Farewell, Summer Reading . . .

by Julia Buckley

I start work again this week, which is probably a good thing--in my summer laziness I've stopped accomplishing as much as I should and I've actually gained weight--but one thing I'll miss is the chance to read more books.

This summer I've read some terrific titles and become absorbed in wonderfully labrynthine plots. Here were some of the highlights:

Cradle in the Grave: This was my first exposure to Britain's Sophie Hannah, whose book has been released in America and which is a fascinating mystery surrounding the stories of three different women who have been accused of killing babies--in two cases their own children, and in one case a child of a friend.

Hannah's writing is intelligent, gripping, and ultimately impossible to put down.

The Janus Stone: This is the second in Elly Griffith's series, and it was just as compelling and well-written as the first, THE CROSSING PLACES. I'm a Griffiths fan!

Bossy Pants. Tina Fey's biography is far from a mystery, but it made me laugh out loud on several occasions and ended up being a reading highlight of my summer.

I Think I Love You: This second novel by Allison Pearson, the author of the bestselling I Don't Know How She Does It, was a nostalgic look back at the 70s and the pop reign of David Cassidy. But it's also about girlhood, friendship, families, and growing up. I loved it.

The Redbreast. This was my first taste of Norwegian Jo Nesbo's writing--an article in TIME likened him to Stieg Larrson, so I thought he was worth a read. It took me a while to get into this story, but once I did I was hooked--although it has many disturbing parallels to the actual brutality that just occurred in Norway. (Nesbo wrote a moving article about the unprecedented violence in his country after the terrorist attack).

Hell is Empty. As I mentioned before on this blog, there is no one in the mystery world right now who is quite as stylish and elegant as Craig Johnson, and this book, with its layers of literary allusion and Native American legend, was both spiritual and suspenseful. You can read my essay comparing Johnson to Ross MacDonald on this blog, here or read one of my interviews with Johnson here.

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit. Mark Seal's non-fiction look at a real-life con man was fascinating and sometimes unbelievable. It seems destined to be made into a movie in the style of Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. (I interviewed Seal about the book here).

I read quite a few more great books this summer, even though I was lazier than usual and wasted far too much time playing Lexulous on Facebook. But these were the first that sprang to mind as good reading recommendations.

What great books did you read this summer?

Walt Longmire and Lew Archer: The Solitary Brothers of Detective Fiction

by Julia Buckley
I’ve always been a Ross MacDonald fan, and until recently I was content to believe there was no one like him. MacDonald’s style is singular—a blend of a great story, a lonely and moral protagonist, and a powerful use of simile and metaphor that elevate his work to the realm of literature. Many mystery writers today have cited MacDonald as an influence, including Sue Grafton, whose “Santa Teresa” is an homage to MacDonald’s fictionalized version of Santa Barbara.

There has never been a match, for me, to MacDonald’s style. But recently I read my second book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, and I realized that Johnson’s writing parallels MacDonald’s in many ways.

First, the protagonist: It is true that the lonely detective is a part of the American hard-boiled tradition, but Johnson’s Walt Longmire has a similar kind of lonesomeness to Lew Archer, even though the former lives in the wilds of Wyoming and the latter does his work among the wealthy and elite of California. They both wear their loneliness like a shield, and they reveal very little of themselves to other characters or to the reader. Both men were once married, so they are able to feel the absence of their wives as a reminder of companionship.

In HELL IS EMPTY, the latest Longmire mystery, Walt is asked by his deputy if he’s sure he wants to pursue a dangerous criminal alone. He responds, “Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure I don’t, but there isn’t anybody else for the job” (Johnson 58).

Similarly, in MacDonald’s great novel THE UNDERGROUND MAN, Lew Archer is approached by a young woman who feels he’s the only person who can solve her dilemma. It is Archer’s day off, but he takes on her task with a shrug: “I’m a private detective. I do these things for a living” (MacDonald 15).

Each detective sees his role as inevitable, and something he must do alone.
My favorite thing about MacDonald’s writing is the way he can take a scene and make it profound with imagery and metaphor—something Johnson has mastered, as well. Here are both narrators, Archer and Longmire, describing fire:

(from THE UNDERGROUND MAN): “I walked toward him, into the skeletal shadow of the sycamore. The smoky moon was lodged in its top, segmented by small black branches. . . . I looked back from the mailbox. Sparks and embers were blowing down the canyon, plunging into the trees behind the house like bright, exotic birds taking the place of the birds that had flown” (MacDonald 40, 52).


(from HELL IS EMPTY): “Lodgepole pines were exploding with the heat, and a crisscross of timber fell down the incline. The darkness lifted long enough to reveal massive logs exploding as the resin inside them reached boiling levels, branches, pine cones and needles swirling in armies of winged fire devils” (Johnson 202).

Both writers take the reader inside the experience with deft language and an immersion in setting—both Santa Barbara and Longmire’s Wyoming forest are prone to forest fires, and so they become a part of the mystery in each novel.

Finally, both detectives have an outlook that is existential but starkly beautiful. Here is Longmire describing his mountains: “Maybe our greatest fears were made clear this high, so close to the cold emptiness of the unprotected skies. Perhaps the voices were of the mountains themselves, whispering in our ears just how inconsequential and transient we really are” (Johnson 123).

