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WS: This is Paula B. If you haven’t read C. J. Box’s crime novels, featuring his Wyoming-based game warden detective Joe Pickett, you’re missing a real treat. As Box says, game wardens are unique because they can legitimately be involved in just about every major event or situation that involves the outdoors and the rough edges of the rural new west. And situations there are in Box’s books aplenty, including murder.
Welcome to The Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B. My guest today is C. J. Box.
C. J. Box is the author of eight novels, including the award-winning Joe Pickett series. He’s the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38, the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award, and an Edgar Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. His novels have been national best-sellers and have been translated into twelve languages. Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, and small-town newspaper reporter and editor, and he co-owns an international tourism marketing firm with his wife, Laurie. An avid outdoorsman, Box has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied through Wyoming and the mountain west. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.
WS: Welcome to The Writing Show, Chuck. I’m so thrilled that you are here today.
CJB: Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.
WS: I absolutely love your books. I read Out of Range and In Plain Sight, and I would love for you to just start by telling us a little bit about them.
CJB: They’re the fifth and sixth in the Joe Pickett series. Out of Range in hard cover came out two years ago and is now in paperback, and In Plain Sight came out in May of 2006. Both of them concern the protagonist, Joe Pickett, who is a Wyoming game warden, and he and his family are players in both.
In Out of Range, Joe Pickett, game warden, is temporarily transferred to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to fill in for a game warden who may or may not have committed suicide, and while he’s there, he encounters kind of a bigger world than he’s used to and a much faster pace and a lot more danger than he anticipated. The title Out of Range also relates to the fact that for the first time, really, he’s away from his wife and family, and he’s tempted, so there’s a moral dilemma to it as well.
In Plain Sight, the newer book, is back in fictional town Saddlestring, and in this case, it’s about the matriarch of a huge local ranch who vanishes, and the sons of that matriarch go to war for the ranch in kind of a nuclear way. Meanwhile, someone from Joe Pickett’s past is stalking him, and he’s got to figure out if the two cases in fact are related in any way. It ends in a pretty wild fifty pages toward the end that leave some questions.
WS: I’ll say. That last part was just amazing. I just was on the edge of my seat.
CJB: When I was writing that book, sometimes the publisher wants to change the title, and I knew that they wanted to, but when I was writing In Plain Sight, the working title was Ranch Gothic, which I still kind of love, but….
WS: Oh, that is nice.
CJB: But that’s how it ends, obviously.
WS: Oh, it’s so exciting. Let’s talk a little bit to start with about Joe Pickett himself. He’s such an interesting, different kind of detective. How did you come up with the idea for him?
CJB: Well, I guess for one thing, I didn’t start out to write a mystery series. I read, I talk to people, and I read blogs, and I have heard from people saying, “I have this idea for a gynecologist detective, nobody’s done that one yet kind of thing.” It didn’t come about that way. I didn’t say, “Oh, no one’s doing a game warden.” For me, it was the issue first,
With the very first book called Open Season, I wanted to write a novel about the contemporary west as I saw it and contemporary issues, and almost all the issues in Wyoming where I’m from and the mountain west are all resource-based. The first book, at least, was about the Endangered Species Act and how a well-intentioned law can cause people to do things they wouldn’t normally do and what can happen in that kind of circumstance. So I started with the issue, not the protagonist. When I wrote the book, I started actually with the sheriff–a local sheriff–and didn’t like the way it felt because I’m not a sheriff, I don’t know much about them, and those I do know I don’t really like. So I changed the protagonist to a journalist, which is what I was at the time, a small-town newspaper reporter. That worked a little better, but I needed my guy to have a gun. He had to have some kind of authority. At the time, when I was working for the small newspaper, I was doing ride-alongs with the local game warden, and I’d go to his house. He had a very small little office in his home, and his kids and dogs and stuff would be running through it. I spent some time with him out in the field and watched him operate all by himself pretty much and realized that was the perfect kind of protagonist, because it was a very unusual kind of job.
