Rob Phillips has been an outdoorsman his entire life.
“I started hunting and fishing with my dad and always enjoyed it,” he says, noting those activities continued through college. “My roommate and I liked to hunt pheasants on the Palouse. It was a big part of my time at WSU.”
He also read a bevy of outdoors magazines, “and I’d dream about the authors and their hunting trips.”
Phillips (’78 Comm.) was working at his dad’s Yakima advertising agency, Smith, Phillips & DiPietro, in his late 20s or early 30s when he sold his first piece to Salmon-Trout-Steelheader magazine. Since then, he’s sold several dozen articles and essays to regional and national outdoors magazines, and started writing for the Yakima Herald-Republic, which has run his weekly outdoors column since 1991—more than 1,500 in all.
Five years ago, Phillips added another kind of writing to his repertoire. His first book, The Cascade Killer, launched the Luke McCain mystery series. The ninth in the series, Cascade Witness, was released on February 25.
His protagonist is a Yakima-based Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife officer who also just happens to be a WSU alum. He and his sidekick Jack, a yellow Labrador retriever, catch poachers, track fugitives, and help solve murders and more in the Cascade Range.
“Since I grew up here, I thought I would have my guy be centered here, in the regional office in Yakima, and patrol the mountains and trails and rivers that I know,” says Phillips, who enjoyed writing the first novel so much that he “just jumped right into the second one, and it just sort of snowballed from there. It’s really taken off and, frankly, it’s humbling.”
So far, Phillips has sold more than 80,000 books, “and it just keeps growing and growing. It constantly amazes me.”
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the first book. “I thought if I’m ever going to try to write a book, this was the time,” says Phillips, a longtime fan of author John Sandford and avid reader of mysteries. “If I’d ever wanted to try to write a book, I thought I’d try to write a mystery.”
Switching to fiction “wasn’t that hard. To me, it’s all creative writing.”
He doesn’t keep a schedule. “Some days I don’t write anything. Other days I might write eight or ten hours. I wrote the first book in 24 days.”
With three Luke McCain books under his belt in 2022, he wrote the memoir A Dog Life Well Lived, celebrating all the dogs in his life. “It’s something I felt I could leave behind, something that would give my granddaughter an idea of how her old grandpa grew up in Yakima, hunting and fishing with the dogs he had.”
Phillips went to work in advertising straight out of college. “I graduated on my birthday, June 5, and, on June 6, I started with the Yakima Herald-Republic in advertising sales in the Sunnyside branch. Two years later, I moved to the main office. After a year, I joined my dad’s ad agency. I had a bit of an ‘in,’ but I had to make my own way. I had to earn my stripes.”
For 40 years, Phillips wrote 30-second TV ads, radio commercials, and more for clients such as the Yakima Bait Company and the Central Washington State Fair. He and the son of his dad’s business partner bought the business in 1995, running it until they sold it in 2018. He officially retired from the ad world in 2021.
Washington State University prepared him for his career, says Phillips, who was part of WSU’s student ad team, competing in the National Student Advertising Competition. Associate professor Edward Bannister, who died during Phillips’s senior year in 1977, taught some of his favorite classes and started an internship program for advertising students which, according to the website for the Edward Bannister Memorial Fund at WSU, has “become one of the most successful programs of its kind in the country.” Through the program, Phillips completed an internship at a large Seattle ad agency “that helped pave the way into my career, and I enjoyed every minute of it.”
He still enjoys hunting pheasants on the Palouse, around Yakima, and in Montana. And he plans to stick with Luke McCain. “People love the series. As long as I’ve got a good idea for a book, I’m going to continue with that.”
Review of Trapped in the Cascades, a 2025 Luke McCain mystery novel from Phillips.