Author Craig Johnson still enjoys Sheriff Longmire's company

Craig Johnson’s latest book “The Longmire Defense” was at No. 7 on the New York Times Bestseller list for combined print and e-book sales when the author spoke with the Chronicle over the phone last week.

On the way, Johnson will visit Country Bookshelf in Bozeman to sign books at noon on Saturday, Sept. 30, and will read from and discuss “The Longmire Defense” at Elk River Books in Livingston at 7 p.m. the same day. Both events are free and open to the public.

The call found him in Philadelphia amid his latest book tour. Johnson will meet fans around the country before heading home to the ranch he built in rural Wyoming, some 20 miles outside Buffalo.

Tours are a bit different now than when Johnson premiered sheriff Walt Longmire in “The Cold Dish” in 2004. Publishers at the time offered minimal support, suggesting a local tour and giving Johnson a chuckle thinking about touring his tiny town of Ucross, Wyoming, which he usually punctuates with “population 26.” There was not a local bookstore. There wasn’t a bookstore within 30 miles. Johnson, however, was already equipped with an old BMW GS dual sport desert bike, perfect for the dirt and gravel roads prevalent around the Big Horn Mountains that feature heavily in his book series.

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“I like doing the research myself,” Johnson said. “I like going out and seeing the places Walt is going to be seeing and doing the things Walt is going to be doing, getting kind of a sense memory for the writing. It seems like it helps out a lot.”

Transportation secured, Johnson mapped out a loop around the northwest United States, knowing that the bike could travel 80 miles on a gallon of gas and there would be couches to sleep on along the way. At first, the “local” tour was grueling, and Johnson would find himself traveling more than eight hours on the bike between readings, essentially riding 5,000 miles to go to six different bookstores.

The Longmire mysteries have since gained traction, with new fans brought in by the Netflix series “Longmire” and a popularity resurgence of the Western as a genre. By the time Johnson stopped the “local” motorcycle tour about five years ago, it included 32 book stores in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Washington and Montana.

“People will write me and say ‘I slow down when I get to the end of your books because I don’t want them to end,’ and I always write them back and say ‘Yeah, me too,” Johnsons said. “It’s not like I don’t know that those characters are going to be back, but I’m losing them for one moment of their lives.”

The moment is short. When Johnson finally writes that last page, he closes the document, opens a new one and starts the next book. Newspapers he picks up in his travels, especially those from small Western towns, provide source material. Each novel begins as a story from one of these papers, leaving Johnson no shortage of ideas. Recently, he read about a woman with the longest postal route in the contiguous United States, driving some 304 miles each day.

“All I could think about when I read that article was ‘If she went missing, where would you look for her?’” Johnson said.

Though the Longmire mysteries may be novels, using real stories as a base keeps Johnson’s sheriff grounded in reality, dealing with things that Western sheriffs deal with. The setting also allows Johnson’s writing to dabble in truth.

“We really love your books because you have real locations,” Johnson recalls representatives of the Wyoming Office of Tourism telling him at a meeting. “It’s a fictitious county and a fictitious town, but everybody knows that it’s Johnson County and it’s a version of Buffalo… You don’t change the street names, you don’t change the trail names up in the Big Horn Mountains.”

While nearly 20 years have passed in real time since Johnson introduced the world to Walt Longmire, the author said the books follow a “Vivaldi version” of time, referencing composer Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” violin concertos. A year is a four-book cycle.

“The Longmire Defense” begins in the spring and centers on a very cold case that allows readers to delve into Walt’s relationship with his grandfather.

“Basically,” Johnson said, “it’s a murder case where he suspects that his grandfather may have been guilty of killing this man who was the accountant for the state of Wyoming’s treasury department.”

Though the murderer may be long dead, the case’s ties to the state mineral fund worth billions thrust Walt into a series of dangerous situations in and around the fictional Absaroka County.

Johnson describes Longmire himself as emblematic of the good people left in the American West. If Johnson slid off of Interstate 90 and buried the front of his truck in a snowbank, Longmire is the person he hopes is behind the wheel when he sees headlights behind him. He describes his lead characters — the sheriff, his lover/undersheriff Vic, his daughter Cady, friend Henry Standing Bear and the retired sheriff Lucian Connally — as interesting and intelligent, each with their own sense of humor, and each grappling with the events life has thrown at them.

“I have to spend eight hours a day with these people,” Johnson said, recalling how he said the sheriff was "good company" in his last interview with the Chronicle in 2018. “So if they don’t have that ability to change and adapt and move on and all that, then I’m not really going to enjoy the time that I’ve spent with them.”

Though Walt continues to question if he should retire, Johnson assured that this does not mean he plans to have him hang up his hat any time soon. His character is aging, and questions like “Am I doing what it is I should be doing? Is it making any difference? How long should I do this? Do I still have the capacity to be relevant?” only make him more human. These are the questions we all ask ourselves as the years start to catch up with us.

“I don’t know what I would do if I retired Walt,” Johnson said. “I would be wandering the streets of Ucross, population 26. That’s a grim thought.”

Instead, he will continue to evolve with the characters he has created, continue touring to meet the fans and support his books, and continue coming home to the ranch in Ucross.

“After 19 years, I’m still having a blast,” he said.

​Rachel Hergett is the arts and entertainment editor. She can be reached at rhergett@dailychronicle.com or 582-2603. Follow her on Twitter @hergett.

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