Local author R Lawson Gamble is a well-respected author of history—he wrote a book about the history of Los Alamos and is currently working on a book about Solomon Pico, the real-life Zorro. He’s also a regular guest speaker on various local historical topics, and he just delivered a talk at the DANA Cultural Center in Nipomo about Pico.
But Gamble has had another iron in the fire for several years now, a series of fiction novels that follow an FBI agent named Zack Tolliver and his friend, a Navajo tracker named Eagle Feather. The two investigate a strange series of murders in the first book, Mestaclocan, facing a mysterious and elusive enemy.
Gamble’s inspiration for the story was his passion for Native American history as well as the suspenseful mystery and investigation novels he loved in his youth, he told the Sun.
“The origins of my approach to this whole story was that I was finding that the books of my childhood, the kind that kept me reading into all hours of the night with a flashlight under the blanket, seemed to have gone away,” he said. “That kind of book seemed harder to find, so I decided I would solve the problem for myself by writing one. What I did was take most of the things that fascinated me, a good mystery, a police procedural type of thing, and the element of the supernatural.”
The adventure continued with The Other, released in 2012, and Zaca, last year. The latter novel took place here on the Central Coast and included locations such as Allan Hancock College and the mountain that titles the book.
The latest edition, which is the fourth volume of the Zack Tolliver series, was just published and will be available at a release party at Bedford Winery in Los Alamos on July 16. The title is simply Cat, which alludes to the mystery of the skin walkers, which is a firmly held cultural belief among Navajo that some people can change into animals. There are even police reports to this day that get filed on Navajo reservations where the citizens report crimes they believe to have been committed by skin walkers, Gamble said.
Tolliver is called back to the Navajo Reservation where Eagle Feather lives after a brutal attack from a mountain lion that maimed Eagle Feather and someone he led on a hike. This mysterious creature may or may not be the same skin walker that Tolliver and Eagle Feather have pursued throughout the first three books, Gamble said, but he has intentionally shrouded the antagonists in mystery.
“I didn’t want to create, like a vampire series, a family of things and identify them more closely,” he said. “I wanted them to remain ambiguous, which is a scarier thing to me.”
The element of horror isn’t missing from his books, Gamble explained. He enjoys building up layers of suspense and mystery, which come to a head in some terrifying moments. It’s the incredible power of fiction, he said, to be able to engross someone in a story quite unlikely, but with the feel of something very real.
It’s an old technique, which may date back to the earliest human ancestors sitting around a fire and weaving mythic stories to explain the world. Or maybe it caught on just because it’s so much fun.
“It’s almost as if we have this primal need to scare ourselves, I suppose,” he said. “I try to lead people in a very logical way to something that’s absurd, but in a way that really gets you to think about it. That’s part of storytelling and tale telling. There’s got to be that suspension of disbelief, which gets you all revved up and excited.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne wishes he could change into a cat. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2016.