Craig Johnson has experienced much good fortune as an author. He started out on the Viking imprint, where he has been for all his sixteen novels. For a decade he has been in the top ten of the New York Times best seller list, and has been equally popular in Europe as he has in the States. As a bookseller who struck up a friendship with Craig since the time of his first book, The Cold Dish, I’ve been around for many of his moments, including the one that increased awareness of his novels like nothing else, the six season run of Longmire, the television show based on his work.
It has been a few years since its last season, but it is still having an impact on both Craig and his books. Before the release of his latest, Land Of Wolves, which puts his Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire in a new place, we discussed the effect Hollywood has had on his life and where Walt is in his.
Scott Montgomery: I thought things would have slowed down for you after Longmire quit shooting, but it really hasn’t.
Craig Johnson: I thought it would, too, but it really hasn’t happened. Every event at Longmire Days sold out in three minutes. The TV show is like a lifetime friend for people, which is kind of nice. I like to think a lot of it has to do with the characters—I’m positive a lot of it has to do with the performances.
And the books are still going strong. We’ve been in single digits on The New York Times best seller list for the last eleven years, and I still enjoy writing the books—that’s the big element for me. Viking/Penguin doesn’t put any qualifications on what I do and how I do it, so it gives me a lot of freedom, and the process therefore becomes much more of an enjoyment. I’ve got about half a dozen Walt books in my head, so he will be around for the next decade and more.
I’m just having a great time writing Walt. I think a lot of that has to do with Walt himself. I really enjoy his company and seeing where he’s going to go.
Has the awareness of the books caught up with the awareness of the show?
It’s interesting to see the dynamic. When the show was on regular cable, it was pulling five million people in a night and it’s hard for publishing to compete with that. When we went to Netflix, they’re not as forthcoming with their numbers, but it was pretty much trending every night, for gosh sakes.
So, I now get a large amount of people who contact me with this apologetic way saying, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know about your books, but I started watching the TV show and switched over to reading them.”
What we’ve found out is that people have watched the show, all six seasons, six or seven times, and they’ve decided after seeing that little blip in in the beginning “Based On The Novels By Craig Johnson” enough times, they think maybe they’ll give them a try. It’s kind of nice that people are out there panning for information on Absoroka County, more information on Walt Longmire, Vic Moretti, Henry Standing Bear, and all these other characters and discovering there is a whole universe for them to explore. I have to admit that it’s gratifying that so many people have made that transition.
I enjoyed the show, but would have probably enjoyed it more if I wasn’t comparing it to the books. Have you found that the readers coming to the books after the show are surprised how much humor is in them or seeing sides of Walt and company they didn’t know?
It’s just a matter of there being more. It’s not like the makers of the show didn’t get the tone right and the characters and place. There is simply a limit to what you can do with a forty-two-minute television show.
As executive consultant I use to get the scripts and see these scenes of humor and character, but when things had to get cut because of the time constraints, it was those scenes that went since they didn’t drive the plot.
Fortunately, when you’re writing novels, you can show these characters’ lives with more detail. Walt is not a homicide investigator who is working on one case. He’s a sheriff in Wyoming, so he’s dealing with so many things that are going on in his county. I think that makes for a multi-dimensional character, not completely driven by one story.
There are obviously changes between the TV show and the books. The producers were very cognizant and were very clear with me about that. They said when they borrow plots from the books, they would change the ending because they didn’t want to ruin the book for readers who gravitated to them after watching the show.
We just had Longmire Days with thousands of people in Buffalo Wyoming where so many people were picking up that new mass market copy of The Cold Dish. It was interesting to see how much of the momentum is continuing.
It really has to do with the characters; I’m a firm believer in that. When I teach writing, I’m always saying if you don’t care, if they’re not real, if they don’t have all the aspects of a carbon-based life form, you’ve got a problem on your hands, but if you’ve got enough to work with, you can go on writing forever.
Besides increased interest in the books, what else has the show provided for you?
It’s a whole new world for me, because we’ve become friends with a lot of people involved with the show, particularly the actors because they come up here for Longmire Days. They’re incredibly talented, intelligent people and they’re very engaged and involved culturally and socially.
As a part of the tour for Land Of Wolves, we have an event in Beverly Hills at The Writer’s Guild Theater and practically the entire cast, the writers, the producers, the artist who composed the music, practically everybody is going to come to that event. For a show that’s been off production for three years that are still connected to this pace and its characters, it’s kind of nice.
You’ve said that you don’t picture the actors when writing the characters they’ve played, but you’ve pictured them as new characters.
(Laughs) They haven’t been able to subvert the characters because I had a real strong start. I was on book seven, Hell Is Empty, when they started filming and I got to meet all the cast members.
One of the quotes I always use is from Wallace Stegner, “The greatest piece of fiction is the disclaimer at the beginning of every book where it says nobody in this book is based on anybody alive or dead.” When you have these fully fledged, it’s easy to avoid using the actor’s characteristics when writing them, but as they’ve become good friends of mine, they’ve popped up as other characters.
