The expectations game: pick up a literary novel, and you usually start with an open mind. You hope for great writing, but structure-wise, plot-wise, the writer is free. Add the word crime, mystery, or thriller, and everything changes. You’re counting on someone dying in the first chapters; you’re counting on being amused by a story of greed, fear, sex, hatred. If it’s a legal thriller, there will be moral conundrums, iffy evidence, bad cops, endangered jurors. If it’s a cozy, you expect cranky old people, poison, and food. LA noir: private detectives, actresses, seedy producers. A thriller set in New York can be anything it wants to be, or just any facet of Robert De Niro—gangsters, restaurants, art galleries—with a hundred possible cons in between. Florida: everyone will be deranged against a background of weather, real estate, and invasive Burmese pythons.
And if a reader sees a review for a novel set in Montana, they might assume it will include handsome rich ranchers with trophy wives, big spreads, mounted heads, a dozen guns and some token cows, while I, having lived in the state for decades, will give them abandoned graveyards, flooding rivers, fatally misinformed tourists, and college graduates who like psilocybin. A reader might stretch their preconceived notions to include wealthy skiers in the winter, big hair in the bars, and brave lawmen versus wingnuts. I might play to convention by framing my story around the 4th of July rodeo, then blow up the clown. People expect cowpokes; I poke no cows in my latest book, but I do boil a Russian travel agent-cum-hit man in a Yellowstone hot spring.
The West is a vast potential cliché, and few areas of the world are as given to typecasting as Montana. Setting is always a misunderstanding waiting to happen, but the divergence between assumption and real life is especially acute here. Visitors want a version of the west that just doesn’t exist for the people who live in the place, and as a writer, obliterating the myth is unbearably tempting, maybe even a moral duty. Every trope in fiction is trying to dodge becoming a cliché, and no form of fiction benefits more from subversion and misdirection than a mystery. I find ideas and scenes in the odd details and mundane corners that are particular to the place where I live—the ravines where a body could be dumped, the overlooked weapons in the roadhouse kitchen, the corners of the river where drowning victims wash up.
Writers are opportunists, always stealing moments. When a sky diver’s chute failed during the halftime show one year, he landed in the arena just before the rodeo queen and her court were scheduled to do a triumphant gallop. I’m not proud that I used the incident in the novel I was working on at the time: the story opened with the discovery of a dead, naked man on the wet sand of Brighton Beach, no water in his lungs, every bone in his body broken. I see birds circling a grove, and I set a scene with birdwatchers finding a body. I hear about a foot turning up in a Yellowstone hot spring and I decide to put it in a red Keds high top. Some hotelier friends find an artificial limb in their rooftop hot tub—of course I use it. After I worried that our tent might blow into a reservoir one night, carrying my two-year-old with it, I opened another novel that way. And when my mother found a drowned body while walking her dog, I used that, too.
Another glitch in the myth: most Montana towns don’t look like Deadwood. There’s something Depression-era about the mountain west, where many downtowns feel like frozen, dusty Art Deco sets for a noir movie. It’s the neon, the glass-block bars now frequented by hipsters and carpenters and cowboys, all of them temporarily united by pool, weed, and music. Our alleys are as intensely urban and lonely as Chicago’s, and they often still look like something out of The Sting. In the winter, they’re coated with ice and filled with wind; I remember slipping once, and as I lay assessing damage, I watched the blinds move on a window above, and decided to write the sniping scene that opens my first novel. Montana’s urban corners and alleys have been used well: by Dashiell Hammett in Red Harvest, in any of James Crumley’s novels (The Last Good Kiss, The Wrong Case), in James Welch’s bleak, beautiful Winter in the Blood and Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red and Jim Harrison’s “Legends of the Fall,” in the central death in A River Runs Through It, filmed in my hometown of Livingston. Red Harvest, set in Butte, is arguably the first noir crime novel, and features no cowboy hats.
And yet people can’t help themselves.
Another way to blow up expectations, rather than blowing up a rodeo clown, is to double down on the underlying, undomesticated place, the world most visitors don’t comprehend. The preconceived notions are as annoying to me as a local as they are as a writer, and in hindsight, a lot of what I write about comes in reaction. I do terrible fictional things to tourists, and to rich cosplaying immigrants with mini mansions and closets full of western wear, but terrible things do happen: it’s deadly out here, in a dozen ways, and tourists, who often fail to recognize the extremity of the environment, are low-hanging fruit, the gift that keeps giving. The bears! The wind! The meth and the poor people! Gravity and alcohol!
If I rewrote Going Local (which features a fatal rodeo accident and that exploding clown) now, I’d probably add a murder over fireworks noise, a character driven to the brink by traumatized pets, casual fires, the drunken movie star pissing on their flower bed. It’s the little stuff that gets to you, the weirdness of what really happens, that makes murder interesting. I’d focus on bad divorces, embezzling county officials, hunters who head out in late September without really checking the weather. If I truly stuck to realism, I probably wouldn’t write about ranchers or cowboys at all—small operations are increasingly rare, because real ranching is hard, heartbreaking and unprofitable, and rich outsiders are buying up the land, splitting it, building very large houses on forty-acre spreads. One of my favorite characters is a rancher, but he’s an old killer with secrets. His war-bride wife is Italian, and his hired hands get around on ATVs. He’s true to life.
The real west has mixed feelings: part of the idea of the place is beautiful, and part of it is a very real tragedy, and sometimes it’s simply turned into a joke. A friend who writes noir gave me a blurb for a book (which he had clearly read) that mentioned cowpokes. I boiled a Russian in a hot spring, but I poked no cows in that book. And rodeos, which give everyone the chance to celebrate the myth and ignore the downside, are too often coopted by politics. The white hat–black hat thing: it’s the Feds vs the wingnuts today, undertrained cops dealing with heroin, methamphetamine, alcohol, suicide. There’s an ache to this place, and maybe some of it is the shrinking of the old real west, the disappearance of small ranches; maybe it’s the shadow of what we did to the people who were here first. Maybe the solace of open spaces is oblivion.
I don’t ignore the traditions. I gave my protagonist a jaw broken by bull-riding in his youth, and I love putting him in bar fights with lawyers and realtors, other cops and reporters, killers and rivals in love. I made him a sheriff, and the son of a sheriff, but I also gave him a graduate degree in archaeology, and some years in New York and Europe. He camps and skis, he floats the river, he hunts. He eats well and travels and does illegal drugs. He’s not tortured in love, not an alcoholic (or at least he’s not dwelling on it), and not particularly earnest. He makes mistakes and rarely wears cowboy boots. He does not suffer nobly and silently, and he does not always do the right thing. He’s as human as I can make him, and he’s still a westerner. And he has sympathy for the cowboy, whose real job between rodeos might be plumbing, working as a carpenter, working as an EMT, writing a little poetry. We all wear different hats out here.
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