Craig Johnson

Craig Johnson has a background in law enforcement and education. He lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population 25.

A. When I was about twenty-four years-old I delivered some horses for a rancher up in Montana to the UCLA area; Ucross, Clearmont, Leiter and Arvada. I got there but the cowboy from Oklahoma who was supposed to meet me hadn’t shown. I called the rancher and he said to just sit tight, that the other fella hadn’t left yet… “From Oklahoma?” I said. Well, he said that I should just go get some idiot cubes (seventy-five pound bales of hay) and turn the horses loose in the public corral. That kind of gives you an idea about Ucross (population 25); we’ve got a public corral, but no post office. I said, “That’s fine for the horses, but what about me?” He said, “They’ve got a bar, what else do you need?”

I had an old Rand-McNally atlas behind the seat of my truck, and I marked that spot where Piney and Clear Creeks run together. I marked a few other spots in a few other states, but I always seemed to drift back to Wyoming, to that spot, and almost thirty years later, here I am, living on the land in the house that I built, writing books about the place that I fell for when I was a teenager.

Q. Your post-graduate work is in playwriting, how has that influenced your novels?

A. I don’t think I was intent on writing plays, but I was interested in the way people talk, the words they use, so playwriting seemed to be appropriate at the time. When the audio versions of the books were being produced, I got a call from George Guidall with some questions about pronunciations of the locations and Cheyenne language, and he asked me about my formal education in writing. When I told him that it had been in playwriting he said, “I knew it!” When I asked him how he knew, he said it was because I almost never use the tag phrases, ‘he said’ or ‘she said’. He was right, I don’t. I think it’s a weak way of getting the information across—if you do your job well enough, the reader should be able to tell who is speaking. The voices should be very distinct, and I think that phrases like ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ only remind the reader that they’re reading a book, and that’s not what I want; I want them to be in the work. I tend to use physical action to delineate character—it’s much more informative and interesting. I guess that’s the playwright in me as well…

After I’d built the first part of the ranch, I started thinking about what it was I wanted to write. I figured I had a background in law enforcement and an education in playwriting. Dialogue was something that I had studied and which came kind of easy to me, so I figured with those two tools in my belt, I’d have a pretty good shot at getting something out there that was worth reading. But wouldn’t you figure, when the first reviews came out for The Cold Dish, everyone praised my descriptive passages and hardly anybody said anything about the dialogue… They came around, though. A good series is character driven and character relies heavily on dialogue—kind of character unfiltered.

Q. There’s a rumor that you built your own house. Do you have pictures?

A. Yep, I have pictures and yes, I did build it—designed it, poured all the concrete, and stacked all the logs myself. I had one of those fathers who felt that in life you could either learn how or pay somebody else to do things—that there might be times when you won’t have money, but you’ll always have the knowledge. I came to Wyoming in a boom period when every cowboy in the country was slipping a four-foot level into the rifle rack of his pickup and calling himself a contractor, and I’ve always suffered under the delusion that I can do anything anybody else can do, no matter how poorly. I think an awful lot of us have a vague notion of striking out, buying a little land, and building a place—the same way a lot of people think about someday writing a novel. I think the longing has to override the fear of failure. I’m lucky in that I am not afraid of much. Of course, that might just be an innate stupidity and not an asset. I think it was an important transition in my life, building the ranch. I did it in three parts—kind of a metaphor for writing a novel, and I learned a lot and not just about construction. I would stack logs from sun up to sundown, turn around and look, and it seemed like I hadn’t accomplished anything. But I had. Writing is a lot like that, the feelings of accomplishment comes in increments, and you have to be satisfied with that. Pacing and patience are important in building a house as they are in writing a book. It took years of persistence to finish the house, and I think the experience proved invaluable when I started The Cold Dish. It certainly would have been a different book if I had finished it before I started the house.

Q. There’s another rumor that you have a baseball field in your back pasture. What’s that about?

A. If you build it, they will come… I really like baseball. I’m a big guy, but I’ve always liked the sport because it’s a competition where one team can’t physically dominate another; if you’re smart and determined, you’ll usually win. I grew up when the Cincinnati Big Red Machine was the baseball force to be contended with, and my favorite player as a kid was Johnny Bench. I always wanted to be like him. I’d heard that he was six feet tall and two hundred pounds, and always wanted to be that big—I got to the six foot mark, and have been trying to get back to the two-hundred pounds ever since… I did bodyguard work at the first annual Rawling’s Golden Glove Awards at the World Trade Center. All the ballplayers wanted to do was talk about being a cop, and all I wanted to do was talk about baseball.

Have you ever seen cowboys play baseball? They’re horrible. First off, they want to play in their boots and hats. Anyway, we decided that we’d have this Fourth of July baseball game, which now has about a hundred and sixty players each year; seven through seventy, everybody plays—it takes hours to get through the line-up, and even though there are nothing but people playing in the infield the ball usually gets through, but it’s great fun.

