me, it’s really interesting, just seeing that you’re integral, and you’re embedded in it, but you’re also, I’m guessing, a little bit outside it.

Christine Carbo  47:16
That is so true. I’ve never had that said to me, like you just said it. And I’m gonna go back and watch this and just hear you say that again. Because I feel like you are my therapist right now, pointing these things out. But that is very accurate and true. And this is a very tough challenge. It’s a wonderful business, the publishing business. It’s so exciting. It’s brought wonderful things into my life that I am so thankful for. And the people like you guys that I have come across and met and interact with and librarians and bookstores. It’s been so enriching.

Christine Carbo
But the publishing world is a difficult world. And so there is that dance constantly of getting your confidence up to go do this, to go be in that world. Dealing with big publishing companies and trying to figure out what your fans want. How do I stay true to some of my literary suspense stuff, but what’s commercial at the same time? What’s next? How to position this and that. All the concerns that go with running a business because it’s a little bit of a business, right? It’s challenging, and it’s fun, but it is interesting to look at it, to hear you say that. And from that insider-outsider thing in Glacier National Park mystery series, how I play it out with my characters, and how that might even be true for myself.

Carolyn Daughters  49:00
Do you hear from readers who say Oh, Monty, I love Monty give me more Monty? To what degree do you get this sort of feedback from readers? And to what degree do you make decisions to implement or not implement some of those suggestions?

Christine Carbo  49:24
With these first four books, I stayed true to my plan, which was to pluck a side character and bring them forward and play through pretty much their entire character arc. Because that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to write this series that allowed me the freedom to still write standalone, so to speak, with each book so that you didn’t have to read them in order. I didn’t think that I had the chops to take a character like a Harry Bosch and just make them interesting forever. You know what I mean? Too insider, too outsider. Too outside maybe to have the confidence to think that I could write a series character that was going to continue to be fascinating forever. I wanted to play through like a major thing, like Ted’s major thing is the grizzly attack from when he was young with his father and all the all the implications. I wanted to have that arc.

Christine Carbo
With Monty, when I brought him forward in the Glacier National Park mystery series. I wanted to do the same thing with him. But interestingly enough, I left a little side thing unsolved. It’s not the main thing in Mortal Fall. And I don’t think it bothers readers to not have it solved. But it’s a little side mystery that’s not solved. And so I actually solved that in the third book called The Weight of Night, which made me decide I wasn’t done with Monty, in spite of my plan to be done with each character. The Weight of Night has a side character, Gretchen, who’s a forensic. And so I do the female perspective with her. And then I flip-flop back and forth between her female perspective, and I stay with Monty. And I’m able to play through that mystery that was not solved in Mortal Fall, which was fun and allowed me to take Monty a little further than I originally planned.

Christine Carbo
And then, with my last book, A Sharp Solitude, I took a different side character, her name was Allie, a federal agent, and brought her forward. I really liked that formula of having two voices instead of just one first person all the way through, like The Wild Inside is. So I have another character named Reeve in this, and I have the male and the female perspective hopping back and forth between this book, similar to what I did in The Weight of Night. I had a lot of fun with that, as well. I do get emails. At first people were really a little irritated with me. Like, why did you not bring Ted back? Why are you with Monty now? Are you going to go back to Ted? Where’s Ted? I still to this day get emails like, we want to see more of Ted, or we want to see more of Monty. Especially Monty and Gretchen in Glacier National Park mystery series. They get a little something going. And people really hook in. Surprisingly, people really hook into romance or love, love stories. People really want to see those. Like, what’s going on with those. Sometimes they wanted that more than to solve the crime. I get a ton of emails about like, are you going to do more on Monty and Gretchen? Are you going to give us more? And I’m like, well, no, because I’m not a romance writer. But both can be done, obviously.

Carolyn Daughters  53:23
What a great compliment to have readers feeling so deeply about the books that they’re writing you to tell you like, I loved what I got. And now I want more.

Christine Carbo  53:33
It is a huge compliment. And I cherish every single email that I get from readers. And I try to respond to all of them, even if sometimes it takes me a while. But I usually try to get back to everyone who writes me.

Sarah Harrison  53:48
That’s really funny that you would say that. I would almost interjected when you said people want to hear more from Ted. I was like, they want him to have a happy ending. That’s what I think they want. They want him to find somebody and stop being so alone, like he is in the book. We just did an episode. It’s not out yet. But it will be by the time this one’s up, on Georgette Heyer. And our guest, Jennifer Kloester, noted that everyone likes a romance. Every great novel has some element of romance in it. It’s really interesting that you mentioned how people get into that aspect of your books. You’re doing a really interesting thing in the Glacier National Park mystery series that I’m not deeply familiar with, which is taking a side character and making them the main character. How far are you into one book before you decide what the next one’s going to be? Who you’re going to select or what the subplot is going to be? Do you have to complete one fully or by halfway through do you know what you want to do?

