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There was an important moment when the guy standing next to me at the Washington Post for the official photo for the National Book Festival in DC turned and said, "Hey Craig, how you doin'?"  I thought he looked familiar as he told me about selling books out of the trunk of his car, but it was only as he was turning away that I got a look at his nametag and read John Grisham.

Another was when I saw an elderly gentleman at the adjacent table looking for a place to sit at the breakfast reception. I stood and took my chair over, placing it beside him. "There you go." By that time I'd gotten pretty cagey about the whole nametag thing and caught a glimpse of his, Ben Bradley--the famed editor who had seen that two cub reporters by the names of Woodward and Bernstein got a crack at a little know story back in the seventies called Watergate.

I was starting to feel a little more than out of my depth.

The night before, Judy and I had attended the opening reception at the Library of Congress Reading Room. If you haven't been there, you should go. I think it's one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever been in and if you go during business hours and show them some ID they'll give you a card so that you can request any of thirty-two million books.

I was tempted to request one of mine but it was, after all, beyond business hours.

 

 

 

 

» Craig Johnson discusses the latest book in the "Walt Longmire" Western mystery series, The Dark Horse, as well as his experiences with fans of the series and his job as a mystery writer.

» Read more about The Dark Horse

Craig Johnson, The Dark Horse, Podcast

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It's always a roll of the dice at events you haven't done before; you never know if anybody's going to show up. Judy and I were whistling down the I-5 in the San Joaquin Valley, and the temperature was burnishing the golden hills at a hundred and thirteen degrees.

I was fortunate to be selected by the Autry National Center to kick off their book club at the Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles-it was to be the swan song of The Dark Horse tour. "It's the debut of the program, so there might not be very many people..."

I glanced at her. "Yep, I know."

If you haven't ever been, the Autry is my favorite museum in the world, and one of the few where you can ride your horse on the equine trails of Griffith Park, tie off to the hitching rails at the museum, and go in. Try that at the Guggenheim.  

When Gene Autry started the museum, he was adamant that it not be about the glorification of himself but more of a celebration of the entire West. Back in the late eighties, Judy and I were in LA when I started exhibiting symptoms familiar to every wife-I stood by the doors of stores and jingled the truck keys in my pocket and stood on sidewalks (not my natural element) and looked into the distance with my eyes set in a hard squint.

"Why don't you go to the Gene Autry Museum?"

I'd been to the Roy Rogers Museum in Victorville, California (now having moved to Branson), and though I loved Roy, hadn't enjoyed the experience. "I don't think I can stand to see Champion stuffed."

"It's not like that."

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I was sitting in one of those chain bar and grills next to one of those chain motels in Boise, Idaho--you know, the literal translation of La Quinta is next to Denny's. I'd finished up a wonderful event at Rediscovered Books and was having a light dinner and a heavy beer. There were three traveling salesmen across the bar (this is not an intro to a joke) talking about how long they'd been out on the road, and I was starting to feel like I was in an Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neil play. A heavy-set fellow with a handlebar mustache and a corporate insignia shirt was complaining the loudest. "A week and a half."

The shorter guy next to him was commiserating, "Two weeks, and I'm starting to think that my wife and kids have forgotten what I look like."

The guy in the ball cap who was on the other side of the beer taps joined in, "I'm doing the inland empire in one sweep; three weeks."

"I've got you all beat." I sipped my beer and watched as they studied me. "Thirty four days and three to go."

The one with the mustache was the first to ask. "What'a ya sell?"

"Books."

"What kind of books?"

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Got a new hat a few months back for the tour of The Dark Horse, and those of you in the West know just how traumatic that can be. It's kind of like, and I'm guessing here, when a woman gets a new hairstyle. You know the old saying, ‘Never approach a bull from the front, a mule from the back, or a woman with a new hairstyle from any direction'.

 I tried the darn thing on about twelve times before buying it and then shipped it off to my hat guru, Mike Thomas, at H-Bar Hats in Billings for a little tweaking. As usual, it was back within the week--transformed into a wonderful facsimile of the one Jimmy Stewart wore in all those Anthony Mann westerns such as The Naked Spur, The Man From Laramie, and Winchester ‘73. He did a fantastic job, but when I pulled said hat from the box, something else came out with it-another hat.

It was a silver-belly, conservative, cattleman's crown with a moderate brim; handsome, but not mine. I figured Mike must've accidentally stuffed somebody else's hat in on top of mine and then shipped it off. No big deal, I'd just put it back in the box and return it to him. Then I got to thinking--Mike is a gracious soul and given to giving gifts, so I tried it on.

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"Texas."

"Nope." The conductor on the Northeast Corridor Local on the New Jersey Transit Line and I were playing a guessing game as I was making my way up the eastern seaboard on The Dark Horse tour. I usually take the window seat facing the back of the train, in that riding backwards doesn't affect me adversely and I like watching the countryside. It also puts me in direct contact with the uniformed ticket takers who stand by the sliding doors between cars.

"I was in Texas once, in the army; didn't like it much." He continued to study my boots and hat. "Montana."

"Nope." Though it might be hard to believe, the longest portion of my rodeo career began and ended in New Jersey. I was doing graduate work at Temple University in Philadelphia and would run off to a place called Cowtown in southern Jersey on weekends.

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The French publisher gets me this weekend--then I'm all over the U.S. for The Dark Horse tour. My wife spent another afternoon in the Louvre, and I waited reclining on the steps underneath the archway Denton in the great courtyard. I like art but I think it's important to set limits in any relationship. I'd already traipsed through a half-dozen museums looking over the heads of Japanese tourists and their cameras, so I decided to forgo the greatest art museum in the world and, instead, do a little people watching. Of course now to watch one must be willing to be watched-that's just the way the rules are written.

After about an hour, I was getting a little bored, so I slipped my cowboy hat down over my eyes, crossed the pointed toes of my size twelves, and closed my eyes. I'd been that way for about twenty minutes when I heard some whispering and shuffling on the steps below. I raised the brim of my hat and saw three little boys about seven years of age with their backpacks and matching red caps studying me. "...Le cow-boy."

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Craig Johnson is our guest blogger during the week of June 1st. If you have any questions for Craig Johnson, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on The Dark Horse:

Walt Longmire goes undercover to save a woman in an unfriendly place

Interweaving classic noir sensibilities and humor with contemporary themes of social justice, Craig Johnson's popular Walt Longmire mysteries transport readers to the sparse and rugged landscape of Wyoming. In The Dark Horse, the sheriff investigates when his instincts tell him something isn't right about a prisoner accused of killing her husband.

Wade Barsad, a man with a dubious past, locked his wife's horses in their barn and burned the animals alive. In return, Mary shot Wade in the head six times-or so the story goes. Walt doesn't believe Mary's confession, and he's determined to dig deeper. Posing as an insurance claims investigator, Walt soon discovers other people who might have wanted Wade dead, including a beautiful Guatemalan bartender and a rancher with a taste for liquor, but not for honesty.

The Dark Horse is sure to build on the success of Another Man's Moccasins as Sheriff Longmire unpins his star and ventures into a town without pity to save a woman without hope.