Dwight Holing

Dwight Holing’s career as an author had a pretty unpromising start. Asked to write this essay during the third grade, he handed this story in called “Bloody Murder” and he used red ink for the title. Clever, yeah? Well, his teacher didn’t agree, and gave it an F. Not all was lost, though. He learned his very first lesson about irony: she used a red pen as well.
 
He spent his summers in college working the salmon fishery in Alaska. By the end of the season, he explored the backcountry before he returned to school. It whetted his appetite for outdoor adventure. After he earned his journalism degree from the University of Oregon, he became a freelance travel writer for magazines and newspapers. Assignments took him from the Amazon to Zanzibar, from sailing around the Galapagos to river rafting in Sumatra.
 
As much as he enjoyed adventuring, what truly captivated him so much more were the stories behind these stories, the natural history of these exotic places that he visited, the plight of the wildlife living there, the people that dedicated their lives to righting wrongs and making a difference, and the threats being posed by environmental degradation. These became the focus of his writing. He covered the fight to save gray whales threatened by this proposed salt factory in Mexico, the race to protect endangered species from extinction, the illegal orangutan trade in Indonesia, and loss of rainforests from slash and burn practices.
 
Feature articles in magazines led to him writing and editing books on wildlife and wild places all around the world. His publishers included Animal Planet, Smithsonian Books, and Time-Life.
 
It is no mystery that he eventually turned to fiction. Storytelling is baked deep into his DNA. His grandpa wrote romantic comedies and serial mysteries for the Saturday Evening Post back when weekly print magazines were as eagerly devoured as bingeworthy TV series that stream today. Paramount hired him to turn his stories into screenplays and he worked alongside Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder.
 
Dwight’s mom (no slouch of a storyteller in her own right) told him about the time she woke up one morning to find Philip Marlowe’s creator doing his own version of a big sleep on the sofa after a night of playing poker and drinking gin with her dad. The guy was still nattily dressed, right down to his trademark white gloves.
 
Dwight started writing short stories that got published in literary journals. He picked up awards along the way, including the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. Two short story collections later, he moved on to writing novels. For this, he reached back to his reporting on the environment and outdoor adventure days. Weather, wildlife, and landscape each play their own integral roles in the arcs of his novels. It’s especially true for his Nick Drake mysteries.
 
Dwight’s of the belief that “whydunits” can be just as entertaining and thrilling as “whodunits”. Characters are the main drive of his books. Revealing their traits, deeds, loves, and hates over the course of a book builds suspense and drives the action. When it comes to one of his series, he makes sure the recurring characters continue to grow from one book to the next. Their journeys make for a richer and deeper reading experience while every book provides readers with more than just the exhilaration of a chase. They also give them something new to learn about human behavior and the natural world.
 
“Bad Karma” is the second novel in the “Jack McCoul Caper” series and was released in 2015. Jack McCoul isn’t your typical private investigator.
 
Jack McCoul (San Francisco’s favorite con artist) is attempting to go legit by launching a startup business for this app. However his past then comes rearing its ugly head. An ex-partner-in-crime’s scheme to snatch this priceless statue drags Jack into this murder mystery and this sexy suspect’s life is hanging in the balance. Hired killers come gunning after him, he must resort to his old skills to turn the tables on them. He rounds up a gang of characters just as quirky as the City by the Bay itself and it is game on.
 
“The Sorrow Hand” is the first novel in the “Nick Drake” series and was released in 2018. For Nick Drake (Vietnam vet turned wildlife ranger) the war at home is proving to be just as deadly.
 
Harney County, Oregon in 1968. Nick’s got a chest full of medals and enough demons to fill up a duffle bag. He has been trained to kill, yet never retrained to ever rejoin society. Drake flees to the lonesome high desert to search for redemption and he takes a job patrolling wildlife refuges where the sole conflicts are keeping ticketing poachers and stray cows.
 
However then he stumbles on this girl’s body ritually placed in this gully. Her murder is just the start, and Drake has to face humanity’s heart of darkness yet again if he is going to stop this killer from turning even more gullies into graves.
 
“Hard Blue Empty” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. Noir and nature combine in this spellbinding new murder mystery.
 
Blue Macaw (an indigenous girl from the Amazon) mysteriously vanishes after some oil drillers invade her ancestral homeland. Once her brother gets accused of murdering some company executive, a no holds barred activist persuades Jess Parks to make some use of his search and rescue abilities to locate Blue Macaw and catch the actual killer.
 
The chase is now on, while the consequences grow increasingly dire once Jess learns that he is not the only one that is hunting for her. The trail takes him from the gritty big city out to the furthest reaches of the wildly beautiful yet dangerous rainforest to some of the darkest corners of human ambition and corporate greed.
 
Can Jess possibly outrun a ruthless pack of mercenaries? Can he learn all of the ancient traditions of her tribe in order to win their trust? Is he going to uncover the full truth behind Blue Macaw’s disappearance? And is he going to succeed in delivering justice for them and their imperiled world?