Reckoning
This dialog exchange from the comic book Preacher, created by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon, remains firmly ensconced in my head after reading it *mumble mumble* years ago:
Dang, but doesn’t that just perfectly sum up the brutal, dispassionate energy of a classic Western villain? That Saint of Killers is a bad dude!
But if that’s the model antagonist, who’s our model protagonist?
I took a college course called Literature of the American West* so I could go down a really deep rabbit hole here on various Western hero tropes, but personally, I’m mostly drawn to protagonists who do the right thing for the right reason, where the drama in the story comes from that black-and-white person navigating a grey world (this is why Captain America is my favorite MCU character).
While I love reading the classic type of Western, set in 19th century America, I also enjoy when it’s written in a contemporary context, with modern wrinkles thrown in. I’ve been lucky enough to speak with two of my favorite authors of contemporary Westerns: William Krueger from my day job, and C. J. Box in the new episode of the Circulating Ideas podcast. In our interview, Box describes his character, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, this way:
…when he gets into something, like this in Storm Watch, his superiors and others want him to just go away. Yeah. Quit pursuing it, you know, go away, do your job, but that’s one unique characteristic of Joe Pickett is he can’t. Once he gets into it, he’s gotta see it through, and it gets him in a lot of trouble and has over the years, but at the same time, that is him. He’s never going to just simply walk away and see what happens.
The sub-genre of modern Westerns I love the most are mysteries! At the end of the day, mysteries are my favorite genre because my brain is soothed by solving puzzles. Every so often I’ll ask Becky Spratford for a horror novel recommendation, and while she’s always spot-on for quality, I don’t like the uneasy, incomplete feeling I get at the end of them (this is not a slam against the horror genre; I’m well aware that uneasiness is a staple that fans love, but that’s something I only want want to feel infrequently). Show me a murder and then show me whodunnit by the end of the story, and I’m a happy reader.
After reading Storm Watch, I was a happy reader, and I hope you will be, too!
* Students affectionately called it “Cowboy Lit”. We read Riders of the Purple Sage, The Ox-Bow Incident, Shane, and The Virginian, among others.
CI238 Show Notes
In Circulating Ideas 238, I chatted with C. J. Box, author of Storm Watch, the 23rd book in his bestselling Joe Pickett series, about his early experiences with libraries, how he gets started with a new book, how his characters have changed over the years, and what it’s like to see his creations adapted for the screen.
I’ve been making some tweaks to the Circulating Ideas website, including finally going back to tag posts to increase findability and serendipitous discovery (work in progress). In doing so, I now have an Authors tag to make it easier to find the interviews I’ve done with game wardens authors.
C. J. Box
C. J. Box is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 30 novels including the Joe Pickett series. He won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for Best Novel (Blue Heaven, 2009) as well as the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, two Barry Awards, and the 2010 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award for fiction. He was recently awarded the 2016 Western Heritage Award for Literature by the National Cowboy Museum as well as the Spur Award for Best Contemporary Novel by the Western Writers of America in 2017. Over ten million copies of his books have been sold in the U.S. and abroad and they’ve been translated into 27 languages. Two television series based on his novels are in production (BIG SKY on ABC and JOE PICKETT on Spectrum Originals and Paramount+). He is an Executive Producer for both series.
Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, a small town newspaper reporter and editor, and he owned an international tourism marketing firm with his wife Laurie. In 2008, Box was awarded the "BIG WYO" Award from the state tourism industry. An avid outdoorsman, Box has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the Mountain West. He served on the Board of Directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and currently serves on the Wyoming Office of Tourism Board. They have three daughters and two grandchildren. He and his wife Laurie live on their ranch in Wyoming.
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