I was sad to learn this week that Elizabeth Gunn, author of one of my all-time favorite mystery series, died on 30 August at the age of 95. Gunn led an eventful life, managing an inn with her husband in Montana and then traveling extensively. She had a private pilot’s license and was a sky diver as well as a scuba diver. She wrote two mystery series, one set in Minnesota where she grew up, and one set in Tucson where she retired.

Her debut mystery was Triple Play (Walker & Co., 1997), in which Detective Jake Hines is hauled out in the middle of the night to look at a mutilated body on a softball field in one of the city parks. One look at the gory corpse with a photo pinned to the body and Jake is calling for help. The realistic police activities that follow, both in forensics and media relations, are enough to attract any procedural fan. The characters make the books outstanding though.

Gunn created a memorable set of personalities while vividly conveying the full range of Minnesota weather. Set in fictional Rutherford, a small city about 60 miles from St. Paul, these books focus on the Rutherford Police Department with all the problems of limited budgets and staff friendly with or related to most of the residents. Jake is a self-made man, a product of the Minnesota foster care system, having been found in a dumpster when he was only days old. He is mixed race, an anomaly in a region known for fair European descendants. Unlike so many police protagonists, he likes and admires his supervisor and they work well together.

Gunn believed in racial diversity for her imaginary crew. (I think this is an inside joke – the 1990 census reported that Minnesota was 95% Caucasian.) In addition to the dark-skinned Hines, the forensics lead at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is Jimmy Chang, a brilliant Hawaiian-Chinese biochemist who is running the BCA lab while earning his Ph.D. in forensic pathology. In the first book of the series Amy Nguyen, a Vietnamese trainee, joins the Rutherford force. And perhaps my favorite of all is the part-time coroner Dr. Adrian Pokornoskovic, otherwise known as Pokey. Pokey is a Ukranian immigrant who walked across Europe to escape Soviet oppression and little surprises him after going through that. He practices dermatology in Rutherford but he’s always available to help Jake analyze a crime scene and conduct an autopsy.

Gunn weaves Jakes’s personal life into the book so seamlessly and makes him so highly relatable that I enjoy reading about him as well as the mystery, and generally I don’t. Midway in the series he buys an old farmhouse, thinking as every first-time buyer before him that the house wasn’t especially flawed and that he could renovate the place himself. This belief is of course the homeowner equivalent of the amateur sleuth going into a dark basement without a flashlight or back-up: nothing good can come of it. The damage to the house was much worse than he realized and he did not have the skills to repair it. Negotiations with sharks masquerading as neighborhood contractors are among my favorite scenes in all 10 books.

In addition to everything else she did in her remarkable life, Elizabeth Gunn created the Minnesota equivalent of Brigadoon from her childhood memories, peopled it with lifelike and likable denizens, and plotted a few terrific problems for them to solve. Her fertile imagination gave me many, many hours of reading pleasure and I will always be grateful.