Longmire author speaks at Mansfield Reads!

By Amanda Rogers

Mansfield Record

If you’re a best-selling writer with a series of novels so popular that it became a popular television show, where would you get new ideas?

If you’re Craig Johnson, New York Times best-selling author of the Longmire series, you read the newspaper.

“I basically travel around and pick up a newspaper,” Johnson said. “I love the weekly editions. They will print things that no one else will. It keeps the books grounded in reality. Reality has a way of putting you in your place. I read about a woman who had a 304-mile postal route. If she went missing, where would you go looking for her? I have a book a foot thick of newspaper articles.”

Johnson, 62, travels the country, promoting his Western crime novels set in his home state of Wyoming. Johnson spoke at the 20th annual Mansfield Reads! Thursday at the Mansfield Public Library, 104 S. Wisteria St.

Johnson said he didn’t set out to write a series of books, he said.

“I set out to write a standalone book,” he said. “When I got picked up by a big agent, my publisher (Penguin USA) sat me down and said ‘We like these and would like to do a series.’ My wife reminded me that when I finished writing I went into a depression. I had been writing about these people so long that I missed them.”

The first short story “Old Indian Trick” won the Tony Hillerman Award.

“There’s nothing more useless than an already published short story,” Johnson said. “I got bored and thought I’d send it out to our list of emails on Christmas morning. It became a tradition to write one every year. When I had about a dozen Viking, put out an anthology.”

So far, Johnson has written 19 novels, two novellas and a collection of short stories about the fictional sheriff of the smallest county in Wyoming, Walt Longmire. Mansfield Reads!, which asks the community to read the same book and then discuss it, will examine his 17th book, “Daughter of the Morning Star.”

The book focuses on a Native teen basketball player who is receiving death threats. Since her sister disappeared the year before, the tribal police take the threats seriously and call in Sheriff Longmire and his team to investigate.

Native American women are murdered at 10 times the national average, and murder is the third-leading cause of death for Native women.

“My ranch is immediately to the south of the Northern Cheyenne reservation,” Johnson said. “I had that in the back of my mind. You have to have a vehicle. I tend to write socially responsible crime fiction. Since this was a Native issue it was under the radar. A friend invited me to a high school basketball game between Lame Deer and Lodge Grass, the Cheyenne versus the Crow. If you think the Indian wars are over, you haven’t seen a girls basketball game.”

Johnson draws on his own experiences, as he lives in a town of 25 in Wyoming, but wanted to write something different than a historical Western.

“(Legendary Western authors) Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey were pretty good at writing,” he said. “Westerns used to be extraordinarily popular. If you’re going to do something like that, do something different. I live in the contemporary world. The period west was interesting but so is now.

“For me, it was trying to do something a little different, Western and crime mystery,” Johnson said. “The competition is pretty ferocious. So for me, I wanted to do something a little bit different. Everything in crime fiction was a little noir. If you did something on the sheriff of the least populated county in Wyoming, that would be different.”

Johnson’s next book title came from a Texas sheriff, he said.

“I asked him ‘How do you know when to switch from your summer cowboy hat to your winter cowboy hat?’” he said. “He said ‘First Frost.’ It’s coming out in May, and is a time-traveling situation. The majority of the book takes place in 1963. Walt and Henry graduate and lose their deferment and receive a trip to southeast Asia. They make road trip on Route 66. They don’t get far.”

This will be Johnson’s first trip to Mansfield, although he has come through the DFW area often for book events.

“It obviously has a very nice library system,” Johnson said. “I judge a community by the strength of its library.”

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