Game wardens in Wyoming can have districts of fifteen hundred to two thousand square miles that they’re in charge of, and because of the distance, they can’t always call for backup in a situation. They have to learn to handle things themselves, and a lot of times they’re in situations that probably no other law enforcement officer can get into. Almost everybody they encounter is armed. That’s part of the deal. And I just started thinking that would be the perfect kind of protagonist because they’re kind of a one-man shop, they’re very autonomous, their families are part of the job, and they would be involved in resource-based kinds of issues. So that’s where I came up with the game warden. Started there and never really thought about it as a series per se until the publisher wanted to make it one.
WS: I was going to ask you about your characters, because so many of them are independent, not just Joe Pickett, but so many of the other ones, and I was wondering if that was because they’re from the west.
CJB: You know, that’s a good question, and I think that’s the case. I think isolation kind of tends to breed that kind of independence, but at the same time, I think people who want to be alone tend to find places like the west, like Wyoming, where they can be their own kind of person for better or worse. So yeah, I do like portraying that type of character in isolation who’s very independent, and I think it makes a real strong character, too.
WS: What else is it about Joe that we find so compelling, because we certainly do?
CJB: I guess I like to think that unlike a lot of protagonists in these kinds of series, Joe Pickett is probably a little more normal and more like the reader than an awful lot of them. He’s not the type of guy all the guys want to be like and all the girls want to be with. He’s a family man, he’s flawed, he has a lot of self-doubt. He’s a bad shot, for one thing. He’s not really a detective like when people think of detectives in detective novels or whatever. He gets involved in these situations and in these cases and then becomes driven to find out what happened and pursue it no matter where it goes, and that’s probably the one thing that’s unusual. But at the same time, he’s not well paid, he has a job that doesn’t afford him a lot of upward mobility at all, and he worries about money, worries about his family, worries about being gone too much, that kind of thing. So I think it’s a little different. He doesn’t enter the book with a lot of baggage in a deep, dark past. He’s just a normal guy. So I think maybe that’s where a lot of people find some empathy with him.
WS: What kind of authority does he have as a game warden?
CJB: Well, in real life, game wardens, their main job is to enforce game and fish regulations in places like Wyoming and the mountain west and actually across the entire country. There is a whole subculture of hunters and fishermen, and one of the great games out there is to somehow screw up the game warden or do something that you don’t get caught. So that’s part of his job is to enforce game and fish laws. But also because often he’s the only law enforcement officer in an area, he’s recruited to help out with other situations. Game wardens, at least in this part of the country, are very heavily armed and well trained, and they do find themselves in situations that have nothing to do with game or fish. They can just as easily happen upon a meth lab as they can on a person who’s poaching a deer, so there are a lot of different situations that come up that they have to be prepared for, at least have the savvy to try to get out of.
WS: Would you call your books mysteries, or would you call them suspense, or would you call them something else?
CJB: Well, you know, that is one of the toughest things.
WS: Well, it’s sort of artificial, actually. It probably not a fair question.
CJB: I’m glad they are considered mysteries because they go into the mystery section in libraries and bookstores, and that’s where people buy books. But they’re not traditional mysteries like who-done-its, which is what I used to always think mysteries were. Before I had a book published, I didn’t think I was writing a mystery at all. I thought I was writing a contemporary western novel about an issue and never thought of it as a mystery because to me, mysteries were who-done-its where clues were planted along the way, and people smoked pipes and tried to figure out what happened. So I never thought of it that way, but to be considered that, the genre is so huge that that’s no longer the case to assume that a mystery is a who-done-it at all. I like them to be called crime novels or suspense or thrillers, but they’re sort of different and unique a little bit [more] than all those kinds of categorizations. It’s actually a tough one. There is a lot of talk about that. Everybody always talks about what kinds of books are these.