Q. Who is Dog?

A. When I was building the ranch, I finally felt like I’d gotten to the point in my adult life when I could take care of a dog. I’d lived in so many places and so many cities where it just wasn’t feasible. So while I was building the ranch, I figured it was time. I went to the pound. I saw this huge, red dog leaning up against the wall with this forlorn look and commented to the guy in charge that it must be really difficult to find homes for the more mature dogs, at which point he informed me that the dog in question was only six months old—and was scheduled to be put down the next day. Of course, I took him. So I hauled him over to get his shots, and the vet looks at me and says, “What kind of dog is this?” I tell him with all the authority of my little dog pound papers that he’s part German Shepherd, part Chow, and part Lab. He shakes his head and calls me over to look at the dog’s tooth structure and informs me that he may have some German Shepherd in him, but that he’s mostly Saint Bernard. I named him Max, and he leveled off at just under a hundred and fifty pounds. He is now immortal.

Everybody in the mystery field told me that I shouldn’t give my protagonist a pet, that it just made for difficulties later on, but I figure that’s what the life-blood of a series is; the complexities of the character’s lives. Dog is such a wonderful opportunity for Walt to express himself when no one else is around… Except Dog. I couldn’t imagine Walt without Dog, anymore than I could imagine being without my dogs.

Q. You practiced law enforcement in a large, metropolitan department in the east. What were the experiences you had that influenced your work?

A. Mostly social. I lived at a hundred and sixteenth and Pleasant Avenue up in Harlem, back before it started getting gentrified. I knew all the kids in the neighborhood, their parents, the shop owners, everybody. I think that’s how you enforce the law, by being a part of a community, not by driving around in a pair of mirrored sunglasses with ‘what the fuck are you looking at’ written on the side of the cruiser. I’m not a big one for the cult of the individual or the vigilante—that usually leads down a very dark road, and that’s not what I am about and it surely isn’t what Walt is about. I think my experiences informed my writing, but you also have to remember that those experiences in my life were almost twenty years ago, so whenever anybody tries to get me to spout off about law enforcement, it gives me a little pause. But the social qualities don’t change and when I hear that the men and women who are involved with law enforcement currently feel a real kinship with Walt and Vic, Santiago and Double Tough, I am flattered.

Q. You and Walt have similar backgrounds. What parts of your daily life resemble Walt’s life?

A. I modeled Walt’s home after my own, at least as a work in progress, and based Durant off of the county seat no more than twenty miles away. It’s almost as if I wake up in Walt’s world every morning, and every time I make a trip into town—it’s this strange, Capra-esque feeling that I’m driving into Bedford Falls, or my version of it, which is Durant. I literally expect to see Walt, Henry or Vic to be walking the sidewalks.

I think when you love a place, it shows; but I think you also owe it the mark of respect. There’s a lot of writing about the west that really doesn’t reflect the west I live in, contrived plots, unbelievable characters and a lot of hokum to patch together some far-flung story that would never really take place. I try and write my novels with a sense that Walt is just sitting next to you at the Busy Bee and telling you what happened to him, and it better approximate the truth.

Q. What do you think separates your novels from other series within the genre?

A. I was fortunate enough to have Ivan Doig read my latest and he wrote me a letter complimenting me on my feel for the country and knack for picking up the lore. Ivan’s pretty shrewd, and I’d hate to try and get anything by him. He said he was pretty sure I was a purebred chronicler of lives and tales peeking out from behind the mystery. Guilty as charged. The reason I write mysteries is because my protagonist happens to be a sheriff. If Walt had been a rancher or a dentist, the series would be something quite different.

Humor is important to me, and I think that’s something that you don’t get in a lot of mystery and thriller writing. A lot of the law enforcement people who read the books comment on the authenticity of the humor. It can be a little dark. When I climbed in my first cruiser with an eighteen-year-veteran, he said he had two things to tell me, “First, take your hat off, everybody knows you’re a rookie if you where your hat in the car.” I took my hat off. “Second, you can lose your badge, hell, you can even lose your gun, but just don’t lose your sense of humor and you’ll be fine.” I took those words to heart. I attempt to write in a different manner than a lot of work within the genre, finding new ways to say things instead of writing about ‘the red-hot gun barrel swung around under the looming mountains…’ Well, the gun barrels are always red-hot and the mountains are always looming, so find a new way to say these things and keep the reader engaged. You’ve got to transcend the genre to really say something new within it.

Q. Is there any reason we couldn’t jump into the series with the current book?

A. None what so ever. Some of the people who have enjoyed the novels the most are the ones who’ve stumbled onto them and then gone back and read the rest of the series from the beginning. I can see how that would be satisfying, being able to go back and begin something like an archeological dig into the lives of characters you enjoy. Each book should stand alone as a piece of literary fiction.

Q. What do you do when you’re not writing?

A. I ranch, so I’m really not very well acquainted with the concept of free time. I run and lift weights a little, and I’ve got a speed and heavy bag in my shop in an attempt to balance out the sedentary aspects of the writing life. I’ve got a few old trucks, a vintage ’65 Mustang and a 1948 8N tractor that I wrench on, but everything seems to lead back to the writing. I guess that’s when I’m the happiest—just writing.

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