This week, I want to welcome my friend and fellow author, Steve Levi. Steve is an Alaska historian and a fount of information about Alaska, past, and present. When I need an idea for one of my true-crime newsletters, I ask Steve, and the ideas fly from him so quickly, I can barely keep up with him. I know you will find Steve and his books as fascinating as I do, so take it away, Steve Levi!

Steve Levi: Master of the Impossible Crime

My motto is simple: “If you do not write something unique you have nothing.” As a writer, I look for what has not been done. After all, the last thing the world needs is one more biography of George Washington or the personal tribulations of a retired detective fighting alcoholism and struggling through a divorce when he/she gets called back for his/her ‘greatest case.’

Keeping with my motto, I want every one of my books to be different. In nonfiction, as an example, I am the only writer to have completed a book on the CLARA NEVADA, Alaska’s ghost ship. It sinks in the Lynn Canal in February of 1898 and ten years later comes back up – missing about $17 million in gold in today’s dollars. My biography of bush pilot Archie Ferguson – dubbed “The Craziest Pilot in the World” by the Saturday Evening Post—was and is the only one in existence and only possible because I took a dozen trips north of Arctic Circle to interview Inupiat Eskimo and whites who knew him. Ferguson died in 1962 and my interviews, on tape, will be around for the next century for anyone who wants a birds’ eye view of the Arctic from the 1920s to the 1960s. I am one of the few people in America – and possibly the only person – who has studied the long-term impact of a terrorist bomb on an American civilian population and my history of the Alaska Gold Rush was the first to make certain readers knew the Klondike Strike in the Yukon Territory of Canada was not the Alaska Gold Rush AND the stories of Jack London and poems of Robert Service have nothing to do with the Alaska Gold Rush.

Just as in nonfiction, I want my fiction to be unique. As far as I know, I am the only writer who produces “impossible crime” novels. An impossible crime in one where the detective has to solve HOW the crime was committed before he can go after the perpetrators. In THE MATTER OF THE VANISHING GREYHOUND, the San Francisco Police are following a Greyhound bus filled with $10 million in cash, four bank robbers and a dozen hostages. The bank robbers demand to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and the police simply allow the bus to roll onto the bridge and then close off both ends. But when they send their hostage negotiators out to the bus it is not there. It has vanished. How can you make a Greyhound bus disappear off the Golden Gate Bridge? You’ll have to read the book to find out! [www.authormasterminds.com.]
When I have to be conventional – as in a mystery with a murder – I make it as convoluted as possible. My novel DEAD MEN DO COME BACK has a murder but the murder is not the focus of the book. The murder – and subsequent reappearance of the cadaver twice – is simply the cover for two robberies of 250 pounds of gold from a mine in Juneau. Thus DEAD MEN DO COME BACK is unique as it offers the reader an on-the-ground look at the Alaska Gold Rush in Southeast Alaska where 250 pounds of gold was simply one-week’s shipment from one mine. Additionally, DEAD MEN DO COME BACK is a novel where the villains, multiple, get away with it because it is a “silent robbery,’ one where the insurance company pays and ‘everything goes away.’ That, in the real life, is a lot more common than one would believe.

If you are a writer, I have some VERY, VERY good news for you! We are entering a golden age of literature. Why? Because, to date, big publishers do not publish good books. They publish books they think will sell. So good books sit in author’s computers. If you don’t believe me, try to find a “mystery” book in a bookstore that is not a murder. If it is not a murder, the big New York “mystery” publishers will not consider it. So I had to go around the Big Publishers. And I was successful because now readers are looking for unusual novels. Readers are no longer satisfied with the same old/same old that has been offered by the bookstores and silver screen. They want different. And they are lucky. Today, with the advent of Netflix, YouTube and other low-budget entertainment outlets, there are increasing opportunities for writers – as long as those writers have unique offerings. And allow me to finish where I began. If you want to be successful in this brave new world of literature, you have to be different. To quote myself, “If you do not write something unique you have nothing.”

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Thank you, Steve Levi! Check out Steve’s website, his Author Masterminds page  where you can buy his books, and his Amazon author’s page. If you would like to learn more about Steve, watch his webinar about how he became a published author, and if you stay until the end of the webinar, you will be able to download one of Steve’s books for free. Don’t miss Steve’s Impossible Crime books because they truly are unique.