WS: I have a couple of reasons for asking you those questions. First of all, let me just mention before I ask you the questions, you do have a lot of who-done-it in your stories, and some of it has to do with murder, and some of it doesn’t have to do with murder. You do have the trappings, the criteria–I don’t know quite what to call it–of mysteries, but you also have a lot of suspense in your stories. So you still come across the same issues that writers of more traditional mysteries would, which is how much do you reveal, and when do you reveal it, and how do you drop clues, and that sort of thing. And that’s one thing that I want to ask you about, because I’m very curious about how people pace things. When I say pace, I mean give the clues and build the suspense. So my question is, how do you decide how much to reveal and when?
CJB: Well, I tend to vary it from book to book. What’s common in all the books are the protagonist and his family and some of the people from around in the town, but I think every one of them in some degree is a little bit different structure. And I like to do that. It’s very challenging to do that. It’s probably harder to do that than if it was a more traditional kind of straightforward where the detective is sitting there and somebody walks in the door and brings the case to him, and it’s his job to go out and try to figure it out on behalf of somebody. I don’t like to do that simply, although there are so many great books, Raymond Chandler kinds of things. I love to read those when they are well done, but there are also so many kinds of other stories and other writers that do that that I wanted to stay away from that sort of thing, make it more about the job. I like to have parallel story lines going throughout the book, several threads going that eventually all come together in the end. In some cases, the bad guy is known to the reader almost right off, and in that case, the story is about how does Joe Pickett figure out who this guy is or woman is that the reader knows. What’s going to fall into place or be revealed that he realizes what the reader knows? And when that happens, I think what that does is make the reader root for him to figure things out that the reader knows and at the same time watch him screw up and go to the wrong direction. I think that’s kind of fun because it involves the reader.
Other times, it is a complete mystery in the end because I think that’s more realistic in a way. Not in every case is the bad guy going to necessarily be some secondary character who’s, “Voila, now we know” kind of thing. Sometimes it is somebody who comes in from left field. I have had some of those kinds of mystery elements in those, especially in the book Trophy Hunt, where there are some clues that are planted along the way that when it’s all done, the reader can look back and go, “Yeah, I should have been able to figure that one out.” But generally, it’s more of a straightforward kind of procedural, with different things happening from different directions. That all sounds kind of obscure, but I hope it sounded clearer than it sounded to me.
WS: No, I understand, and the fact that you used the word “procedural,” that’s very interesting. I mean, it is, but there’s much more to it than that, I think.
CJB: Well, the other thing I do in them that I think is a little unusual is that because Joe Pickett has a family, they’re involved. And different things are revealed by different members of his family or different perspectives, and sometimes the reader is the only one who really knows the whole story going on because everybody else just knows that they know. Sometimes I’ve been accused of Joe Pickett being kind of dim because he can’t figure out what’s going on, and the reason is because the reader knows everything and he doesn’t yet. Different people know different things. I like to write with some different points of view throughout, sometimes including the bad guy, so that everything is out there to the reader but not necessarily to Joe Pickett.
WS: Well, he has some problems, too, in that he doesn’t tend to get along with the other law enforcement people that he has to deal with, and he can’t depend on them for backup or for any kind of help.
CJB: Right. As a game warden, he is a part of a state bureaucracy, and like any state bureaucracy in just about any state or certainly federal bureaucracy, a lot of the people involved in it are more into empire-building with petty jealousies and so on. They aren’t all necessarily on the same page. Yeah, he tends to clash with his bosses, especially back at headquarters about what he’s doing out in the field and doesn’t necessarily get along with them real well and has really made some enemies. I think that’s pretty true to life. I think anybody who’s been in a large corporation or bureaucracy knows that those sorts of things exist and that they’re part of the job. A lot of conflict.
WS: Right. And that brings me to my next question, which is, do you think that detectives or detective-like characters need to be lone wolves in order to be interesting?
