Jon Stratton draws on thirteen years teaching inside a maximum-security prison for Murder on Alkali Road
GREAT FALLS, MONT. — Jon Stratton spent his career teaching philosophy and critical thinking, mostly to college students and, for thirteen years, to inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Now he’s written a whodunit.
Murder on Alkali Road is Stratton’s new mystery novel, set in Great Falls. It follows Earl Coffin, a young man sent to pick up an antique six-shooter from a client and fly it back to Seattle. It seemed like a simple job, until his cousin turns up murdered with that same gun, stolen the night before.
Stratton says the book grew out of what he saw in the classroom, not the crime section.
“Thirteen years teaching inmates at Walla Walla, that’s probably the most relevant experience I had writing this,” Stratton said. “You learn what people are actually capable of. And what they lie about.”
He’s a native Montanan who started on the Hardy Boys as a kid, moved on to Agatha Christie, and reads Anthony Horowitz now, a lineage that shows in the book’s structure. Murder on Alkali Road runs as one continuous narrative, with no jumping timelines or alternating perspectives; everything comes through Coffin, hour by hour.
What sets Coffin apart, Stratton says, is what he isn’t. Not a genius. Not hardened. Not chasing a bottle or an addiction to numb the job. He meditates. He limits his drinking. He doesn’t smoke.
“I wanted a detective who solves things because he won’t quit, not because he’s tougher or smarter than everyone else in the room,” Stratton said.
The case also pulls Coffin into his own family’s history, tied to a stolen six-shooter and a decades-old Montana bank robbery. Stratton describes the Coffins as neither wealthy nor violent by trade, just people who put family loyalty ahead of nearly everything, including, at times, the law. The book is aimed at readers of classic whodunits, with crossover appeal for fans of Westerns and Old West history.
Stratton previously published Critical Thinking for College Students with Rowman & Littlefield twenty-five years ago and has worked on grants through the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. Murder on Alkali Road marks his first work of fiction.
About the Author
Jon Stratton is a native Montanan and former philosophy professor whose career included teaching philosophy and critical thinking at colleges and universities across the Pacific Northwest, as well as thirteen years teaching at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Murder on Alkali Road is his debut novel.
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