Depth of Winter

by Craig Johnson

  I think by the end of The Western Star, Walt realizes that Bidarte is relentless, understands that he will have to go far beyond his personal moral code because Bidarte will never stop coming at him. In Depth of Winter, Walt is truly in unfamiliar territory.

  Throughout Depth of Winter, Walt is forced to choose how far he will go in order to protect himself and those he loves. Can you talk further about Walt’s code? Why is his moral compass so important to him? What would cause him to cross the boundaries he has created for himself? Why does he allow himself to associate with others who might not adhere as closely to his code?

  Walt’s cowboy code might be seen to be simplistic by some and perhaps it started out as something you could read on the back of a cereal box, but I think that Walt’s version has developed with age and experience, especially his idea about extreme force. Walt is not a killer—he deplores taking another life, but killing has been a part of his life since his military experiences in Vietnam. More than once, he’s expressed the Buddhist philosophy that killing is the absolute worst sin as it is the only action that cannot be undone—once you take a life, it’s gone, and there is nothing you can do to replace it. I think this belief is so central to his code of ethics that other characters use it against him knowing what they can get away with. The only time Walt would ever consider killing someone is if there were simply no other alternatives, and in those instances, he can be fearsome. Henry Standing Bear and Vic are readier to respond in a violent manner, but they both know that Walt’s methodical methods are potentially more dangerous. As Walt’s mentor, Lucian Connelly, says in Any Other Name, “He’s like a gun, once you point him and pull the trigger you better be sure because there’s no way to stop him.”

  Why does Walt associate himself with people who may not adhere as closely to his code? Because it’s his code, and just because it’s what he personally believes doesn’t mean others must believe in it. His philosophy is his, and it has evolved from his experience in Vietnam, a pattern of survival that held back the chaos of war. Walt found the law to save himself and has been using it to save others ever since, but that doesn’t mean he holds others to that standard, especially in a lawless place.

  This is the first book where Vic and Henry appear only briefly. What were the challenges of creating a new set of characters? Were there times when you missed being able to rely on Vic and Henry? Which new character did you most enjoy writing and why? Are there plans for any of the new characters to appear in subsequent Longmire books?

  I’d dabbled in these fields before in Hell Is Empty, where Walt is pursuing a group of escaped prisoners into the Cloud Peak Wilderness of the Bighorn Mountains. Most of the time in that book Walt is alone, or thinks he’s alone, but in Depth of Winter he’s far from being by himself. The challenges were pretty clear to him from the beginning, that he’s in a foreign country, and the hurdles of society, culture, and language permeate every page. He’s poorly equipped to deal with the situations he faces in Mexico, even after putting together a ragtag team whose chances of success are dubious at best. It was fun to think of the worst group of individuals you could ever want to assemble, including a legless, blind hunchback, but even more amusing to watch as they prove to be more capable than we at first thought.

  Of course, I missed the usual ensemble of characters, but having them there would’ve been too much of a crutch. I remember an interview that Jack Palance gave about the movie The Professionals, and about how ridiculous a premise it was that this handful of Americans would venture south against a thousand Mexicans and somehow end up triumphant. I knew that if Henry, Vic, Lucian, and even Dog were there they would save Walt in some sort of moral default. I find it really tiresome when the secondary characters commit the most gruesome acts while the protagonist is able to keep his morality unsullied, and I was trying to keep a squadron of Black Hawk helicopters from sweeping in at the appropriate moment to save Walt’s bacon. When Walt chooses to jump into the pan, the sizzle is his alone.

  Since the TV show Longmire debuted, one of the things I’m continually asked is whether the actors have had an effect in taking over the characters in my head—the answer is no, because those characters are based on friends, family, and people I’ve worked with; however, the actors have popped up in odd places as new characters. When I was writing the novella The Highwayman, there was a point where I had to describe one of the main characters, the legendary Arapaho highway patrolman Bobby Womack. When I did, my wife read it and asked, “Is that Zahn McClarnon you’re depicting?” I thought about it and realized that I had been describing our friend, the actor who plays the police chief Mathias on the television show. There’s another one in Depth of Winter with Adan Martínez.

  It was a blast writing Adan, the Seer, Alonzo, and Isidro, but the female characters always threaten to run away with the show when I’m writing a book and this one is no different. Bianca Martínez, Adan’s sister, the Skin Witch, was a fun character, but I was prepared for that. My wife says I fall in love with all my female characters, and she’s probably right.

  The surprises are when the bad guys become so charismatic that you almost start rooting for them, and in this book that was Peter Lowery, Bidarte’s tech wizard, and Culpepper, his second in command.

  I think the enjoyment factor in writing new characters is that it gives you the opportunity to stretch creative muscles. I love writing the ensemble that comprises Absaroka County, but for the books to remain believable I sometimes have to stretch Walt’s jurisdiction and that requires new characters, and there’s nothing I like better than reintroducing those characters in subsequent novels.

