When Aaron Stander was a young teenager in Michigan, his parents bought an old hunting lodge with a cottage on the lake. He and his brother basked in the freedom of exploring the surroundings.

“We’d ride our bicycles 20-30 miles,” he says. “We had a rowboat. We’d hike. I really knew the landscape. And sometimes, on some back road, I would think, This would be a good place to bump someone off.”

Luckily for readers (as well as for potential victims), Stander became a writer of mysteries instead of a serial killer. Kirkus Reviews praises Smoke and Mirrors, his 12^th book featuring Sheriff Ray Elkins, as “a richly rendered story of murder on the shores of Lake Michigan.”

In Smoke and Mirrors, fireworks ensue when Sheriff Elkins and Detective Sergeant Sue Lawrence—now living together—investigate the murders of two people found naked near the beach during a Fourth of July weekend. The identity of the tattooed, 30-something male victim is unknown, while the female victim is a troubled local teen familiar to Child and Family Services. Elkins, Lawrence, and their team uncover a dark world hidden from the ritzy resort area’s privileged summer visitors.

Stander, a former college English professor, could be said to have become a fiction writer by accident. More than 30 years ago, his back went out while he was changing a bearing on his vintage sports car, and he was incapacitated for four months.

Stander was never one for recreational reading. “Not because I was a snob,” he says. “I was always so busy. I was teaching writing courses, teaching Shakespeare. People talked about recreational reading, and I would say, ‘Why would you read recreationally when you could be learning something?’”

But then while convalescing during what he calls “the summer of my discontent,” he was given Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard, the Michigan-based dean of crime fiction. “It was great fun,” he says. “I sent my wife to Borders Books and asked her to bring home everything with his name on the spine.”

After bingeing on Leonard, Stander read other crime and mystery authors. “I learned about the genre and responded to the writing,” he says. The seeds of a novel were planted as he reflected on the dual nature of life and wealth in a ritzy resort area. “The locals,” he observes, “work real hard. Then you have the summer people with the $10 million houses; for them, this is paradise. They separate their downstate and upstate lives—they do things in a rural area they wouldn’t do at home. Both groups have their own crime problems.”

That summer, Stander thought back to growing up in Michigan’s rural Benzie and Leelanau Counties. Like Leonard, he writes with a vivid sense of place. At one point in Smoke and Mirrors, Elkins and Lawrence weigh where they should camp out. The sheriff lays out their options:

The day trippers and most of the campers remain on the east side. The west side feels very remote, even though it’s only a few miles. If we hike that way, we’ll stay on the main pathway until we find a place with a compelling view. In daylight, we’ll see the curvature of the earth. At night, maybe the lights of a few lake freighters. Other than that, it’s open water to Wisconsin.

As Stander embarked on writing his novel, he mentally revisited all those places he’d explored on his bike as a youth and started to write murder scenes set in those locations—just murder scenes. He does not recommend this approach to aspiring writers. “That is the worst way you can do this,” he says with a laugh.

His fledgling novel needed a main character who was a local, someone who knew the people and who managed to get along with almost everyone. Sheriff Ray Elkins was born.

Stander sent his manuscript to a publishing house. Someone there suggested he talk to an agent named Grace Morgan (who has since left the industry). “She called me on Christmas Eve and said she would represent my book if I rewrote the first 150 pages,” Stander says. “I made every mistake you could make in a first novel, but it would have been a lot worse without Grace.”

For example, he recalls, “I would get so far in the story and not know what to do next, so I would kill someone off willy-nilly. People said of early drafts of the book that it was more dangerous being in northern Michigan than to be in Detroit.”

Stander completed that first book, Summer People (2000), which itself was gratifying. He’d told his wife that he would write a book, and he had done so. He’d previously written numerous scholarly articles that no one had ever read for conferences with “two people in the room,” he says.

Then came an unexpected twist. A bookmark advertisement inside a book he’d purchased at Barnes & Noble said that the company would publish his book for $200. “My wife and I did it as sort of a joke—she said that I was worth $200,” he says. “We published 10 copies to give to my mother and our children. I also gave one to a friend of mine who was a stringer for the local paper. She wrote a review. The local bookstore called and asked if I had any extra copies they could sell. I had four books left. She said they would try to sell them. Then she called for 10 more copies, then 15, then 100. Then I was on the local bestseller list. It is still amazing to me.”

Then things got even more amazing. Other bookstores started encouraging him to write a second Elkins book. He wrote Color Tour (2006) and connected with a statewide distributor that placed the books in different stores. His work found an even wider audience on Amazon.com. “I always wanted to be a writer,” he says, “but I’d never gotten around to it. I was afraid I’d be a failure. English majors—we’re all sort of neurotic.”

Stander is no longer teaching full time, but he has taken on other educational gigs. He’s taught creative writing to high school students and mystery writing to adults. For 17 years, he interviewed Michigan authors on Interlochen Public Radio. “These conversations about how they got started, what pushed them toward writing, and what they’ve learned over their careers have been so useful to me,” he says. One of these authors was Elmore Leonard himself. “It was one of the great days in my life,” Stander says. “He was so welcoming and so humble.”

Their conversation is still paying dividends. “Two nights ago,” Stander shares, “I was up at three in the morning. I was stalled on a story, and I remembered something Leonard told me. He said when he got stalled, he just listened to the characters.”

After 12 books, what’s next for Sheriff Elkins? At the conclusion of Smoke and Mirrors, Sue asks Ray if he’s burned out. The same could be asked of Stander, who lives with his wife of 46 years in Interlochen in the cottage he built the first year they were married. “I think I can do another two books,” he says.

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who is published on vanityfair.com and in the Washington Post and other outlets.