CJB: Boy, that’s a good question. You know, I don’t think probably in every case, but I think in most cases, yes because I think the reader needs to be able to empathize with one person, not a team. I think that gets tougher. That’s why we turn the pages–because of the conflict that’s generated on every page. And that can come from the bad guy or the case itself or the situation or in some cases internally from who should be a friend or should be a colleague, and it’s all about conflict. So therefore, if it’s sort of a lone wolf out there, it’s easier to empathize and follow him or her and want to know what happens than a kind of wider-scoped multi-, like I said, a team, I guess, going after something.
WS: Do you think that a mystery or a suspense novel needs to have a murder in order to be compelling?
CJB: I think in most cases, yes. That’s not to say they all do. It kind of depends on the sub-genre within the genre, the kind of thing I like to write and I like to read. What the murder does is it sets everything up in much higher stakes. Some people don’t like books like that. Some people want to read about cats and quilting, and that’s fine. But at least for me and the kinds of things that I do and like to read, I like them to be put on a higher level of danger and suspense, and a murder does that because, at least in these kinds of books, the murderer doesn’t want to get caught, and so therefore they’re often willing to do things they wouldn’t do if it was a burglary or something. Plus, there’s that sense of justice that you as the reader want to see happen in the end, and when the stakes are higher, then that creates more tension.
WS: Let’s talk about your bad guys, because they certainly raise the stakes.
CJB: Yeah.
WS: First of all, just tell us a little bit about Bill Monroe, how he’s so evil. He’s really evil.
CJB: Yeah, Bill Monroe is the guy I mentioned in In Plain Sight, who is kind of the secondary story almost in a way, who is traveling across country to stalk Joe Pickett, to get him. There’s not a lot revealed about his background, but there are several hints: that he was related to some people that Joe Pickett tangled with early in the series, that he’s from Mississippi, that he was in prison, that he was an outfitter, and that he probably killed a couple in Atlanta and stole their car, and that’s what he’s traveling in Wyoming with. And he’s particularly driven. He’s different from just about any other villain I have in any of the books in that he kind of revels in the fact that he’s mean and evil and wants people to see him that way. And as he gets worse and he kind of degenerates through the book, he takes more pride in the fact that he can strike such fear in people. And he’s really bad. It was kind of fun to write about a character like that and hopefully not make him appear cartoonish, but there’s no doubt that there are people like that. In fact, we hear about them every day, but in most cases in the books, in all of them, the villains are not out-and-out bad, mean people like that.
I think the secret to creating an interesting villain is to figure out what their motivation is, not that we have to sympathize with them, but at least we understand where they’re coming from. In my books, a lot of times it comes from greed and taking advantage of some of the things that are happening in the west with all the energy development and so on and buckets of cash and suddenly boom times. So it can be greed, it can be madness, it can be ideology, which is the case in a few of them, where like environmental terrorists, Joe Pickett encounters them, and they’re absolutely driven. So it has to do with what they want. With the exception of Bill Monroe in In Plain Sight, I don’t think any of the bad people really consider themselves bad, they just consider themselves a means to an end.
WS: You mentioned that your publisher asked you to write a series, and I’m very curious how that’s worked out for you. For example, I know that each of your books stands on its own, but you also have some back story that you have to get across in order for the reader to understand the context. How do you decide how to work that back story in?
CJB: That’s one of the tougher things. That’s a challenging kind of thing because exactly as you mentioned, if a reader picked up In Plain Sight and had not read the five books preceding it, you don’t want so many assumptions in there and obscure references that the new reader would feel like they weren’t welcome or that they were somehow being compelled to go buy the first five before they could get to that. But at the same time, you want to reward the readers who’ve been with you for every single book and are watching the characters develop and evolve. So it’s kind of a fine line. There has to be enough back story that someone who’s picking up the book for the first time understands a little bit about the characters, what they look like, what drives them, a little bit about what’s happened in their past, and at the same time not bore those who’ve been following it every time. So in some cases, that’s the hardest thing in every book: what to reveal about what’s happened without going on and on and on and on.
