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Dave Hugelschaffer - September 2008

Dave Hugelschaffer was born in Edmonton, Alberta and grew up on a small farm about forty miles north of the city. Work on the farm was hard and steady, but he found time to spend in the surrounding forest. At the age of fourteen, a Métis trapper appeared on the farm, asking permission to trap beavers in a creek passing through the property. Dave accompanied the trapper, and soon learned the skill of trapping.
In a few years, following graduation from high school, Dave was trapping full time, and had acquired a team of sled dogs. He learned the art of knife-making and leather tanning.
After a brief stint in an engineering program, he transferred to the field of Forestry, which was more to his liking, and graduated from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. Several summers were spent working for the Alberta Forest Service, fighting forest fires, as a member of an elite initial attack crew, as well as cruising timber and conducting reforestation surveys. His first permanent posting as Forest Ranger was in the remote isolated community of Fort Chipewyan, on the north shore of Lake Athabasca, in the northeast corner of Alberta. Fort Chipewyan is a unique location, set amid icy lakes in the Canadian Shield. It was during the long, dark winters that he started a family, and began to write.
The first book was a marathon effort on a manual typewriter – an eco-terrorism thriller, which ran to five hundred pages and was naively sent off into the wilds of the publishing world after an initial first draft and single review. Not surprisingly, it was rejected, but the experience, although exhausting and finger-numbing (he has always typed with one finger), was instructive.
After three years of isolation in the north, he moved to Peace River, Alberta, to broaden his career as a Forest Ranger. The moved reintroduced the family to the luxuries of civilization, such as roads, hardware stores and a movie theater. An eternal optimist, he began his second book, choosing a new direction and penning a science fiction thriller. He worked with an agent for a time, polishing the high-concept story and seeking a market, but found there was little appetite for such a story.
After nearly ten years with the Forest Service, seasonally and as a Forest Ranger, it was time for a change. Wages in the Forest Service had been frozen, and then rolled back. Rangers who depended on the overtime from firefighting had faced several dreary wet summers, and Dave was one of many Rangers that cast about for a more lucrative career, which he found with a private timber company along the eastern slopes of Alberta. For the next ten years, he worked as an industrial land planner, integrating the operations of the forest and oil and gas sector in a way that minimized the impact on the land base. And he kept writing.
The next book was a suspense thriller about a trapper, down on his luck, who has lost his way of life as result of the anti-fur movement. The trapper kidnaps a vocal environmentalist and takes her to his trapline, convinced that if he can convince her of the value of his way of life, she will change her views. Isolated, in the dead of a northern winter, these diametrically opposed characters must depend on one-another for survival. The book wasn’t published, in large part as it was marketed to publishers in the United States, who had little interest in such a Canadian story. Discouraged, he put the novel away, and took a break from writing.
The break was short-lived. A creative outlet was needed, and this time he was determined to approach the venture more systematically. What sort of stories did he enjoy writing that would sell? Research revealed that mysteries had never been written set in the world of forest firefighting and investigation – a field in which he was intimately familiar. One snowy winter morning, when the children were asleep and the house was mercifully quiet, he sat down and starting writing Day into Night. Two years later, the story was complete. A week later, the next book was started, with the same character and a new set of problems, and the Porter Cassel mystery series was born.
Cormorant Books, of Toronto, published Day into Night in June, 2006. The second book in the series, One Careless Moment, is due out in January, 2009.
Dave Hugelschaffer rejoined the Forest Service in the spring of 2007, and currently lives with his family on an acreage, in the vicinity of Edson, Alberta. He is working on the third Porter Cassel mystery, which is set in Fort Chipewyan.