Q&A with Craig Johnson of Longmire mystery series

Craig Johnson will be in Charleston on Sept. 30 as part of The Post and Courier’s Charleston Porch Talks series. 

The New York Times bestselling author behind the Longmire mystery series answered five questions ahead of his appearance here. You can learn more at the event at Festival Hall by visiting postandcourier.com/porch-talks. 

This interview has been edited for brevity. 

Why the mystery genre? What draws you to this and what other mystery writers have inspired you?

I’ve always enjoyed that golden era of mystery fiction — Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler — but the thing that drew me in was the structure. Mystery fiction hasn’t given up on storytelling; you can always count on a good story.

Then there’s the Western blend. Were you drawn to old Westerns and cowboy tales growing up? How does living on a ranch continue to inspire your writing?

It’s funny because the mystery writers think of me as a Western writer and the Western writers feel I’m a mystery writer. I think when you live in a town of 26 in northern Wyoming, you’d have a hard time writing about a homicide detective in, say, San Francisco. I can’t help but think that all those novels, motion pictures and TV shows had an effect, but I think just living and working in the Rocky Mountain west is more responsible for my style than anything else.

I read that your family tradition of storytelling on the front porch inspired you to be a writer. What kind of tales did you spin early on and how did that influence your career?

Well, the difficulty was that I was the worst storyteller in my family, so I started looking for other ways of telling stories — and that led to the writing. Another difficulty is the odds against being a successful writer are something like those of wanting to be an astronaut. When I finally got my first book, “The Cold Dish,” published by Viking/Penguin and made the New York Times Best Sellers List, there were a lot of my friends and family that were shocked that I’d written a book — maybe a little too shocked. 

When the Longmire books made their way on screen for a TV series, what was that process like? How did you help translate from page to script?

I think Warner Bros., like me, were looking for something different and thought that the sheriff of the least-populated county in the least-populated state might be the thing. I remember when I was starting out that folks would come up to me and say, “You should get a movie or a TV show,” (to which I responded) “Uh huh.” The problem being that getting one of those is even more difficult than getting published.

When “Longmire” finally started getting made, they offered me an opportunity to be in the writing room, but I just thought that was a bad idea. I mean, what television writer wants the novelist in the writing room?

Hollywood is a lot like any other type of business; to be successful you have to get the best people you can to work with and then do the hardest thing of all — leave them alone. They went ahead and made me a creative consultant on the show, which led to interesting exchanges, something like this one:

Them: “Can we have a body wash off the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in the Powder River.”

Me: “No.”

Them: “You’re just being difficult.”

Me: “No, I’m telling you the Powder River runs north, onto the reservation, and the time of year of your episode there’s only about two inches of water in it. So your body would not only have to do the backstroke but be extraordinarily skinny.”

What are you most excited about for your visit to Charleston for Porch Talks? And what else is coming up for you? 

I’ve been fortunate enough to do multiple events here in Charleston and the readers are wonderful. Then there’s the architecture, the gardens, the food — but I couldn’t live here because I’d end up weighing 400 pounds.

There’s always another Walt Longmire novel, and the next one is called “The Brothers McKay,” a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov in Wyoming. There’s also a standalone novel concerning the stealing of Buffalo Bill’s body from the Denver Armory in 1917, and then a series of pitch meetings on another streaming television show adapted from James Norman Hall’s (of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame) “Doctor Dogbody’s Leg.”