DETROIT — Michigan crime reporter and editor John Counts understands rural Michiganians.

He's lived and worked all over the state covering crime, but he also fishes, hunts and plays guitar. The seasoned journalist — the son of a veteran Michigan journalist, the late Jeff Counts — is gearing up to release a book of short tales titled "Bear County, Michigan: Stories."

The page-turner gives glimpses into the lives of his Michigan-based characters: the brave, the misunderstood and the criminal. Counts, 47, has used his many years covering crime in Michigan to help him paint a vivid, engaging picture of the "real version that's left behind after the tourists leave."

Naturally, the musician also wrote a 12-track album to go with the stories in "Bear County, Michigan." We spoke to the father of two girls from his home in Whitmore Lake ahead of the release of both the book and the album.

The conversation has been slighted edited for length and clarity.

Q: Bear County, Michigan, is a fictional place in your writings, but it sure feels familiar. It's on the west side of the state near Grand Rapids, is that fair to say?

A: Before I came to Ann Arbor as a journalist, I worked at the Manistee News Advocate for a couple years, and that's kind of up between Ludington, and just north of Ludington. This town is very much based on my experiences up in Manistee and Manistee County. I was kind of like a police and court reporter. I spent a lot of time up in northern Michigan as a child anyway, but that was my first opportunity to really live in a small town like this. I just moved back to Michigan from Chicago and my now wife and I moved to Manistee about 2009.

Q: When did you transition from being a reporter to an editor?

A: About five or six years ago. I was mostly a police and court reporter in Manistee and then in Ann Arbor for five or six years. Then I was put on a statewide team as an investigative reporter during the Flint water crisis. And then I kind of bounced around and did a lot of special projects-type stuff. Then they moved me up to an editor at the Flint Journal in 2018, then to Ann Arbor as an editor during COVID. For the past year and a half, I've been the editor of our statewide investigative team.

Q: So you really know crime in Michigan. Have you met people like the characters in your stories?

A: Yeah, I've met them. You know, I grew up with ... I grew up kind of around a criminal element to begin with, but that's kind of another story. That's more of like the punk rock background. It was kind of a natural segue into police in court reporting. Going out to the crime scenes and sitting in court for five years will certainly change your views on humanity.

Q: Beyond the crime reporting, what's your relationship with rural Michigan? Did you spend a lot of time in the woods growing up? Your characters seem to know their way around a campfire or hunting rifle.

A: Yeah, dad was also a journalist. He worked for the same company that I work for now. I was born in Bay City, Michigan, where my dad worked at the newspaper. He was a big outdoorsman, kind of like this rugged, Hemingway type who liked to take my brother and I trout fishing up in the UP and backpacking on Isle Royal and bird hunting and all that kind of stuff. I really grew up going all over the place with the old man. He kind of knew Michigan like the back of his hand. He passed away in 2019. He had worked at the Observer and Eccentric at the end of his career, took the buyout and started his own outdoors publication.

So I've kind of been around that world my whole life. It's something I still do. I go trout fishing and bird hunting every year and I've got two daughters now, and I try to take them out and show them all the rivers in Michigan. I kind of had that background before I went up to Manistee. I had fished the Manistee River before I ever lived there, so I had that landscape in my imagination already.

Q: So is truth stranger than fiction? Which are crazier, the stories you've covered or the ones you've made up for this book?

A: It's probably a little bit of both. I think the crazier stuff is true, you know. Philip Roth kind of made a point in an essay in the early '60s that reality was starting to outpace the fiction writer's imagination. And I think that's true in a lot of ways. I think you could write some of the stuff that we've covered verbatim and nobody would believe it.

It would kind of lose meaning because fiction is a different animal to where there's the events and there's the characters, there's the people, but you're also kind of viewing it with meaning. The story means something where as journalism is just sort of throwing it out there like: this is what happened. This is what you need to know to be an informed citizen in your community.

But there are at least a couple instances in the book that are fictionalized versions of things that I covered as a reporter. Specifically in the story Lady of Comfort. I got called out as a reporter to a scene where some old fella had blown himself up in his house and I was kind of standing out there waiting to find out what happened. The state trooper said the guy had a girlfriend and I was like, oh is the girlfriend in there ... what was the relationship like? He was like, oh she was his 'lady of comfort.' I was like, that's kind of a weird term. That story title came straight from a state troopers mouth. The story "The Hermit," that was up in Manistee. I got called out to a fire late at night in the winter and this cabin was burning across the field and there was no road into the field. Troopers were getting all geared up on their snowmobiles to take firefighters across this field and told me the hermit had lit the cabin on fire as a call for help because he was out there stranded. I very nearly — this is one of my greatest regrets — I very nearly came close to being able to hop on the back of a snowmobile with the state trooper, which would have been the thrill of a lifetime. But right as I was about to crawl on his supervisor came along and said, hey, media is not allowed back there.

Q: Talk to me a little bit about the tone that you set for this collection of stories, there's a lot of dark humor here.

A: I tried to build a community out of a lot of different characters and I think covering the crime beat for as long as I did you develop a gallows' humor about the crazy stuff that you see. This isn't the Hallmark version of a northern Michigan town. This is the gritty, real version that's left behind after the tourists leave. These are the locals. These are the townies, and this is their story, unvarnished, warts and all.

Q: You mentioned your punk rock roots. You band Suburban Delinquents have been around since 1994?

A: We just celebrated our 30th anniversary. The first show we played was in November 1994 at the abandoned Broderick Tower on the 17th floor with one of (Jason) Navarro's bands Roosevelt's Inaugural Parade and Earthmover. It was kind of a crazy show. So 30 years later ... we were pretty active from 1994 to 1999, disbanded for 15-odd, 20 years, and then since 2015 we've been playing out regularly and releasing different albums. We just had a 30th anniversary show at (Hamtramck club) the Sanctuary.

Q: Any shows coming up?

A: So there's an interesting component to this that's non-Suburban Delinquent related in that I've written an album, a soundtrack to the book. I put together a band with two of the Delinquents and Nikkie (Galindo) from Touch the Clouds, I wrote a soundtrack based on the book. There's "Big Frank" the song based on Big Frank the story. There's 12 songs. I'm going to release the album in early March. Let the book come out and give that a chance to breathe.

We set up an album release show just for that album, April 18 at the Lexington. It's acoustic, it's kind of like folk, punk, alternative.

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