Detective novelist Craig Johnson makes crime pay
Publisher Viking Penguin hopes his fourth book, 'Another Man's Moccasins,' raises his profile.
CRAIG Johnson comes as advertised. Standing outside the Autry National Center on a boiling summer afternoon, the Wyoming-based crime novelist is decked out in a long-sleeve shirt made of heavy cotton, scuffed brown boots and a 10-gallon hat that provides shade, but not nearly enough. Spotting his interlocutor, Johnson sticks out his hand and delivers a booming "How ya doin'?!" This is the same Marlboro Man who squints at readers from the window of a beat-up junker truck on the jackets of his four novels, which includes the recently released "Another Man's Moccasins."
If you didn't know that Johnson was a rising star in the crime novel genre, you might mistake the guileless rancher for a hayseed agog in the big city. That is, until he goes inside the museum and wanders around its latest exhibit on presidents and cowboys. Suddenly, Johnson is dropping little nuggets of historical information like a docent. Passing a photo of Bat Masterson, Johnson, 47, reels off the titles of some of the dime novels that the famed western crime-fighter wrote. He's got a few choice factoids on Lyndon B. Johnson and Calvin Coolidge as well.
In "Another Man's Moccasins," Johnson flashes back and forth between present-day Wyoming -- the setting for all four of his novels -- and LBJ-era Vietnam, where Johnson's protagonist, Sheriff Walt Longmire, once served as a Marine investigator during the war. As Longmire, the star of all four Johnson novels, searches for the killer of a Vietnamese girl who's found on the highway in tiny Absaroka County, his past creeps up on him, back to memories of drug runners and prostitutes among the mud and pestilence of Tan Son Nhut and Tet. As Longmire unravels the present-day murder mystery, Johnson uses his parallel stories to ponder racism, redemption and the gravitational pull of the past.
Like the greatest crime novelists, Johnson is a student of human nature. Walt Longmire is strong but fallible, a man whose devil-may-care stoicism masks a heightened sensitivity to the horrors he's witnessed. "Longmire has seen some bad stuff in his life," said Johnson. "I suppose there's a good deal of myself in Walt, but he's unhappier than I am. He certainly believes in the goodness of humankind even as he deals with his share of, for lack of a better word, evil."
- * Mary Frances Shura Craig; Author of Mysteries, Children's Books Jan 17, 1991
- Mary Frances Shura Craig; Author of Mysteries Jan 18, 1991
- He Said It Jun 11, 2000
