A Craig Johnson Treat

I was super excited to get this petite volume in the mail--a book of short stories by the great Craig Johnson, the creator of the Walt Longmire mystery series.

Angela at Viking/Penguin filled in the interesting background of this compilation:

"Ten years ago, Craig Johnson wrote his first short story, the Hillerman Award-winning Old Indian Trick. This was one of the earliest appearances of the sheriff who would go on to star in Johnson’s bestselling, award-winning Walt Longmire novels and the hit TV drama series Longmire. Each Christmas Eve thereafter, Johnson has sent to friends a new short story featuring an episode in Walt’s life that doesn’t appear in the full-length novels. WAIT FOR SIGNS is the first time these stories are available in a single volume and also features an entirely new story, Petunia, Bandit Queen of the Bighorns."

I love Johnson's writing, and have talked about it in various blog posts that you can read here, here, and here.  In the last link I compare Johnson's writing to that of one of my other favorite writers, Ross MacDonald, who paved the way for writers like Johnson with his moody Lew Archer mysteries.

It will be nice to be able to enjoy some of Johnson's fiction in smaller, more easily digestible pieces (for the reader on the go!)

The book goes on sale officially on October 21st!

MacDonald and Nostalgia

It's a highly satisfying experience to read (and re-read) a Ross Macdonald novel. I just finished The Blue Hammer for the third time in about twenty years, and it was still a great read. There's just something about Macdonald's writing that stays with you after the book is closed. It's not just the sense of sadness that permeates, I think, all of his writing; this sadness is of course compounded for me by the knowledge that Macdonald was a relatively unhappy person and died, sad to say, of Alzheimer's disease in 1983. It's also a matter of his unflinching look at human nature and his refusal to turn away from what might be ugly or pathetic there.

I don't suppose this sounds cheery, and certainly there's not much humor in his novels, but I read them for their poetry. Macdonald does something with diction that not everyone else can achieve; he uses simile and metaphor almost constantly, and for someone else that would seem overdone, but in his books it becomes a tribute to metaphor, and a way to more deeply understand both his characters and his detective, Lew Archer, who might be one of the most melancholy gumshoes I've ever encountered.

The other satisfying thing about this novel is that it captures so much of its time period. In this case it was the mid-seventies (and it was Macdonald's last book), but he began in the fifties, and each novel carries with it a nostalgic look at its age. His fictional "Santa Teresa" was later resurrected by Sue Grafton in her alphabet mysteries, and she claims Macdonald as a major influence on her writing.

Now that I've finished The Blue Hammer, which was the end for Macdonald and for Archer, I think I'd like to go back to the beginning, to his book The Moving Target, which was written almost thirty years before in 1949.

If anyone wants to read a good short sample of Macdonald's fiction, I very much like his story "Midnight Blue," and it captures the spirit of Archer in a more compressed form.

Thank goodness for old books and comfortable chairs.