And Lew Archer, confronting a suspect: “His heavy gaze came up to my face. He seemed to be trying to read his future in my eyes. I could read it in his: a future of fear and confusion and trouble, resembling his past” (MacDonald 240).

I love the spare and beautiful prose of both writers, honest and poetic as both of their lawmen follow a quest for the truth.

MacDonald has always been a part of my permanent collection; Johnson will now be in that collection, as well.

Works Cited

Johnson, Craig. Hell is Empty. New York: Viking, 2011.

MacDonald, Ross. The Underground Man. New York: Vintage Reprint, 1996. (Original pub date: 1971).

Mysterious Sex

Guest Author: Craig Johnson

When I was asked to participate in the Poe’s Deadly Daughters’ blog, the first thing I did was look at a calendar and see what part of the month of February I had free. There was a little time toward the middle of the month where I was home at the ranch, so I contacted Sharon Wildwind to offer the date, wherein she informed me that it was a perfect choice because it was Valentine’s Day. I was completely unaware, and how it is that I’m married and have been able to stay that way for twelve years is still the true mystery.

I’ve heard it said that women have sex to achieve love and that men have love to achieve sex; either way, the two are pretty well entwined.

People always want to know what the most difficult parts of a novel are to write, and when I tell them it’s sex and violence, they’re usually surprised. . .or not. When I was starting out, a lot of mystery authors were pretty free with their advice, and one of the things they told me was that if there was sexual tension between any of my characters, I had to make sure I didn’t let anything “happen” for a good sixteen or seventeen books.

My immediate response to that was, “What kind of women are you dating?” I don’t know any woman that would wait sixteen or seventeen years for something to “happen”. It just didn’t seem realistic, and I figured all it would do is complicate my characters lives, and I’m a firm believer that a series survives on the development and complexity of its characters. Still, it took me three novels before I girded my loins to the point of writing my first sex scene. It was one paragraph long. I remember coming up from the shop where I write with a strange look on my face.

My wife asked, “Is something wrong?”
“I think I just wrote my first sex scene.”
She showed more than the usual interest. “Is it any good?”
“I’m not sure.”

Sex scenes are tricky the same way scenes of violence can be; make a mistake and they immediately become vaudeville, and vaudeville at the precisely wrong time can be really, really embarrassing. I’ve always prescribed to the theory of less-is-more, and I think that holds true with sex (literarily, but maybe not practically), as well. Consequently, I’ve written a few scenes that are after the fact or lead up to the ubiquitous curtains blowing in the window or the proverbial train going through the tunnel. I’ve always been a fan of the drift away from the kiss to the heroine’s one, high-heeled foot being lifted.

I guess I’m old-fashioned and, like Blanche Dubois, have always depended on the kindness of strangers or at least their imaginations. I think you can simply plant the seed of an idea, especially one as powerful as sex or violence, and just let the reader’s imagination do the rest. That’s when I really feel sorry for the television and movie production studios in their attempts to match the custom-fit, mind’s-eye of the reader. I don’t think it can be done.

That or I’m just chicken-shit.

To prove a point, one of the erotic scenes that I’ve gotten the most responses about was a scene where a female highway patrolman has a leather, search glove unsnapped, and my protagonist, Sheriff Walt Longmire, notices the tan line at her wrist. I got a ton of guys emailing me over that one.

Perverts.

Fully grown, upstanding ranchers in my area of northern Wyoming keep asking me who’s going to play Under-sheriff Victoria Moretti in the A&E pilot based on my books. They don’t care who’s going to play Walt or Henry, just Vic.

Perverts.

Men keep emailing me pictures of actresses and models or sometimes even NFL cheerleaders. Somehow, I don’t think the women’s thespian talents are the immediate concern. It’s also tough explaining to my wife.

Women are almost as bad, though; happy to tell me which actor they think would make the perfect Walt or Henry and then staring off into the distance with a dreamy look in their eyes. Generally the female vote is split: Walt is the one they want to marry, but Northern Cheyenne Henry Standing Bear is the one they want to run off with for the weekend.

Perverts.

After the “sex-scene” book came out I was touring in Olympia, Washington, and got to the Q&A portion where a woman was jumping out of her seat. “I want to talk to you about that sex scene in your book?”

I was a little nervous. “Yes, Ma’am?”
“It went on forever.”
I paused. “It’s only one paragraph long.”
The crowd started laughing as she turned bright red.

I couldn’t let it go. “How many times did you read it?”
She came clean. “Oh, a bunch of times.”

I took that as a partial vote of confidence and have started feeling a little more confident in my abilities—but I’m on book seven and I’ve yet to write another explicit one. Maybe book eight, maybe not.

Craig Johnson author of Viking/Penguin’s Walt Longmire series including The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished (the “sex scene” book), Another Man’s Moccasins, The Dark Horse and Junkyard Dogs. The seventh in the series, Hell is Empty will be released by Viking, June 2nd. To learn more about Craig and his book, visit his web site.

Photo credit for Craig's picture © Catherine Henriette.