  In Depth of Winter, we find Walt in Mexico, far from his home in Wyoming. Why Mexico? What about the landscape appeals to you? What was it like to imagine Walt in a new environment? How is he changed by it? How does he stay the same? What sort of research did you do in order to create this world? Have you been to this part of Mexico?

  I’ve been to Mexico numerous times and have loved it for many reasons, but one of them is a Wild West quality that’s fading in the US, an almost palpable feeling of lawlessness that’s compelling. The choice of setting Depth of Winter there was simple—where else would a man like Tomás Bidarte be able to assemble a criminal empire, a place where Walt would be stripped of his usual resources in confronting him? There was also the duality of the title. Knowing that I write the Longmire books in a cyclical pattern with four seasons/novels making up one year in Walt’s life, I knew readers were preparing for a winter book and I gave them that in the title, but not in the plot. I thought it would be fun to write a novel with the name Depth of Winter where the temperature never goes below 92.

  Mexico also gave me a chance to look at the Chihuahua desert, a place foreign and yet somehow similar to Wyoming, and the landscape provided the same sort of enjoyment that I get when I write different characters, trying to convey not only the terrain, but the mood and texture of the place that’s so important in a novel like this. And then there is Walt himself, certainly a fish out of water in old Mexico.

  Being torn from his usual environs is difficult enough, but it’s the constant onslaught of violence and insanity that wears on him. In one of the quieter moments in the novel he says that it’s the normalcy of everyday life that he misses amid all the madness of the narco culture.

  The society has changed since I first began going to Mexico years ago, and the city of Juárez has done a great deal to clean itself up and become a tourist hot spot again, but there are inherent dangers when traveling anywhere in Mexico. Like Walt, I’m not going to blend in. . . . You can hire guides who will meet you on the El Paso side and give you something of an insider’s view of the city—maybe the parts that don’t appear in the guidebooks. Even if you have nothing to do with the drug culture, you can still be kidnapped when small-time hoodlums take tourists and demand money for their return. I remember sitting in the Club Kentucky with a guide and him asking me why
I was there, and I told him I was the author of Longmire and he immediately went into a panic. “Don’t tell anybody that while you are down here.”

  How did Bidarte accumulate his power? What is it that you want a reader to take away about who he is and how he differs from Walt?

  Like Adan Martínez says, Bidarte has gone into one of the most dangerous places on earth, the home of some of the most bloodthirsty individuals anyone has ever seen, and carved himself an empire. Perhaps the most ruthless man in the world, Bidarte has no limitation in what he will do to accumulate and solidify his strength. In the small mountain village he has made his own, he is a man unchallenged. To him land, people, money, drugs, everything is just a means to personal power—whereas Walt is a creature of community, a man of service to his fellow man.

  Walt has a hard time understanding someone like Bidarte and that puts him at a disadvantage in dealing with him. One of Walt’s strengths is his empathy, an ability to understand people and think like they think, but Bidarte is too alien. He knows that a person like him isn’t born but is constructed, and for the first time he’s confronted by someone who will never quit coming after him until he’s physically stopped.

  Going to Mexico is a trope in many westerns. What do you think Mexico represents in the context of the western? How have you used those associations in your writing? What does Mexico represent in Depth of Winter?

  The American western landscape has been shrinking, hence the use of Mexico as the last vestige of a frontier that is found in so many books and movies—a place to escape. The trick is not to fall prey to the stereotypes and clichés, or if you do decide to use them to make sure the reader is in on the joke. One of the consistent tropes that I did use was the Mexican Revolution, which I think is so compelling as a metaphor for a people’s battle against a corrupt governmental system. Interestingly enough, Mexican literature and cinema appears preoccupied with that period before World War I when both countries were transitioning from agrarian to industrial states. I think the Porfirio Díaz quote says it all: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near the United States.” It’s difficult to have a country such as Mexico, which is still developing, so near a superpower like America and not have it have an undermining effect—even today.

  Are there other literary models you’ve thought of while writing about the feud between Walt and Bidarte? How have you used these tropes and how have you changed them?

  There is a marvelous Northern Cheyenne saying that you judge a man by the strength of his enemies. I try to keep that in mind when I’m constructing the antagonists in the series, not wanting to give Walt too easy of a challenge. Strangely enough, over the years, I’ve often wished I could resurrect some of the more despicable characters that he’s gone up against, but alas, I killed them.

  As for literary tropes, the one that comes to mind immediately is, of course, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. I’m sure that Arthur Conan Doyle wanted someone who could be a foil for Holmes, otherwise he would become stale and lifeless. I think that the characters of a series either live or die by their development, and you have to provide challenges that force them out of their comfort zones, compelling them to make decisions that resonate. Bidarte was a different kind of character not only for me, but for Walt, an antagonist unlike anything I’d done before. I’m always looking to do something different in hopes that the readership will enjoy something new.