“I’m a bit of a crow. I fly around and pick up the shiny bits and put them in a story. The people I know are fair game.”I think the first was Zahn McClarnon who plays Mathias who popped up as Bobby Womack the highway patrolman who haunts The Wind River Canyon in the novella The Highwayman. In fact, when my wife read the description of the character she asked if it was Zahn and I said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
And just recently, In Depth Of Winter there is a character named Adan Martinez in it. That’s A. Martinez,
They’re interesting people and I’m a bit of a crow. I fly around and pick up the shiny bits and put them in a story. The people I know are fair game.
With Land Of Wolves, you have moved Walt to a place that is familiar to where he was in The Cold Dish, but he’s more aware.
With Walt it’s always going to be a case of trying to overcome this overwhelming depression that has become a large-scale portion of his life. The fact that he made this deal with the universe that he would enforce the rules and there would be no sliding scale of justice in Absaroka County and after doing that he has the most important thing in his life taken away from him, his wife…he will never quite get over that.
It’s going to be a battle he’s going to have to fight his entire life. That’s something I think is an important part of his character, that battle to overcome that daily depression. Obviously, with the epic events that occurred in Mexico In Depth Of Winter, you just can’t ignore that kind of thing and pretend it’s not something he’d have to deal with.
In one chapter, he’s talking to Dr. Isaac Bloomfield about moments when he freezes. Isaac explains the fight or flee mechanism and says there is a third recourse, the freeze, where you’re confronted with something so terrifying you can neither fight or flee and you’re simply frozen in your tracks.
Walt says, “That’s all well and good Doc, but what the heck is it I’m afraid of?”
And Isaac says, “I thought that was manifestly obvious; it’s yourself.”
The experiences he had down in Mexico, like Henry said, was a war, not a police action. So, he had to unpack that guy he was when he was a Marine investigator in Vietnam in 1968 and that was one tough guy and he had to get him out of the foot locker and used that guy to survive against those cartels. Then he got back to Wyoming and is having trouble getting that guy back into that foot locker again. He finds himself not only a stranger to himself, but to the world he was born into and grew up in. Wyoming now seems strange to him.
The title comes from the Basque proverb, “A land of strangers is a land of wolves.” Walt has become a stranger to himself to a great extent and so when there is an apparent suicide of a shepherd up in the Bighorn Mountains, which might be a possible murder, and the appearance of this wolf who is aged, large, kicked off from the pack, and solitary when he appears, Walt has a strange connection. It was fun book to write, because sounding the depths with Walt is something I try to do in each book.
He’s returning to a land of strangers he knows.
Well it’s his home and everyone is worried about him and concerned about him. The only comic relief that runs through the book is poor Ruby trying to get Walt to have a computer and actually use it, which doesn’t go well. He is even being confronted by technology, which is a stranger. It’s just one of those things where you’re trying to add as many layers to a book as you possibly can. I only get a chance with readers one book a year and want to try to take full advantage of that and try to make it as good a book it can possibly be to carry them through the next year.
Did you know how that computer situation was going to turn out when you introduced it?
Oh yeah, absolutely. (Laughs) It was a forgone conclusion. I knew it was going to be agonizing for all parties concerned. But it is also an attempt to be realistic.
It came from a dispatcher who dealt with an older sheriff who did not have a computer and so she had to go print out his e-mails and leave them on his desk. He would hand write the responses and she’d type them back via e-mail. That’s okay, back in the day, when you were getting half a dozen e-mails, but in the modern era that’s quite a load to bear. I’d have to imagine that there was a certain point in time Ruby would have had enough and would have to get Walt kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, not even the twenty-first.
Walt has to deal with the primal aspects of life and death and the natural world and what people are capable of while trying to deal with the modern world and move forward.
Another reflection of being in a land of strangers, Walt has to dive into the Basque society and he needs Saizarbitoria for an interpreter in his jurisdiction.
I knew I just wasn’t dealing with younger Basques, but older Basques and that the story would deal with a family that had a member that took Lucian’s leg. It’s fun to circle back around and hit some of those tropes from early books and then maybe find out more. We think we know what happened, but maybe there’s more to the story than is obvious. It gives you an embarkation point for more complexity for the characters and more layers.
“Some say avoid the social and political. If it has an impact on the place you write about, I think you have a responsibility to become engaged in those issues.”The Basque aspect is very important to me, because it is such a vital part of our world out here. The shepherds, these huge sheep ranches, the utilization of lease land in The Bighorn Mountains, the difficulties immigrants face when working up here on visas. There are a lot of hot topics in this book, one being immigration, another being wolves. It’s one of your responsibilities as a writer. Some say avoid the social and political. If it has an impact on the place you write about, I think you have a responsibility to become engaged in those issues. That doesn’t mean you use it as a bully pulpit and preach your politics, because I think part of your responsibility is to show both sides. Hopefully, that’s what I’ve done.
In the end, what was the takeaway from your Hollywood adventure?
I’m still stunned by the impact Hollywood makes. Longmire is showing in about ninety countries around the world. I’m still getting e-mails from Turkey. “I really love the show, I really love the characters. The books haven’t gotten translated in Turkish, but I found one in Egyptian and am reading it.” I’m amazed at the global impact of that imagery and it’s still out there working.
Also, there is a good chance it’s not over. There has been talk of TV movies and Warner Brothers is starting their own streaming service. I find it hard to believe they’d ignore one of their highest rated scripted series. Of course, you can never predict the vagaries of Hollywood….