But I’m kind of learning how to do that, I think. I’ve read a lot more series over the last five years to see how other people do it, and I think so far, so good. I think with this new book, In Plain Sight, without revealing the ending that we talked about earlier, it kind of sets the table for a whole new direction because I felt that it was starting to get a little bit mired in some of the things that had happened earlier, and it was time to change, go a different direction, create some new stuff.
WS: I am so curious to know what’s going to happen, and I can’t say anything, because I don’t want to spoil…. but yes, I can’t wait for the next one.
CJB: I was going to say, I also think that’s very realistic, because in real life and in all of our real lives, people change jobs, situations change, circumstances change. I don’t see why that can’t happen to a fictional protagonist and family as well.
WS: How do you work that back story in?
CJB: I try to do it fairly quickly in a couple of paragraphs as the characters are introduced to state who they are, why they’re there, and maybe what happened recently–recently being the last book or the book before–that gets them in the place that they are now without going on and on. I try to do that with the major characters, and then with some of the secondary ones, just references sometimes to them within dialogue of the main characters talking to each other about so-and-so and what they did in Winter Kill or “We haven’t seen this since book two” or something. I don’t say “book two,” of course. But that kind of thing. That way, a new reader knows that this is an ongoing character and that there is some history there but that you don’t have to go back and read it in order to be able to keep reading the book.
WS: Do you find that you have continuity problems?
CJB: Yes. Luckily, my wife is a great first reader. She gets every chapter, and she’s the best one in pointing out that two books ago this guy’s name was Bob and now his name is Don, what’s going on? That kind of thing. And sometimes something will happen in a book that I’ll kind of forget about and bring a character in later and not make a reference to that. But generally, with each one, as I sit down, I try to do a long outline of where we’re at with each character: what their ages are, what happened in the last one, what they are going to do in the next one, who’s coming back, who’s not, so I can keep referencing that as I write. I do a big outline, and that kind of keeps me on track.
Well, the other thing, though, is that the publisher has people. This is something I found fascinating. For a series like this, my publisher, Putnam, will have somebody put together a notebook that keeps track of things like what are the streets in Saddlestring, Wyoming, and is the main street Main Street or First? And I’ll get notes sometimes on the copy that say, “Back in Open Season, you said a river went through town, and now you don’t refer to it,” and that kind of thing, so they kind of help me with the continuity stuff, and that’s very helpful. But I also want to do a different story every time, so sometimes there are threads that don’t get picked up for a book or two.
WS: Well, I suppose if it’s for a book or two, it’s fine because that’s just sort of suspenseful, and people are wondering all that time, and then you can bring them in and give them what they’ve been hungering for the whole time.
CJB: Hopefully.
WS: Why do you say that?
CJB: Well, because I’ll have people that read the book so carefully that they’ll point out to me that things have happened in a book that I didn’t catch. Just small things. Like it was recently pointed out to me that in Out of Range, Joe Pickett’s truck catches on fire, and all of his belongings are burned up inside, including his weapons. But then in In Plain Sight, there he is with the shotgun that supposedly got burned up in Out of Range. Things that I never thought of that readers pick up on. And sometimes when they do, I am able to make that change for the paperback, and then it will be right in perpetuity. But sometimes it’s too late, so little things like that you just live with.
WS: Well, worse things have happened, I think. How has your writing changed since your early books?
CJB: My assumption was that it would get harder as the series went on. I think what I’ve found is that it gets easier. It gets easier to tell the story and to structure it. The hardest thing is to figure out what to write about. Once I’ve got that down, it goes fairly quickly. I think I’m a little more economical. I’m learning to know better what to leave out.
WS: Like what, for example?
CJB: There doesn’t need to be an excess of detail sometimes or description. I’m getting better about winnowing that down to just the essence or the bone to drive the story forward. I think I’m better at dialogue than I was originally. Just the tricks of the trade kind of thing. The craft part of it is getting better, and I think I’m getting better with pacing, as well. I don’t want to suggest that the early books aren’t any good, I think they’re okay, but I think they do get better, smoother as they go along.
