In death, as in life, Jim Fielder touched a nerve.
That’s made very clear in this newspaper's letters to the editor section, and in the comments appearing on the Queen Anne View website.
The former schoolteacher, author, outdoorsman and lover of birds and trees died in a house fire near the Seattle Pacific University campus on December 9. Jim had been in poor health, was in bad shape financially, and hoped to sell his family home and move to Southern California.
He never got the chance.
No doubt there are those out there biting their tongues, because in a safe, traditional sense, the lanky, 68-year-old — a multigenerational Queen Anne guy in a changing neighborhood — was a little bit out there himself, a sort of John the Baptist wandering in the polite, urban wilderness. His tall presence challenged complacency and business as usual.
Testimonials from his former students carry the most weight: Kids can always smell a phony. “What we crave is reality,” wrote one of Jim’s heroes, Henry David Thoreau. Jim was real, and he knew too many school kids feel like they’ve been captured by pirates.
I met Jim nearly a decade ago. The occasion: his true crime book, “Slow Death.” It was so gruesome, there was no way I was going to review that book. Instead, I wrote a column about Jim and the toll the writing of it took on him.
“Jim Fielder’s olive-dark eyes have seen things,” the column began.
Jim’s book had sold 60,000 copies at the time we met. He said his friend, crime writer Ann Rule, could only get through half of it. I quit somewhere around page 20.
“Slow Death” was the account of a serial, sexual sadist-murderer named David Parker Ray, who Jim said looked like an aging Marlborough Man. Jim wanted to get a book under his belt. He saw his chance in the story of grisly crimes committed in a small town called Truth or Consequences, N.M.
He immersed himself in the life of that benighted town, interviewing people who knew Ray, and spent a few hours with the imprisoned Ray before he died of heart failure.
“The FBI had a 10-year plan to interrogate him,” Jim told me. “They considered him one of the most brilliant killers they’d come across.”
The details of Ray’s crimes were so horrendous that an FBI agent who helped bust Ray, told by her boss what a good job she’d done, went home that night and put a bullet through her head.
Jim took four years to finish the book, writing in longhand at the upper Queen Anne Starbucks — the tall guy with beard and big black hair scribbling in the corner definitely wasn’t “journaling.”
When it was all over, Jim wondered if he’d made some sort of Faustian bargain.
“I didn’t think I changed when the book came out,” he told me. “It’s been 14 months. I’ve changed my point of view. I don’t believe in curses, but I’ve had more health problems in the last year and a half than I’ve had all my life.”
The whole experience “made me a quieter, more introverted person,” he said. Jim added that he was done writing about crime and psychopathic creeps: He was working on a western novel.
We stayed in touch over the years, and I saw his lighter side.
I happen to write poetry. One day Jim materialized at Queen Anne Books, where I was doing a book signing. He was strapped for cash but he bought a book anyway. Meanwhile, a corporate captain I barely knew wandered in and saw me at the table: Politeness tugged him in my direction, where he leafed through a book, said “Very nice,” put it back down and muttered something about buying one later (I confess: The book was lacking in poems about Tuscany).
When a bemused Jim, watching all this gave me a knowing wink, I experienced what some of his students must have felt in the classroom: It was good to know I wasn’t alone.
But Jim died alone. He had a raw integrity that made him vulnerable to the ruthless side of life.
I remember how he signed off on our interview nearly a decade ago.
“When I started out I didn’t know it would be so dark,” he said of his David Parker Ray project. I’ll always remember how he paused and looked away before sighing:. “I hope there is a hell for a guy like him.”
I hope there is a heaven for Jim Fielder.
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