INTERVIEW: Glacier National Park, through one mystery writer’s eyes

America’s love for its national parks continues to grow on an annual basis. Last year, with the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, federal lands throughout the United States reported record numbers of visitors, all clamoring to hike the trails, see the wildlife and enjoy the wilderness of these preserved spaces.

One of the most popular parks in the West is Glacier National Park, the so-called crown of the continent and a popular destination for those traveling to Montana. This section of the northern Rockies sits right below the Canadian border and alongside Kalispell and Whitefish, Montana. For anyone who has traveled its iconic Going-to-the-Sun Road or witnessed grizzly bears by Many Glacier, the park emits a mysterious, transfixing energy, one both historic and timeless.

This majestic setting has inspired local Montana writer Christine Carbo, who has created a series of suspense thrillers set in and around the crown of the continent. Her first book, released a couple years ago, is called The Wild Inside and involves a murder investigation and grizzly bear mauling.

A character from The Wild Inside, park officer Monty Harris, has more adventures in Carbo’s follow-up novel, Mortal Fall, which details the aftermath of a researcher’s fall from a steep cliff off Going-to-the-Sun Road. This past summer’s entry into the suspense series is The Weight of Night, set amidst a Glacier National Park forest fire.

Plans are already in the works for Carbo’s fourth book, A Sharp Solitude, set to be released in May of 2018.

Reading one of Carbo’s books is an exercise in appreciation. It’s obvious that the writer knows her craft, knows her surroundings and can spin a thrilling yarn. What readers may not know from her words and pages is that her journey to becoming a novelist was a long ordeal over the course of many, many years.

“In high school, I found out that I loved my English classes, and I loved reading,” Carbo said in a phone interview earlier this year. “I loved the essays I had to write.”

In college, Carbo’s love of reading and writing only grew, and she started thinking of possible story ideas for a novel on her commutes back home, a drive that could take eight to 10 hours.

“I would think about stories in my head, stories that I would want to see,” she said. “I almost kind of envision them in movie format. What would happen if this was on a movie screen? So I kind of played it out like cinematography in my head, and then at some point, it just dawned on me that I would like to write some of these stories down. But I didn’t really think that I had the confidence to do that. I was just a college student, and who was I to think that I could write a novel. Novelist seemed like some other level of brilliance that I didn’t possess, and so I didn’t jump on it for a long time until I had gone on and gotten a master’s degree in English and linguistics.”

After earning her master’s, she received a job at a local community college in Montana. While teaching there, she found out about a community education program with a class called “Write Your First Novel.”

“So I really got interested in that, so I took the class,” Carbo said. “And all it was was write your first 30 pages or something like that, and so I did. And I ended up continuing on and writing an entire novel that was not a mystery or anything, and that was a long time ago. It took me about four years to finish the entire novel, but I figured it was like my practice novel just to see if I could do it. And I never really did anything with it. In fact, I don’t even know if I could find it today. It’s on some dusty hard drive somewhere, but I ended up from there writing a second one. So I wrote actually two books. They were non-genre. They weren’t in the mystery genre at all, and the second one, that one took me two years. It took me half the time that the first one took me, and I thought, well, maybe I’m getting the hang of this novel writing thing.”

At this point, Carbo decided it was about time she started looking for an agent. These were the days of snail mail, so that meant she needed to query literary agents and wait long intervals for any type of response. She called the process slow and agonizing, and when letters were returned, they often were rejections.

“It’d be kind of devastating,” she said. “I don’t know if this is for me or not, this whole novel writing thing. It takes so much effort and so much time, and then you just get these rejections. But I’m also a little bit of a fighter. I’m kind of bull-headed, and I kind of thought I might need to just keep plugging ahead with this thing.”

Life circumstances delayed Carbo from pursuing the agent route any further. Her marriage fell apart, and after the divorce, she became a single mother.

“I kind of went into survival mode and just thought, well, forget that writing thing,” she said. “That’s just not going to happen, and so I started working really hard doing other kinds of writing, technical writing in fact, and doing a lot of that online. A lot of that I could do when my little boy was asleep at night, and it worked well for me. But it was incredibly monotonous work for me. I know there’s a lot of technical writers that love their job, so it’s not a slam in any way to them. It was very hard on me, but it paid bills.”

At the time, the last thing Carbo wanted to do after finishing her technical writing for the day was sit down in front of a keyboard and write creatively, so she shelved her novelistic ambitions for an entire decade.

“I remember telling a lot of my friends like, ‘No, no, the writing thing is done. I’m not doing that. I’m not going to do that novel writing business. It’s not going to happen for me,'” she said. “I had one friend, who is also a writer, who said, ‘Oh, you just wait. It’s going to come. You’re not going to be able to forget it.’ And she was right. I couldn’t. Somewhere along the line after that 10-year hiatus away from doing any kind of creative writing … that whisper kept happening that I needed to get back to it. And so I did, and when I did, that second time around I came back to it very deliberatively. And I thought, if I’m going to pick up this writing thing again after taking a 10-year break, I’m going to do it with a lot of purpose, a lot of intention, not just kind of half-assed.”

Carbo, with renewed energy, was determined to find an agent and also write a novel that emulated the style of book she enjoyed reading.

“I embarked on this crime fiction novel because I love to read crime fiction,” she said. “The crime fiction novels that I’ve read that really have gotten to me and stuck with me have been very atmospheric. They’ve taken place in very interesting settings where maybe they’re action-packed cities with lots of crime, or maybe it’s mysterious countryside in England. Or maybe it’s Dublin or Scotland, the interesting city of Glasgow. A lot of great crime fiction is just steeped in a sense of place, and so I knew that was going to be an element for me that I really wanted to develop.”

Lo and behold, Carbo lives within a few miles of Glacier National Park, which is federally protected land in the northwestern section of Montana. There are many jurisdictional issues that occur in and around the park with the local, county, state and federal law enforcement divvying up responsibilities.

“Sometimes it takes all the departments around locally to solve a crime if it occurs on that federal land, and so I just thought I’ve actually got a really great setting because at first I didn’t think I did,” Carbo said. “At first, I thought I’ve just got Cowtown, USA. Who wants to read about that.”

After settling on her setting, Carbo realized she could write with comfort, ease and excitement. The geographical turns that the characters would be taking are turns she has taken her entire life. She knows these trails. She knows these roads. She knows these communities. She knows the valleys and peaks.

“That’s when The Wild Inside was born, and then from there, after setting, it’s like who am I going to write about,” she said. “Who is my protagonist? And what kinds of things might affect him or haunt him because I always feel like the protagonist … in a crime fiction novel needs to have something interesting about them going on as well as the case. That makes a more interesting book when you also have the case that the protagonist is inspecting also bothering the protagonist, so it’s working both ways.”

Carbo now finds herself with a successful mystery series that shows no signs of stopping. She has continued to develop that abiding love for writing that has been with her since she was a child, and what has inspired the novel writing — besides her own determination and dedication — are those beautiful mountains and unique surroundings.

“Glacier, for me, is a gorgeous, beautiful, desolate, haunting place,” she said. “But it’s a happy place, too.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Click here for more information on Christine Carbo and her books.