WS: Do you ever get tired of your characters?
CJB: I haven’t yet. I think I can see the potential of that. I think the way to address that is to do a big change of direction and create new circumstances. I really like Joe Pickett and his family very much. I’m not tired of them. Like I said, the two things I think to avoid that rut are to keep changing it up, keeping changing up the structure and the stories and the themes. And the other thing is that I’m writing some stand-alone books that are not Joe Pickett books, and one of them will be out next year, and to be able to go back and forth from the series to a stand-alone, that keeps it a little fresher for me when I go back.
WS: People have compared you to Tony Hillerman, who, of course, writes about Navajos, who-done-its, mysteries set in New Mexico, a whole long series of books that are very popular. Do you think this is a fair comparison or a useful one?
CJB: I am honored by it. He’s an icon, and everybody knows who he is, and he was kind enough with the very first book to really make a point of telling people how much he liked it and providing a blurb and in interviews would say that it was one of the better books he had read kind of thing. So I’m forever indebted to him. I think our series are different. I guess the only thing that not really bothers me but that I don’t want is there is always kind of a fear of being characterized solely as a regional writer, and even though these books are very much set in Wyoming and the mountain west with a very strong sense of place, I think maybe they’re a little different because they’re more issue-oriented and maybe a little more political and social than simply a place, so it’s good and bad. It’s probably more good than bad.
WS: Do you think Tony Hillerman is categorized as a regional writer?
CJB: Only in his subject matter. So I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and I think in a lot of ways, what he was able to do by concentrating on that region is he pulled a lot of people into that. He kind of made it more of a national series simply through the quality of the writing and the characters and the number of books even though he didn’t necessarily have to make his scope bigger. And I think that’s probably helped a lot of people like me and other writers who tend to write with a real sense of place in a certain area.
WS: I’m just wondering about this, because a lot of, say, police or detective stories are set in a particular city. You have New York, you have England, you have, I don’t know, various other places, and I’m not sure people think of those as being so circumscribed. And yet when you talk about Tony Hillerman and New Mexico and your books in Wyoming, people seem to think of it as being so regional. Why do you suppose they do that?
CJB: Probably because the landscape and the environment are as much a character as the characters, and, therefore, in some cases, they’re not considered as urban and edgy as some writers and some characters and more traditional kind of mystery thriller crime novel kind of things. I think when it’s set outdoors, it gives it a whole different kind of color and a different kind of setting and a different kind of flavor than when it’s set on the mean streets of Any City, USA. In this part of the world, at least, in the mountain west, because there are so few people and so much landscape, the terrain and the environment are a part of the story as much as anything else. Sort of a combination between a traditional mystery or crime thriller as well as a little bit of a nature book in a way because there is a lot of scenery and terrain described as well as the plot.
WS: I want to talk more about the issues. Early on, you decided you wanted to write about some of the issues that arise in the mountain west, like environmental issues and guns and energy and that kind of thing. Obviously, they’re very important in your books, and one of the things I wanted to know was, when you put opinions about these issues in your characters’ mouths, do people think that that’s necessarily your position on these issues?
CJB: Good question. Sometimes. What I really honestly try to do is take an issue like coal bed methane development, the energy boom I referred to earlier, which is really changing the landscape of the west economically as well as physically. And what I try to do with a thing like that is not make it a black and white kind of thing. I don’t want anybody to ever pick up the books and just assume that if somebody’s a developer, they’re bad, and if they’re environmentalists, they’re good, and that’s it. There are a lot of different agendas, a lot of different shades of gray in all these things, and what I try to do is have characters on both sides make their case throughout the book. Joe Pickett’s just kind of in the dogged middle trying to solve the crime, and the reader can come away with coming down on either side of the issue. Joe Pickett rarely says too much about what he’s thinking politically when these things come up, but I think what it does is open up a lot of issues that were maybe thought of as black and white, as portrayed in other books as very black or white, and showing the nuance on both sides. That’s what I like to do.
