Mystery Monday: The Cold Dish!

Our book today is 2005’s The Cold Dish, the first installment in Craig Johnson’s hugely successful series of mystery novels set in the fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming and starring laconic, leather-tough sheriff Walt Longmire and a terrifically engaging cast of supporting characters, from his long-time friend and Cheyenne saloon owner Henry Standing Bear to his sharp-tongued deputy Victoria Morretti to his lawyer-daughter Cady. And of course the other major character in this series is the breathtaking landscape of Wyoming, which Johnson (who lives there, in a flyspeck town with fewer citizens than you have roommates) evokes extremely skillfully. His Walt Langmire might be the last rock-solid plainsman left in the modern era, but when it comes to contemplating that breathtaking landscape, his thoughts become almost poetic:

I watched the clouds slowly eat the Bighorn Mountains. There was a little early snow up there, and the setting sun was fading it from a kind of frozen blue to a subtle glow of purple. I had lived here my entire life, except for college in California and a stint in the marines in Vietnam. I had thought about those mountains the entire time I was gone and swore that a day wouldn’t go by when I got back that I wouldn’t look at them. Most of the time, I remembered.

Langmire is a classic example of a kind of mystery-thriller hero that’s taken on renewed popularity in our ultra-convenienced wi-fi café latte era: the tough man (or woman, as in the case of, say, Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon) in a wild place. He’s in a deeply sympathetic relationship with the natural world around him, and he’s got a reflexive disdain for the vast majority who don’t feel that relationship (“During the latter part of hunting season,” he grouses, “my part of the high plains becomes a Disneyland for every overage boy with a high-powered toy”). These characters are the anti-Sherlocks; they have no use for the metropolis, preferring the much slower and sparser setting of the country. And they’re anti-Sherlocks in another sense as well – they tend to let instinct, not logic and deduction, govern their behavior. For these characters, the natural world is always there, ready to distract:

I’ve got the large office in the south side bay, which allows me an unobstructed view of the Big Horn Mountains to my right and the Powder River Valley to my left. The geese fly down the valley south, with their backs to me, and I usually sit with my back to the window, but occasionally I get caught with my chair turned; this seemed to be happening more and more, lately.

In The Cold Dish (who knows how many Star Trek fans did it inadvertently attract, before they reached Johnson’s opening inscription: “Revenges is a dish best served cold” and recoiled in horror at its attribution: “Pierre Ambroise Francois, Choderlos de La Clos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses” … no mention of Klingons or Khan in sight … it cannot be …), a white man who got a light, suspended sentence for the rape of a Cheyenne girl is found murdered near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Longmire hardly needs a keen deductive mind in order to suspect that a long-simmering thirst for revenge is at work here, but one of the key points of characters like this is that deductive reasoning has little to do with things:

“Good morning. I’m Sheriff Longmire, and I’d like a word with you.” At  first he didn’t move, and I could see the wheels turning as he tried to figure out what it was that he had done to bring himself in contact with me. These few moments in the beginning can often tell me what I need to know. You hear about eye movement, nose touching, all that crap but, when you get right down to it, it’s just a feeling. The little voice in the back of your head just says, “Yeah, this is the guy.”

This sort of thing would ordinarily annoy the spinach out of me; I deeply revile the anti-intellectualism of the George W. Bush years, deeply revile the way ‘knowing things with your gut’ was elevated during those years from the status of a slight embarrassment (self-deprecatingly admitted) to the status of a legitimate working alternative to reasoned thinking (proudly, arrogantly asserted). I deeply revile the way that decade strove to elevate mulish stupidity to the level of a worldview, a personal choice nobody has the right to condemn; “you go with your intelligence? Fine  – I go with my feelings, and that’s just as good.”

But luckily, that revulsion doesn’t come anywhere near the Longmire books (or the absolutely crack-addictive A&E TV adaptation, starring the great Robert Taylor doing the best work of his career). There’s a hard-edged and very Robert Parker-esque intelligence behind these books (see, again, that heretical epigraph) that wonderfully compliments the instinct-calls of our gruff hero and his wise-cracking supporting cast. In fact, there are times when I wonder if the whole series isn’t in part a commentary on the W. years – although that may just be the city-slicker in me.