Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
It started with a trip to the zoo in Scottsbluff, Neb.
New York Times best-selling author Gregg Olsen, then a kid from Bellevue in the early 1970s visiting relatives, thought the zoo was lacking.
So he wrote a letter to the local newspaper, saying that the condition of the zoo disappointed him. The 12-year-old used the word “appalling.”
Soon he was back in the station wagon with his two brothers for the long ride back home.
Back in Scottsbluff, the paper started getting more letters.
“I agree with the man from Bellevue,” they noted.
A successful campaign began to improve the zoo.
Today, Olsen, 54, is the author of eight non-fiction books and seven novels. He will appear at the Colfax Library on Sept. 11 at noon.
“My little letter changed everything,” he said. “That’s why I became a writer. Because I saw that words could get things done.”
Olsen will return to Whitman County after his “The Deep Dark,” a nonfiction work about the 1972 Sunshine Mine Fire in Idaho was a selection of Everybody Reads in 2007.
Earlier this year, at a Public Library Association Convention in Philadelphia, Olsen ran into Jennifer Ashby of the Asotin Library.
“You oughtta come back,” she said.
It was arranged, and Olsen will be here to present a crime file of his book “A Twisted Faith,” examining the 1997 case of a Bremerton minister’s wife, whose body was found charred in their burned-down home – without smoke in her lungs.
Olsen’s stop in Colfax is part of a mini-tour promoting his new young adult series.
Afterwards, he will appear at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., Sept. 17, where “Envy” – his first young adult book – has been chosen by Washington’s secretary of state to represent the state.
Aside from that, Olsen is working on an account of the case of Susan Powell, the Utah woman who disappeared. Powell’s husband and two children died in a suspected arson fire in Graham last February.
“I enjoy presenting to an audience,” Olsen said. “But I also enjoy the questions. We identify with the tragedy of crime, while we want to know why, and what we could’ve done to prevent a similar thing from happening.”
He has written true crime stories about the northwest as well as Ohio and Texas. Some of the cases are well-known such as the Mary Kay LeTourneau saga (“If Loving You is Wrong”) and others less known.
In 1992, when Olsen, his wife and twin daughters moved into a new house in Olalla a knock came at the door. It was a new neighbor suggesting he write about the local crime story. It was something Olsen had never heard of.
The book became “Starvation Heights.”
Olsen’s seven non-fiction crime books have brought him much satisfaction, while one aspect lingers.
“What’s unfortunate about true crime is they put together the worst covers out there. You look at them, and think, this could not be good,” Olsen said. “This could not be serious.”
Nonetheless, he said, he is granted no input on the covers.
“Zero,” he said. “When the hard cover of ‘A Twisted Faith’ came out, I said, ‘That’s not even the right church.
‘We’ll, we know what we’re doing,’ they said.”
The cover of “The Deep Dark,” (Random House) about Idaho’s silver valley, features a picture of a mine in England.
It all can make for some strange pairings.
“We gotta stand next to this book for the rest of our lives,” Olsen said with a chuckle. “And some of them are real dogs.”
The start
Olsen spent his whole childhood in Bellevue, the son of a sewer pipe salesman and a hairdresser. He graduated from Sammamish High School and earned a journalism degree from Western Washington University at Bellingham in 1981.
Was he ever a reporter?
“Never. I thought it was too hard,” he said.
So he went into public relations. Right out of school, the former editor of Western’s literary magazine, Klipsun, saw an ad in the Seattle Times for Corporate Communications Editor for Thousand Trails, an RV travel magazine published in Seattle.
“There weren’t any magazines in Seattle, and I was (afraid) to go to New York,” Olsen said.
He worked for Thousand Trails for 10 years, taking the publication from a circulation of 20,000 to 250,000.
All the while, he was interested in writing a book.
“I just didn’t think I could do fiction,” he said of the task of making up that long of a story. “I thought, ‘I’m a journalist and I’m interested in crime.’”
So, in 1988, he wrote a book proposal about a murder case in Clearview in which a man named Charles Campbell raped a woman. Campbell was convicted on testimony of the victim and a neighbor.
Later, he was granted work release and came back and murdered the woman and the witness.
Olsen’s agent sent it off to Warner Books and it was denied, deemed too regional.
“I just decided they’re wrong, and I’m going to try again,” Olsen said.
Around this same time, he read an article in People magazine about an Amish man who killed his son and his roommate. Olsen looked into it further and wrote a proposal. It lead to a $7,500 first deal to write “Abandoned Prayers.”
The agent representing him he got by two cold calls.
Starting with a photocopy of the “Literary Agents” pages from the New York City phone book, which he got at the Bellevue Library, he picked up the phone and started calling.
He introduced himself as a journalist with a true crime idea.
On the second call, he was sent to the office of David Black, then a young agent who represented journalist writers.
Olsen had hit the jackpot. He signed with Black, who represented him for more than a decade, along with Mitch Albom and others. About 15 years ago, Olsen switched to Susan Raihofer, another agent in Black’s office.
Trajectory
It took a year to write “Abandoned Prayers,” and when Olsen’s second book came out, “Bitter Almonds,” he quit his job at Thousand Trails.
It began a new life.
“I missed the office structure,” he said. “Writing is solitary.”
His career continued in the non-fiction realm until 2006, when research into another true crime idea led to the expansion of his fiction endeavors.
He had an unpublished novel called “21,” and after he wrote “Starvation Heights,” Olsen went to LaPorte, Ind., to research a story about a farm woman named Belle Gunnesf, who, in the early 1900s, summoned suitors to her farm and killed them.
The idea eventually turned into a novel called “A Wicked Snow.”
“That was the transition from non-fiction crime to crime fiction,” Olsen said.
Two years ago, an editor at Splinter, an imprint of Sterling, approached him and asked if he’d ever thought of writing for young adults.
He hadn’t.
He got started.
He approached his young adult fiction in the same way, the main characters just happened to be still teenagers.
“The world is different when you think about the lives kids lead today than before, but the emotions, the feelings and the disappointments are the same,” Olsen said.
He writes these in his office at home, where his twin daughters no longer live. They are now in their mid-20s.
He still does 90 percent of his writing at night.
“The goal is a thousand words a day,” he said.
All together, it’s the life Olsen imagined since not long after that summer car ride back from Scottsbluff to Bellevue.
“I think it’s better than I imagined it would be,” he said. “I’ve had such a diverse career. I’m not a famous author, but I’ve gotten a taste of that and I’m satisfied with what I have.”
His books have been published in nine countries. In 2005, the reissue of “Abandoned Prayers” appeared at No. 7 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Last year, “Closer Than Blood” made the New York Times Fiction E-book list.
His latest book, “The Fear Collector,” a novel about a woman whose sister was killed by Ted Bundy, comes out in December.
What is next, after the Susan Powell book, no one knows.
“You’re always on the hunt, you’re always listening,” Olsen said.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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