That’s my goal. When a book like Savage Run, which is the second one, which is about environmental terrorism, when that came out, I had people on extreme sides, on both sides of both development and environmentalism saying, “We’re glad you’re with us, Chuck,” or “You really got ‘em in that one, didn’t you?” kind of thing. So I try to do that as more of balanced approach to these things.
WS: Do you ever put your own words in your characters’ mouths?
CJB: Sometimes a little bit. I try very hard not to make them agenda-driven. And I do honestly myself personally often see both sides of these things. The big issue in the west right now is, like I said, the energy development, the fact that thousands of gas wells are going in in parts of the state, and I see it both ways. It does obviously create a lot of traffic and development and new people and new buildings, and there are some down sides to that. There is also the fact that we’re swimming in wealth in this state, and everybody seems to like that pretty well. So it’s pretty hard to just say it’s all good or all bad.
WS: But it’s good that you’re bringing out a lot of the nuances to people who aren’t familiar with the issues. I don’t think too many people outside of Wyoming really know much about what it’s like.
CJB: Well, I think that is one thing that I’ve been sort of surprised and pleased at is the reception of these books across the country and that they’re now in twelve languages in one form or another. What I find, and I’m always kind of surprised, is that even though I can consider these issues very local, similar sorts of things happen everywhere, and readers in Florida or France will find similar kinds of environmental arguments going on from where they live and can empathize with what’s going on and sort of understand it and either really like it or really not. But it’s not as local as I thought it was when I first started writing.
[Reads opening of Out of Range.]
WS: That is so evocative and so suspenseful at the same time. I have to say, when I read this, I thought, “What is this guy doing? Who is this guy, and why is he eating all this meat?” It’s so easy to picture the meat and the whiskey. Yukon Jack–is that whiskey? I’m sorry, I don’t know. Or scotch. Okay, whiskey. And then, after eating all this meat, which seems like more than one person could eat to me…
CJB: Right. Four and a half pounds.
WS: And then he just–well, okay, I don’t want to give away anything, but it’s just suspenseful and so evocative at the same time.
CJB: Thank you.
WS: I just love that. Tell us, you talk in this book about the good meat movement. What is that?
CJB: Right. It’s actually based on a real thing. Like I said, with the themes we talked about earlier, with Out of Range, one of the themes of the book is about meat. In fact, when I wrote it, I had a little card taped above my desk saying, “a book about meat,” and what that means is not only meat, like I described here, he’s eating meat, and he’s cooking it, but also where does it come from? What has to die? Where does it fit into our scheme of things that animals die so we can eat meat, and where does it come from?
A couple of years ago, there was a story in the Sunday New York Magazine about something called the pure meat movement. And what it was was a bunch of Manhattanites who were vegetarian but realized they had to have meat in their diets and for their children. They came to the conclusion they were so out of touch from where their food came from and that was something their kids didn’t know that they started visiting farmers in up-state New York and Vermont and contracting with them for grass-fed, pure, hormone-free cows and pork, even to the point where they would take their kids up to see the animals get slaughtered that they would later eat so that the kids who didn’t know anything about a farm or a ranch or anything else would have some idea where the meat came from.
I read that story with this fascination, not really thinking about that there were people in our society so removed from their source of food that this was considered revolutionary and kind of daring to go do that. I sort of took that thought of that good meat, pure meat thing back to Wyoming where there’s a developer creating a good meat kind of village with high-priced homes where people would only eat the purest kinds of meat and be able to watch it and that kind of thing. And Joe Pickett, who’s a game warden, of course, is out in the field every day with hunters doing exactly that same thing, but they’re considered low-brow, whereas the development community is multi-million-dollar homes doing basically the same thing but with a different philosophy. So that kind of juxtaposition is the sort of thing that gets me going in these books.
WS: It’s just wonderful. It’s just so original. Why did you start writing novels?
