What books is Anna Pigeon based on? The author wore a real ranger badge for years before writing them
Anna Pigeon was invented by a law enforcement ranger working in a West Texas national park, who happened to be a former actress with a novel already behind her.
USA Network's Anna Pigeon premiered on August 7, with Tracy Spiridakos as a National Park Service ranger investigating crimes in Glacier National Park. Morwyn Brebner created the series; Lea Thompson directs and executive produces. The season ended on October 9, two days after USA renewed it for a second season.
All of it comes from Nevada Barr, who has written 19 Anna Pigeon novels.
The books
Barr published the series between 1993 and 2016, and almost every book sends Anna to a different park. In order:
- Track of the Cat (1993) — Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas
- A Superior Death (1994) — Isle Royale, Michigan
- Ill Wind (1995) — Mesa Verde, Colorado
- Firestorm (1996) — Lassen Volcanic, California
- Endangered Species (1997) — Cumberland Island, Georgia
- Blind Descent (1998) — Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico
- Liberty Falling (1999) — the Statue of Liberty
- Deep South (2000) — the Natchez Trace Parkway, Mississippi
- Blood Lure (2001) — Glacier, Montana
- Hunting Season (2002) — the Natchez Trace again
- Flashback (2003) — Dry Tortugas, Florida
- High Country (2004) — Yosemite
- Hard Truth (2005) — Rocky Mountain, Colorado
- Winter Study (2008) — Isle Royale again
- Borderline (2009) — Big Bend, Texas
- Burn (2010) — New Orleans
- The Rope (2012) — Glen Canyon, on the Utah–Arizona line
- Destroyer Angel (2014) — Superior National Forest, Minnesota
- Boar Island (2016) — Acadia, Maine
Track of the Cat won both the Agatha and the Anthony award for best first novel. There hasn't been a new Anna Pigeon book since Boar Island.
The two the show actually uses
Season one doesn't work through the list. It takes its stories from two books, and Thompson said so plainly to USA Insider.
"We use Track of the Cat and The Rope," Thompson said of season one.
The pairing makes more sense than it looks. Track of the Cat is the first book, in which a fellow ranger's death gets blamed on a mountain lion and Anna doesn't believe it. The Rope, published nineteen years later, is a prequel: Anna's very first season as a ranger, fresh out of New York after her husband's death, stranded and alone in the desert. The show starts from the first book and the one that goes back before it.
Neither of them is set in Glacier. Thompson moved everything there, "from Texas to Glacier National Park," and filmed it in Alberta. The one book that actually takes place in Glacier, Blood Lure, isn't one of the two.
The badge
Barr didn't research the job. She did it.
She grew up in Susanville, California, where her parents worked at a small mountain airport, got an MFA in acting, and spent years on stage off-Broadway in New York, then in commercials and radio voice-overs in Minneapolis. Her first novel, a historical Western called Bittersweet, came out in 1984. Then her first husband's interest in conservation took her into the parks:
- 1989 — a seasonal summer on Isle Royale, in Lake Superior.
- 1990 — Guadalupe Mountains, in West Texas, as a law enforcement ranger.
- 1991 and 1992 — two seasons at Mesa Verde.
- 1994 — a permanent ranger position on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi.
- 1996 — she resigned to write full time.
She took the job as a way to keep acting in the off-season, she told BookBrowse. It didn't stay that way.
"Once I'd begun the parks stole my heart and acting went by the wayside," Barr said.
Every one of those parks later turns up in a book: Guadalupe in the first, Isle Royale in the second and again in Winter Study, Mesa Verde in the third, the Natchez Trace twice. The first three novels are her first three postings.
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How much of Anna is Barr
Most of her, at the start. Barr has never pretended otherwise.
"Anna was conceived as my alter ego when I was working as a law enforcement ranger," Barr told BookBrowse.
Track of the Cat wasn't planned as the first of anything. Barr told the same interview she wrote it "as an expression of who I was then set amid murder and mayhem," and that Anna has since grown into her own person. Even the family carried over: Anna's sister in the books, the psychiatrist Tricia Helfer plays on the show, is named Molly, and modeled on Barr's own sister of the same name.
Thompson optioned the books about ten years ago. At the premiere, Barr pointed out she wasn't the first to try. "This was the 23rd time the book was optioned," she said. The 23rd is the one that got a second season.
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