In a rural 1970s Oregon town, where the counterculture meets concerned small-town residents, sheriff Ty Dawson has another mystery to solve.
Wilsonville resident Baron Birtcher was a finance major in college who went into the music industry and then turned to mystery writing. He has numerous awards to his name and is the author of the Ty Dawson mystery series. Birtcher describes the books as crime thrillers, with each taking inspiration from cultural issues in the 1960s and 1970s — the age of psychedelic drugs and far-out political activism.
The series centers on Ty Dawson, a Korean War veteran and rancher who is enlisted by his community to become sheriff in a fictional 1970s town.
Birtcher was 13 years old in the early 1970s and was raised in Dana Point, California, which he said was both a surf town and a cow town near large ranches. While he said he was young and wide-eyed, he remembers observing older children embracing the counterculture while the town’s older residents were concerned about it.
To Birtcher, the early 1970s are an interesting cultural time to write about, and he got to reexamine his childhood “through the eyes of an adult.” Before his father died around five or six years ago, they spoke about the experience of raising a child during the 1970s.
“It’s only now facing me, (now) that I’m a grandparent, how challenging and how potentially scary that must have been. When you grew up in one culture, and your kids are growing up in one you don’t even recognize,” Birtcher said.
Birtcher said the previous books, with the first published in 2017, explore topics such as concern over the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, the arrival of a hippie commune to the small town and police corruption and political trouble in Portland.
In the fourth and latest book, “Knife River,” Birtcher explores the cultural challenges created by a popular musician coming to traditional small-town culture in the 1970s. The musician returns to his hometown and throws a concert to promote new music when a tragic incident occurs.
Birtcher said he pulled from his personal experiences in the music industry, where he worked as a professional musician and then as a producer and manager. During his time in the music industry Birtcher said he met the person who founded Caribou Ranch in Colorado.
Caribou Ranch was a recording studio in Colorado, near the small ski town of Netherland. Several famous musicians recorded at the studio, including Elton John and The Beach Boys, and Birtcher said the musicians brought their teams as well. The musicians would explore Netherland in their down time, and “completely disrupted the universe of this little town.”
“It’s just a little town in the mountains in Colorado, and all of a sudden there’s 30 rich hippies in here,” Birtcher said. “What are they doing? When are they leaving? And how much damage are they going to do while they’re here?” Birtcher said these questions, applied to Ty Dawson’s fictional rural Oregon town, help drive the story in “Knife River.”
Birtcher said his stories don’t have an overarching message on the time period. The books are character and environment driven, and feature sub-stories within the main story. While the Ty Dawson books are a series, Birtcher said the stories are also stand-alones that can be read without the context of previous books.
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