Blue-Eyed Tough Guys
Queuing up this week’s podcast episode with ‘Longmire’ author Craig Johnson.
The other day, my daughter Sam and I watched Cool Hand Luke together for the first time. Donn Pearce wrote the novel in 1965 and earned an Academy Award nomination for sharing screenplay credit for the 1967 movie starring blue-eyed Paul Newman.
Born in 1928, Pearce left home at 15, attempted to join the United States Merchant Marine at 16, but was turned away due to his age. He lied about his age a second time to register for the draft to fight in World War II, and was inducted into the Army in 1944 before going AWOL. After a stint in the Merchant Marine, Pearce was arrested, tried, and imprisoned after attempting to pass counterfeit American money to a police officer in Marseilles.
Assigned to a work detail outside the prison grounds, Pearce escaped, making his way to the Italian border. He returned eventually to the United States, cracking safes at age 20 in 1949. He must not have been any good at the sneaky part, because he was arrested for burglary and served two years in the Florida Department of Corrections chain gangs.
Fifteen years later Scribners published his first novel, Cool Hand Luke, based on his time in the chain gang.
Enter Craig Johnson
Pearce’s scofflaw-to-published-author story is similar to that of French escaped convict-turned-author Henri Charrière, who published Papillon in 1969. Newman’s Hollywood rival Steve McQueen played the title role in the 1973 movie adaptation. Everyone loves a story about dangerous men with deep blue eyes, it seems.
Little is known of blue-eyed author Craig Johnson’s career path prior to publishing his first novel, The Cold Dish, at age 43 in 2004. Johnson appears to have stayed on the right side of Johnny Law, and at some point was inspired to develop the characters which appeared in the book. He certainly has a vivid imagination and a penchant for writing about trials and tribulations of people on and off the Indian reservations around the greater Wyoming area.
The main protagonist, Sheriff Walt Longmire, is more like Robert B. Parker’s detective Spenser, a flawed but earnest man with book and street smarts who can throw a punch when necessary. The Longmire series is based in fictional Absaroka County in northern Wyoming.
“The guys who are 6 feet 2 inches of twisted steel and sex appeal – every woman wants him, every man fears him – that’s not him,” Johnson told the New York Times in 2009. “Walt is the sadder-but-wiser sheriff. My favorite musketeer was Athos, the heartbroken one.”
“I don’t want him on a cruise ship, or jetting around on a skateboard,” he said in a 2014 interview. “I want to paint a realistic portrayal. There has to be a certain amount of honesty involved, even if it’s a little dramatically heightened, just so we can give him something to do each week.
“But all the stories in the series come from newspapers I’ve read in Wyoming and Montana. You become like a horse handicapper – you read something in the paper, and you think, ‘well, there’s 400 pages in that one.’ Walt is based on elements of about half a dozen people. Each time I come up with characters, I stitch pieces of different people together to tell the story. Everyone’s based on family, friends and neighbors.
“Anyone talking to me for more than 20 minutes is taking their literary legacy in their hands. It’s a small town, though, so people soon figure out who they are, but no one’s complained yet. When I’ve given people the choice of changing their name, they always seem to want to stay in.”
Here’s what we know about the 62-year-old Johnson, who grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and attended college at Marshall University.
In a 2008 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he mentioned a few joy-riding episodes and brushes with the law, which gave him an interesting perspective when he became a special officer attached to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“I had spent a lot of my life dodging cops and suddenly I was one!” he added.
Knocking around the country after graduating from Marshall, Johnson earned an M.A. from Temple University, where he wrote plays and did a little acting. In 1988, he took classes in the New York City police stations that were civil service oriented, and was constantly recruited by the police department, but after a knee injury he chose to work at the Met.
After visiting Wyoming when he was 22, Johnson returned in 1992 and bought the land where he currently resides with his wife Judy, several animals, and a garage full of motorcycles in Ucross (population 25), 18 miles northeast of Buffalo.
Eight years after The Cold Dish was published, A&E developed a popular television series named Longmire based on the books, which ran for an additional four seasons on Netflix through November 2017.
The success of both the books and the TV series spawned an annual festival called Longmire Days in Buffalo, attended by thousands every year, and running this Thursday through Sunday.
Johnson has authored 24 books featuring the blue-eyed Sheriff Walt, translated into 14 languages and winning numerous awards, including the Nouvel Observateur Prix du Roman Noir and the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF) Mystery of the Year. His 19th novel and 25th book featuring Walt, The Longmire Defense, will be published in early September 2023.
Tune in to the Motorcycles Are Drugs podcast this Wednesday to hear our conversation with Johnson who – like recent guest and Longmire co-star Zahn McClarnon – only agreed to chat when the topic of motorcycles came to the forefront of our invitation to meet a few months ago.