John Straley comes by detective fiction honestly.

The author, who was raised in the Pacific Northwest, took an intriguing path to literature. A reader since childhood, he moved with his wife, marine biologist Janice Straley, to Sitka, Alaska, where he found work as a private investigator. It was there that he wrote his first novel, “The Woman Who Married a Bear,” which introduced readers to detective Cecil Younger; the book also earned Straley a Shamus Award for best first P.I. novel.

Several more books featuring Younger followed, most recently “So Far and Good,” which Soho Press published in 2021.

For his latest book, “Big Breath In,” Straley decided to introduce a new character — Delphine, a retired marine biologist fighting cancer who goes in search of a missing woman and her child. Delphine is based on Straley’s wife, who fact-checked the manuscript to make sure he wasn’t taking any liberties with the marine biology aspects of the book. “She didn’t care too much about how I characterized her, but she wanted me to get the science right,” Straley says.

Straley talked about “Big Breath In” via Zoom from his home in Carmel, where he and his wife moved in 2022. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: You’ve worked as a wrangler, a trail crew foreman and a private investigator. What inspired you to start writing books?

A: When I was a kid, my parents were very bookish. They loved books and loved to read. And ever since I was in the eighth grade, I wanted to write, which was strange because I was very dyslexic. I didn’t do well with the mechanics of writing, but I had a teacher named Joe Moriarty who just said, “You can do this.” He let me read things aloud and he introduced me to poetry in the ’60s, and I was just smitten. I loved it and it was a good way to both rebel and kiss up to my father, who didn’t think I was capable but was proud of me for wanting to give it a try. I just started reading as much as I could. I went to the University of Washington, got a degree in English, and ever since, I wanted to tell stories.

Q: You published your first novel, “The Woman Who Married a Bear,” in 1992. What was the reaction from your fellow Sitka residents when that came out?

A: A lot of people got a kick out of it, and a lot of people thought they recognized themselves, and they were all wrong. I made a real effort not to include real people unless I actually named them. There were some people that I named and they enjoyed that. There were some people that voiced concerns from the Tlingit Native community. They didn’t want me to meddle too much in their traditional storytelling. In Tlingit culture, stories are like material wealth, so they didn’t want me to mess too much with it, but I got support from various Native leaders and intellectuals and writers. That meant a lot to me.

Q: What was the inspiration behind “Big Breath In”?

A: My wife and I had been staying at a hotel across the street from a hospital in Seattle. My wife has Parkinson’s disease, and she was having surgery, and I saw a yellow Harley-Davidson Sportster chained to a fence right across from the hospital, and it was all covered in grit. It hadn’t been washed in a long time. I began to wonder if somebody rode to the hospital and never came out.

My wife has mobility issues. That night, I had a dream about her just tearing up the streets of Seattle on a Harley-Davidson. She does have a motorcycle endorsement on her license still. She used to ride motorcycles and she lords that over me somewhat, because I never had an endorsement. So it just started there. I asked her what she would think if I wrote a book about a female character that was based almost solely on her, and she said it would be fine, but she didn’t want me to use her real name. And I said, “Well, what do you want your name to be?” She said, “I want it to be Delphine.” I was off and running. I wanted to write an extraordinary older female character who wasn’t like Miss Marple. My wife is a genuine badass. She’s a marine biologist and is just filled with courage, and so I wanted to write about that.

Q: The natural world has always played a big part in your books. Do you attribute that to growing up in Washington, where there’s all this gorgeous nature, and then living in Alaska, which is one of the great natural gems of America?

A: Oh, yeah. I’ve always been fascinated by the nonhuman world. We lived in a beautiful house in the country. I could see deer and bear prints in the woods sometimes. I always felt that nature was always reaching out all around me, trying to wake me up, trying to surprise me, from the flowers to the animals to the sun. I remember once when I was a kid, I saw a bright blue meteor burn into the atmosphere, and that just seared into my mind. I’ve always felt that extraordinary things are happening in the world that are beyond the realm of men.