By Mala Hoffman

There’s actually very little mystery about why surveyor-turned-mystery writer Norman Van Valkenburgh set Murder in the Shawangunks, his latest whodunnit, in the Shawangunk Mountains. Since his retirement from the Department of Environmental Conservation about a decade ago he’s been working with the Mohonk Preserve "only three days a week," he says, adding quickly "I really am retired."

But as to why Murder in the Shawangunks is shorter than Van Valkenburgh’s three previous Catskill-based mystery novels, and why the book include a novella, Class of ’68, by the unknown writer Airilee Ellyn Blessing, who turns out to be Van Valkenburgh’s late daughter, well, that’s more a secret of the heart than a mystery. "I only wrote Murder in the Shawangunks to induce the publisher to take my daughter’s book," Van Valkenburgh confesses. "And I don’t want to make it too long to overshadow hers."

After Blessing died suddenly of pneumonia nearly four years ago at the age of 44, Van Valkenburgh decided to take what was then an unfinished manuscript and publish it as a companion piece to one of his own works. Only it didn’t happen right away. "I had the manuscript, and we knew what we wanted to do, and it just sat there," he recalls.

Even once he started the process of filing in the gaps in the story line, and editing the rough edges, Van Valkenburgh found it a challenging task. "It was very difficult. Out of all the books I’ve ever worked on, this was the hardest," he admits. "I was trying to be her, saying how she would say things, when I was filling the gaps. And when I was editing, I’d think, gosh, if I change this word around, she wouldn’t like it."

In a way, his daughter’s talent at composing a mystery story came as a surprise to him. Though he knew she enjoyed writing, she was always reluctant to share her work. "She kept her mother informed, so we knew she was writing, but she never sent her pieces to read," Van Valkenburgh notes. The novella she did produce was a veiled autobiography inspired by a recent high school reunion (although no one was murdered at the actual event). And Van Valkenburgh says, "I thought it was great." In fact, many of the characters, including the protagonist’s best friend and the grandmother, a mail deliverer known for reading the backs of her customers’ postcards, are taken directly from Blessing’s life.

Despite Blessing’s reticence to go public with her work in life, Van Valkenburgh says her husband and daughter are pleased with the book’s publication, although his granddaughter has yet to get past the first few chapters, in which her relationship with her mother is prominently featured. And the actual "Class of ‘68" has started a scholarship fund in Blessing’s honor, with a grant of $150 to be given each year to the student in the Hunter-Tannersville school district who shows the greatest interest in writing. "The royalties from this book are going to go to that fund as well," Van Valkenburgh adds.

Now a resident of Saugerties, Van Valkenburgh and his family spent many years living in the Greene County town of West Kill, where Blessing’s novella takes place. The community has been used in fiction before by Van Valkenburgh himself, who set his first novel Murder in the Catskills, in the family home. Prior to writing the mystery, which feature land surveyor Ward Eastman as the sleuth, Van Valkenburgh, a former DEC regional director and director of lands and forests, had published eight or ten non-fiction books about state and land history in the Catskills and the Adirondacks.

"I hadn’t done any fiction, and that first book is about one-third history and non-fiction, with the fiction built around it," he says. It was a strategy to persuade his publisher, Purple Mountain Press, to venture into the then-uncharted world of fiction. Since then, the Ward Eastman mysteries have done quite well, and are particular favorites among land surveyors, which, Van Valkenburgh claims, is not that surprising. "Being a surveyor is kind of a mystery, too. Putting together dead parcels is kind of a puzzle. Finding corners on the ground in a mystery," he notes.

In fact, both the character of Ward Eastman and the stories he uncovers are based on truth. The model for Eastman was a land surveyor named Edward West ("You take the ward off of Edward and change the West to East," Van Valkenburgh explains), whose real-life adventures were related to the author.

Though he claims in this latest book that Ward Eastman is officially retired, Van Valkenburgh isn’t giving up his pen yet. In June, Purple Mountain Press will again follow an unmarked path when it publishes his (and its) first children’s story, "The Hunter Mountain Fire Tower, 1963," based on a trip he took with his son’s Cub Scout troop and with illustrations by his son, a chef in Pennsylvania. "That’s another experiment," he says, "Like the fiction."

In a way, Blessing inherited not only her father’s ability to merge fact with fiction, but his spirit of adventure as well. As Van Valkenburgh now realizes, her mystery novel was written almost as a dare.

"I was always picking at her about women, and what they could do. When the first mystery of mine came out, she read it and said, "I could write one of these." Well, she did, but we didn’t know it."

The book containing Van Valkenburgh’s Murder in the Shawangunks and Blessing’s Class of ’68 is available in all area bookstores, or by contacting Purple Mountain press at 1-800-325-2665.