"...THE DEFINITIVE RESONANCE OF COLD..." :TOOTH AND CLAW'S CRAIG JOHNSON
Craig Johnson always tries to do something different with each Walt Longmire book, but Craig went Monty Python and did something completely different with Tooth And Claw. Taking place in Alaska right after Walt and Henry get out of Vietnam, the story places them with a crew of scientists with a murderer in their midst, a mystery ship, and a killer polar bear. Craig has described it as a tip of the hat to action-adventure master Alistair MacLean. He took some time to answer our questions about it.
SCOTT MONTGOMERY: This is probably as different as you ever got in a Walt Longmire book. How did the idea come about?
CRAIG JOHNSON: You know, I started this novella over five years ago but put it away because it just wasn’t turning out the way I wanted, the tone just seemed wrong. I put it aside, but then about a year ago pulled it out and looked at it again, realizing what it was I was shooting for in the writing. Like everyone else, I’m a serial reader, picking up a book and then reading everything that the author ever wrote and the same was for Alistair MacLean—devouring Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare. Sometimes you start a piece of work and lose track of some of the seminal reasons for writing it and that was the case for Tooth And Claw, going after that machismo, international thriller kind of thing. After re-saddling, I came to the conclusion that not only was the tone wrong, but the story I’d come up with was kind of one-dimensional in local and the whole thing was going to end up taking place out on the frozen ice. Then I remembered an article I’d saved on the SS Baychimo, one of the most notorious ghostships of the Arctic and I was off to the races.
S.M.: There's so much in here I've never seen you do before, and you feel the fun you were having writing it. What aspects of the story did you enjoy working on the most?
C.J.: Well, writing about Walt as an alcoholic, world-weary, sarcastic husk was a hoot and then the environs of the North Slope of Alaska was a blast. I’ve spent a lot of time up there and refer to Alaska as Wyoming on steroids. Upping the ante to more of an international level was also fun, lampooning thrillers a bit, and then the Nanurluk… I’ve never written about a creature like that before.
S.M.:: As fantastic as this story gets, I always bought what was going on and was with it. How do you keep a tale like this grounded while playing into its ripping yarn aspect?
C.J.: It’s always going to be about the characters and their reactions to extreme situations, and you sell that by having their responses be as real as possible it seems to me. So, in that I was able to fall back on a tool I’ve had in my belt for some time and not get so caught up in the story that you forget these are real people and how would they respond to given situations—humor also helps.
S.M.: Your previous novel, First Frost, deals with Walt and Henry right before they go into Vietnam, and this takes place right after. How did the experience change them early on?
C.J.: Um, Walt’s drinking a lot… I think he’s really hit a nadir in his life even before we meet him after Martha’s death in The Cold Dish. After the things he seen, he’s bottoming out and it’s both heart-breaking and funny at the same time because the defense mechanism of humor has kicked in full force and for once, he’s the funniest character in the book.
S.M: This is your third novella with Walt. What are you able to accomplish in this form you can't with a short story or novel?
C.J.: Oh, there are stories that come to you and just because they’re not three-hundred or four-hundred-page novels doesn’t mean they’re not worth telling. I’m open to different forms and even though I’m primarily a novelist, I still enjoy writing in the other disciplines. Who knows, maybe there’s a musical in my future… All joking aside, I could’ve expanded T&C into a full-blown novel, but I think it would’ve lost the urgency it deserves as a kind of pocket thriller.
S.M.: I've joked with you before that Chandler used to pull out a gun when in doubt and you pull out a snow storm. What draws you to using that for literary affect?
C.J.: My wife, Judy says my thermostat is broken, and she might be right. I’ve had Walt in city landscapes and trudging through burning deserts, but they sometimes don’t have the definitive resonance of cold and that’s good in that the majority of books take place in Wyoming where we have two seasons, winter and the fourth of July. It’s funny because I like the cold and work in it practically every day, but then torture Walt with it. There’s something rather psychologically perverse in that I suppose. It’s just an honest portrayal of the difficulties Wyoming Sheriffs face—it’s the Rocky Mountain High Plains and we get our share of cold and snow.