Craig Johnson

Kindness Goes Unpunished, Craig Johnson's third Walt Longmire Mystery, was published this spring.

Julia Buckley interviewed Johnson earlier this month. Part of their exchange:

Parts of your books also remind me of old westerns. Did you watch those as a kid (or an adult)? Were you ever influenced by people like Zane Gray or Louis L’Amour?

You can’t write about the west and not be influenced by those guys. I think it’s important to acknowledge the iconoclastic aspects of the genre you work in, taking advantage of a high-context relationship with the reader for all sorts of reasons, laughs, for one. I write contemporary novels, but they’re set in the west, so I better know about the west in a non-fiction and fictional sense. I’m probably more influenced by western writers like Walter Van Tilberg Clark, Wallace Stegner, John Steinbeck, and Dorothy Johnson.

Read the entire interview.

See Johnson's website for another Q & A about the Walt Longmire series.

The Page 69 Test: Kindness Goes Unpunished.

--Marshal Zeringue