Christine Carbo  54:58
I usually have to complete it. And then get that bigger perspective, step away from it and look back on it. Who is it that’s resonating with mean? Who is it that I want to take forward? It’s not just as simple as like, oh, this character is handy, let me pluck this character. It’s more like, which character actually could be interesting enough for me to spend a pretty large portion of time with.

Sarah Harrison  55:40
That’s really interesting. We have like a whole list of questions we haven’t even got to ask you.

Christine Carbo  55:45
I’m sorry. I kind of ramble on certain things.

Sarah Harrison  55:50
Well, we have always 100,000 questions. Well, I was I wanted to ask her what she was working on next. You’ve completed your fourth book, right, so are you working on a fifth? Are you working on anything right now?

Christine Carbo  56:07
Yes, I have, oh, my gosh, this is a long story. But I won’t make it long though. The fifth book I wrote, and I wrote, and I rewrote, and I rewrote. It was like, it was the book that just would not cooperate. I went around and around and around with it. And I revised it to death. I revised it to the point where I didn’t want to put it out. And my agent agreed with me like, Okay, I like this book. But maybe this book is the book that doesn’t want to cooperate for now. After working on that book for a long time, too long, like three years, I shelved it and put it aside. And now I have begun a different project. It’s not related to the Glacier National Park mystery series, I didn’t pluck aside character from these books. These four books are their own package now in my mind. I may go back to them.

Christine Carbo
But for right now, I wanted to do something a little different. I’m working on a fun, in the business we call it high concept. It’s more like having I hate to use the word gimmick, but having a little bit of a gimmicky idea, you know what I mean? And just having fun with it and running with it. The book that I revised and revised and revised was a pretty dark book, it was a subject that was interesting to me. It was about a death row mitigator. That doesn’t roll off the tongue. And that right there is shows you how that it could potentially be pretty dark. But a death row mitigator is somebody who goes in and interviews people who are on the row to get what their childhood traumas and what the backstory is, and present that to the prosecution to not get them exonerated or anything, but to get them off of death row. A mitigator is just trying to help not have them be on death row, because they don’t believe in it.

Christine Carbo
That idea came to me because I teach Pilates. I own a Pilates studio, and I had a client that came in, a gorgeous young woman, and I was teaching her. We were striking up conversation. And I said, Well, what do you do for a living? And she said, a death row mitigator. She started explaining what this was to me. And this is the way ideas work, something catches you. I just started asking her question after question. I was super fascinated by it. I decided I really wanted to write a character who did that. But for whatever reason, it was the book that just wouldn’t cooperate. And so I decided I would try to have a little more fun with something. Now I’ve got this thing that I’m working on, hopefully, very suspenseful, and maybe a little more gimmicky, but still deals with some pretty deep issues as well. Because that is the type of writer I am. I am an introspective writer, but I wanted to try to have a little more fun at least with my plot point. That’s what I’m working on right now without giving too much more away.

Sarah Harrison  1:00:00
Well, that sounds really interesting. I’m sure folks will be excited to see what it is when you’re done. All right. It’s been wonderful chatting with you about the Glacier National Park mystery series and The Wild Inside.

Carolyn Daughters  1:00:11
It has been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Sarah Harrison  1:00:13
I love your story and your journey through writing. It’s so interesting. Thanks for sharing all that.

Christine Carbo  1:00:18
Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks so much for having me and for asking such fantastic questions and having such great insights as well. I really enjoyed your take on some of this stuff. So, thank you.

Carolyn Daughters  1:00:34
The book that we focused on most today is The Wild Inside, but there’s also Mortal Fall, A Sharp Solitude and The Weight of Night. The four books are Christine Carbo’s Glacier National Park mystery series So how can people find you, Christine?

Christine Carbo  1:00:52
I am in Barnes and Noble bookstores. I believe you guys are in Colorado, right? I’m in a lot of Colorado bookstores, and definitely Tattered Cover. And Amazon, for sure, and any other place where they sell books.

Carolyn Daughters  1:01:14
And you have a website, ChristineCarbo.com.

Christine Carbo  1:01:18
I do. Yes. And social media. I’m on Instagram and Twitter.

Carolyn Daughters  1:01:26
We will share links for all of those pages and all of that information so our listeners can find you. Thanks, Christine.

Christine Carbo  1:01:37
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Sarah Harrison  1:01:42
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