Alaska Authors: Jones, whose Nathan Active series was set in a fictionalized Kotzebue, spent many years as a journalist and with the FAA before becoming a novelist.
Author Stan Jones only spent about four years living on Alaska’s Arctic coast, but it left a lifelong impression. “All the time I was in Kotzebue I thought, this is such an interesting place, such interesting people, such an interesting culture,” he said recently.
After high school, Jones attended Cornell University before transferring to the California Institute of Technology, where he studied computer engineering. One winter day while riding the bus back to school from Los Angeles following Christmas break, Jones met Susan Paul, who was attending another college in Pasadena.
Jones twice lived in Kotzebue, the second time from 1979 to 1981. During the 1970s he also began doing freelance and public radio journalism. In 1981, then-Anchorage Daily News editorDuring the 1980s, Jones alternated between the Anchorage and Fairbanks papers, covering some of the state’s biggest stories. While in Fairbanks he stumbled onto the shady real estate deal that led to impeachment hearings against then-Gov. Bill Sheffield. He also covered the Exxon Valdez catastrophe.
By then, Jones was an established novelist. He published his first Nathan Active mystery, “White Sky, Black Ice,” in 1999. The books are set in Chukchi, a fictitious version of Kotzebue. Jones said he “wanted to be able to fictionalize as needed. If I called it by its real name I’d be locked into the real Kotzebue. I didn’t want that.
Despite his initial protests, as the series unfolds over seven books thus far, the reluctant trooper finds his home in Chukchi, marries, and takes the position of director of public safety for the borough.
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