The Highwayman and An Obvious Fact by Craig Johnson (review)

Wyoming is the tenth largest state in the Union and, at the same time, the least populous of the fifty that constitute our Republic. Its roughly half million inhabitants get to roam almost ninety-eight thousand square miles without many obstacles, save for the winters and the mountains. When the natives long for big city lights, they head for the state capital of Cheyenne where sixty thousand souls work and play. That’s as big as it gets in this western landscape, and yet it’s here where Craig Johnson not only unfolds his fictional microcosm but also where he himself has chosen to make his home, in the tiny hamlet of “Ucross, population twenty-five,” as all of his books’ dust jackets make known, proudly and tongue in cheek and, no doubt, at his request.

How and why this West Virginia native (Huntington, 1961) came to the great state of Wyoming would probably be of interest to many of his readers but what truly matters is how well he has adapted to his adopted habitat as a dozen full length novels, as many short stories and two novellas set primarily in Absaroka County—not one of the 23 real entities—attest. Its seven thousand square miles (“about the size of Vermont or New Hampshire”) have been in the care of sheriff Walter Longmire for twenty four years, along with a seasoned dispatcher and a small band of deputies, among them a Basque greenhorn and a transplanted Italo-American lovely who happens to share the lawman’s bed on occasion. Their headquarters, previously the Absaroka County Library, can be found in the center of Durant, a town that may remind some of the city of Buffalo given its similar size (pop. 4,615), location (20 mi from Ucross), and distinctly sounding weekly newspapers (Durant Courant vs. Buffalo Bulletin). After almost a dozen years (The Cold Dish [2004] inaugural Longmire book), Craig Johnson’s fans are well acquainted with the comings and goings of the usual coterie of characters that make the Longmire series so thoroughly enjoyable. Walt’s predecessor, former boss and mentor, Lucian Connally, now a resident of the Durant House for Assisted Living, endures old age with daily doses of Pappy Van Winkle, but still manages to lend a hand when duty, or Walt, calls. The lawyer Cady, Martha and Walt’s daughter, “the greatest legal mind alive,” and the apple of her widowed father’s eye, returns to Wyoming when she herself is widowed. Henry Standing Bear, member of the Cheyenne Nation, owner of the Red Pony and Walt’s oldest and best friend, reveals himself often times as the indispensable member of a tag team that always comes out on top. Dorothy Caldwell, proprietor of the Busy Bee Café, doubles as its chief cook and serves our sheriff not only his requested “the usual,” but also heaping clues regarding the case at hand. There are many identifiable others in the loveable cast who help the protagonist deal with the malfeasant antagonists that move the plots of each individual work, be they short stories, novellas or full length novels.

The Highwayman is the second of Johnson’s published Longmire novellas (Spirit of Steamboat was the first, published in 2013). The author labels them both “Stories,” but they are much more than that given their length--146 pages in the first instance and 190 in the second--and their complexity, making them a near perfect fit for Henry James’ definition of the rarely practiced mid-length narrative genre which is the novella. Like Spirit of Steamboat, The Highwayman is set in winter when days are short, the roadways icy, and the cold and the interminable darkness engender incidents that imperil members of the Wyoming Highway Patrol in troubling and mystifying situations. Not quite a ghost story in the sense that Dickens would have understood, though Johnson pays ample tribute to his “The Signal-Man” (“which I consider to be one of the world’s...