CJB: One of the bigger reasons, I think, is that I’m a voracious reader, always have been. And there were so many novels I would read that were set in the mountain west or about Wyoming. Sometimes they were being written very beautifully and very well by people who had either just moved here or vacationed here or passed through. And I felt like the story that was being told in them was not the story I knew, wasn’t the state I knew, the people I knew at all. It seemed like, and still in a lot of these books that are about here, written here, all the characters seem to speak in southern accents. It’s like they’ve taken a chunk of the South and moved it into the rural Rocky Mountain states because they don’t quite get it. And what I wanted to do is give my perspective on this area and explore some of the issues that we talked about earlier in a fictional way. So that’s when I started, after college, actually started writing fiction as well as doing journalism, which is what I was doing at the time.
WS: What kind of books are you talking about?
CJB: I don’t want to mention any names.
WS: You don’t have to mention any names, but I mean, are these writers from Wyoming or Colorado?
CJB: No.
WS: Oh, okay. That’s kind of what I wanted to know. Where are they from generally?
CJB: Generally from the East Coast. And that’s perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s such a myth of the west and the cowboy culture sort of thing, and I certainly use those in my books, but sometimes I think the way people are portrayed here is not accurate and is a little too rural, a little too dumb. I think people here have a lot more nuance than that and are certainly more well-educated than that, and I like to put those kinds of characters in my books.
WS: What other kinds of places would you like to write about, or where would you like to set your stories?
CJB: I do like outdoor settings because I think it isolates the characters in an interesting way and also, I think, kind of drives up the suspense because it’s fewer people in a big landscape, and those people have agendas, and they’re very obvious, visible agendas, and at some point, they’re going to clash. It’s very much like a western movie, I think, where there’s just inevitable forces moving at each other. So I like that, and I probably will always write about the west, not necessarily Wyoming.
The stand-alone novel that’s going to come out next year, called Blue Heaven, that’s set in north Idaho in the north Idaho panhandle. It’s called Blue Heaven because… I’ve met L.A. cops who, when they retire, sell their homes in L.A. and buy big chunks of land in north Idaho and move up there. There’s hundreds of them up there, and they call it Blue Heaven. I love the title.
I’m working on another stand-alone right now that’s set in Denver, so it’s not necessarily an outdoor tale like some of these others, although it has those aspects. So I think I’ll probably always stick to the west.
WS: Well, there’s a lot there, obviously.
CJB: Yeah. There aren’t that many writers, and there’s a lot of country, so I might as well stay out here. I think New York is covered pretty well.
WS: What has no one ever asked you about that you wish they would?
CJB: I honestly can’t say no one has ever asked about this, but I kind of wish more people–with the books, they tend to key on Joe Pickett and the mystery and the issues, which is good–but I think one thing that’s a little different in these that I work hard on is the characterization of his family, his growing family, his daughters, and the fact that all of the books have some of the story told from their perspective. I try very hard to write from the perspective of Sheridan Pickett, who in the first book was seven and is now, I believe, thirteen and change her perspective from a seven-year-old girl to a thirteen-year-old girl, but at the same time keep it as authentic as I can. That’s something that’s hard work to do, and occasionally people will say, “I just love that Sheridan, she’s great,” but at the same time I think maybe not realizing what a trick it is for a guy my age to be writing from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl. So that’s something that people seem to like but maybe don’t realize that that’s a little different in these kinds of novels.
WS: I think you do a wonderful job of it.
CJB: Thank you. Yeah, I was fishing for compliments.
WS: And in In Plain Sight, you have Sheridan and her friend Julie, and you show a lot of their interaction and what they do all day. Yeah, it’s great.
CJB: Well, thank you. Luckily, I have daughters.
WS: Yeah, that probably helps, too, doesn’t it? How about your Web site?
CJB: The Web site is cjbox.net, and I have a lot of information there.
WS: Thank you so much for being with us today, Chuck. This has just been so interesting, and as I told you before, I can’t wait to run out and get the rest of your books.
CJB: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Great questions. This was fun.
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