  The bond between parent and child is a recurring theme in your novels, and in Depth of Winter, Walt justifies his rash decision to forgo the help of his friends and the FBI in order to save Cady. Can you talk about this relationship and its importance? What does Cady mean to Walt?

  Rarely do you have to explain bureaucracy to county sheriffs, and Walt’s seen his share in his tenure as a public servant. He knows that the wheels of justice turn slowly, especially when it’s two governments, and that if he doesn’t act quickly, Bidarte will disappear and take Cady with him—something I don’t think Walt could survive.

  If you look at the composition of the books, you can see that there is a structure where Walt, who is damaged, is pretty much surrounded by what I refer to as a pride of lionesses who protect him. I don’t think that Walt could have endured without them, each being responsible for some facet of his survival. Cady is perhaps the most important, an emotional lifeline for Walt after the death of his wife, even though when we first meet her in The Cold Dish, she’s only a disembodied voice on an answering machine. As the series continued, I realized that Walt needed her in his life and decided to bring her back to Wyoming. It’s not a perfect relationship between them, but few parent/child relationships are.

  Depth of Winter is a departure for you, in that it’s an action-based thriller, as opposed to a mystery. What challenges did that pose for you? What did you find freeing about this different genre?

  I’ve often made fun of thrillers, complaining that you know who did it from page one and the five hundred pages you read next is simply a chase to see what happens. I think one of the challenges in this type of literature is to make sure you allow for the nuance that keeps readers interested in the characters and their surroundings. Even though this is the most action-oriented novel in the series, I like to think that it has character development and enough layers to keep you in the story. I also think there are degrees of each, and the fun part of the writing is finding and using the elements of both mystery and thriller that will result in something challenging and hopefully better.

  One of the things I did differently in the last book, The Western Star, was to leave one of the two narratives unfinished, and some people were upset by that, figuring I wasn’t playing fair with a partial cliffhanger ending. The reason I did it was because I needed the momentum of that book to launch me into Depth of Winter, where I couldn’t take the time to get the story up to speed.

  There are mechanics that are required in a straight-ahead murder mystery, one of the more obvious being a murder, and I knew very early on that having a protagonist who was the sheriff of the least populated county in the least populated state in America meant that he wasn’t likely to stumble across a body every couple of months without it becoming ridiculous. So I started treating the books like a ball team, alternating home and away. Walt usually finds himself in Absaroka County every other book, allowing me to take him to adjacent counties, other states, and sometimes other countries. If you had someone like Walt, who is as capable as he is, that person would probably begin gaining a reputation as someone who could break difficult cases, so it’s only logical that he would be called in by fellow law-enforcement officers to assist.

  This book is different, but the elements of mystery are served in his attempts to find his way in unfamiliar territory and whether or not he can trust the people he meets there. There are stages of trust, and like the mountains of Bidarte’s stronghold, Walt has to climb his way up and then out. The stakes couldn’t be any higher in this book and that motivates not only Walt but everyone around him. Usually there’s a veneer of civilized society in the novels, but the surface has been stripped clean in this one and we’re left with Longmire on steroids.

  This is your fourteenth novel in the Longmire series. Can you reflect on how Walt has changed as a character and how has he stayed the same? What is the meaning of his evolution? How have you changed as a writer since you began the series?

  When we first meet Walt Longmire he’s in the throes of clinical depression, something that was maybe a riskier proposition than I was aware of as a beginning author writing in the first person. The problem with it is that the writing might become dull or depressing, but I was saved the same way Walt was—by a case. As Walt becomes more and more involved in his job there’s a resurrection that literally brings him back from the Camp of the Dead.

  Walt is surrounded by people who care deeply for him, but they can’t save him from himself. He’s a marked man, marked by the death of his wife, which is som
ething he might never get over. For me, it was interesting to see how much and how long it would take to bring him all the way back, and it continues to be. I’m not sure he’ll ever make it, but it’ll be interesting to see.

  With all the talented editors that I’ve been fortunate to be associated with, I hope I’ve gone through a period of growth as a writer. When I first started the series, I was concerned that I’d become repetitive, but there haven’t been any restrictions on me and I have to admit that I’m having more fun now.

  In simple terms, I’m fourteen years older than I was when I started writing the Longmire books, and I like to think that since I am now approaching Walt’s actual age I’ve grown with him and become not only a better writer but a better person through him. I owe him an awful lot, especially after all that I’ve put him through.

  Depth of Winter is a surprising title for a book that is set in the sun-drenched Mexican desert. What is the title referring to? What do you want readers to understand about the book from the title?

  The title comes from the Albert Camus quote, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” I’ve always had readers ask me why there’s so much snow in my books, and I have to remind them that Walt doesn’t live in Key West, so this is a little inside joke for all the regular readers of the Longmire series. I knew that with the seasonal cycle of the series they would be expecting a full-blown Rocky Mountain winter, especially with a title like Depth of Winter—so like I said I threw them a curve, where the temperature in the book hardly gets below a hundred degrees.