June 7, 2010 The bio on the book jacket of Craig Johnson’s latest novel, Junkyard Dogs, is refreshingly brief, noting only that he is the author of the Walt Longmire mystery series and that he “lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.” But it’s worth mentioning that the modest Johnson has become a literary star in a seemingly unlikely place: among the famously intellectual readers of France. His first novel, The Cold Dish, was released in France in 2009 as Little Bird and won the Prix du Roman Noir as the best mystery novel translated into French for 2010. Before his Nashville appearance on June 7, Johnson answered questions from Chapter 16 about the ways that his literary alter ego has surprised him over the course of six books, the responsibility he feels as a Western writer to get the region right, and the group of French schoolboys who peppered him with questions at the Louvre, and whom he gallantly named “Les Cowboys.”
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Cowboy Thriller
Craig Johnson talks with Chapter 16 about his Walt Longmire series, tensions in the American West, and what it’s like to be a French cowboy
