So for those coming in late, here’s the tradition.
Mystery was my Deck’s jam more than mine, and so I didn’t really read mystery novels (he did). But then the TV series “Longmire” hit, and for some reason I connected with that. Discovering that it was based on actual books, I bought the books as a Christmas present FOR HIM the year we began watching the thing on TV, and then, come January of the year that followed that Christmas, I would pick up the books and read them. And although I am not a mystery fan as such, I liked these. They held my interest. And so for some years that went on, and the latest Longmire book became my “January read”.
Then Deck died. And in the Christmas presents of that year – the ones he never got to open – there was a Longmire novel. Which, with a weeping heart, I followed tradition and read in January that followed. And I have been doing that ever since he left me. I’ve been somewhat trenchant about a couple of the Longmire books when I felt the author was skating off the terrain I actually liked and tried (and failed) to do something different – the volumes where he becomes SuperWalt and hives off to Mexico to deal with drug cartels and can almost literally stop a speeding bullet left me a little colder than usual, seeing as it skewed the character I had grown to know and love into weird and unlikely directions. But then he corrected course and last year’s book was a decent read.
The latest Longmire, “First Frost”, picks up pretty much where the previous book in the series left off – in one level of the narrative. In a deeper level, intertwined with the current events in Walt Longmire’s life, we get an “origin story” narrative, a tale of the young Walt’s “Salad days” when he was (I kid you not) a surfer boy in California (he keeps on being told, in a funny repeat line, “you’re too big to surf!” by a bunch of different characters…) On their way to their respective enlistment boot camps for the Vietnam war, Walt and Henry Standing Bear go on a road trip cross country in a truck in which they probably should not have attempted to do so. Somewhere along the way they suffer a traumatic breakdown of said vehicle and in trying to get it sufficiently fixed to continue on their journey they stumble into a hornet’s nest dating back to the appalling Japanese internment camps of WWII and specifically a very special one with a lot more skeletons in its cupboard than just questionable American ethics of the time.
In this book, Walt utters, at one point, the sentence “I’ve read a lot of Donald Westlake and John D. MacDonald” – and, reader, I teared up, because this was a direct message from beyond the veil. Deck had liked Westlake, and his favourite writer of all time was MacDonald, as exemplified by two entire shelves of that author’s books (probably every one he ever wrote) in his library. It felt as though he reached out and touched me somehow, or even just smiled at me. The Longmire novels have always made me feel closer to him but this, specifically, brought him into the room with me. Close enough to pretend I could point to this and grin and tease him about it. For that alone this January read gets bonus points… and I was not done with the messages. At some point Walt is told about Japanese phrases shikata ga nai and gaman suru which, in turn and respectively, are supposed to mean it can’t be helped and just endure it. Which is pretty much a summary of my own life in the past four years since he’s been gone. And it was as though he had acknowledged this to me, here, and understands it, and is sorry about it. Message number three, this bit of dialogue:
“Where exactly is here?”
“[…]Why, are you particular?”
“No, I just like to know where I am on a regular basis.”
[…] “I hardly ever know where I am.”
Oh, okay, already. I get it. I would love to know where I am… on a semi regular basis… but I’ve been kinda lost for four years. I hardly ever know where I am, to be sure. Okay, I hear it. I hear it.
The book poked me in the eye with a couple of typos that the copyeditor clearly missed – “naval gazing” when it means the general region of the belly button rather than ships floating on oceans, “his final rights” when I think what is meant is the last rites given by a priest to someone on the brink of death, for instance – but typos breed in books when nobody is looking and I know that I have them in MY books even after four proofreading passes, and I tend to be reasonably forgiving of these – but for some reason the Longmire books have been pretty clean thus far, and seeing stuff like that makes my inner reader hiccup a little. But okay. That has little bearing other than just ‘I saw these and noted them’ on the final verdict.
And the final verdict is, Craig Johnson still has the mojo.
On the basis of this book, I will be on the lookout for (and preordering) the next one. For next January. So I can sit there and read a book I enjoy and feel the presence of the man who once loved me reading over my shoulder.