A great evening with Craig Johnson

There’s nothing quite like a good storyteller, a person who can spin yarns and keep an audience enthralled for a long period of time.

A prime example is the visit by bestselling author Craig Johnson to the Lovell Library last Tuesday, Sept. 3.

Johnson, the bestselling author of the Sheriff Walt Longmire series, is a master of his craft, able to tell a good story on the printed page or in person. He kept a large audience entertained for more than an hour Tuesday, telling how he became an author and recalling fun anecdotes.

Johnson told how he wrote his first novel, “The Cold Dish,” but set it aside for something like 10 years before he got the nerve to get back to it. Then as he wrote, he visited with Johnson County Sheriff Larry Kirkpatrick to pick up some ideas, and when reading pages of manuscript, Kirkpatrick would try to guess the outcome of various cases in the books, and he was wrong every time, which gave Johnson great satisfaction.

One of the great things about the Walt Longmire character is that he is not some wacked out character struggling through life but rather is a smalltown sheriff doing the best he can with limited resources. Craig Johnson characters are true to life, though written with a little flair.

 The Longmire books take place in the fictional town of Durant, Wyoming, located in a fictional 24^th Wyoming county, Absaroka County. But many of the place names are real, and Johnson’s characters are partly based on people he knows. (I wonder who Ferg is based on.)

As a resident of tiny Ucross, northeast of Buffalo, Johnson loves small towns, and he portrays smalltown folks in a generally positive light, not making fun of them as country hicks. Walt himself, is a sheriff of great skill and a sharp investigator, though he lives in tiny Durant.

One of the best stories Johnson told is how he came up with making Rainier Beer Walt’s favorite. He said he simply knew the small brewery could use a boost, so he made Rainier the beer of choice for his main character.

Johnson told how he was asked to speak at the Meeteetse Library – his first speaking request – and the librarian said she couldn’t afford much of an honorarium.

First, Craig said, he had to look up what an honorarium was, and then he said he would do it for a six-pack of Rainier. “Done,” came the reply from the librarian.

Since then, Johnson has appeared for free at Wyoming libraries, except for the Rainier “honorarium.”

The use of Rainier in the Longmire books gave perhaps a small boost to Rainier sales when the books came out, but when the Longmire series was aired on television, sales exploded. Johnson told how, when he was to speak at an event in Colorado, nary a six-pack of Rainier could be found anywhere for his “fee.”

He thought maybe the brewery had closed, but it was just the opposite. Longmire had just come out on TV, and the beer apparently sold out throughout the West.

Fast forward a few years, and Johnson was to speak at an event at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. He was walking around the facility with an escort to get a feeling for the place when the two walked by a tall man who said something like, “Rainier? Really?!” After they passed, his escort asked if he knew who the man was, and Johnson said no, he didn’t.

“That was Pete Coors,” he was told.

“I’m probably not going to get any sponsorships from Coors,” he quipped to the Lovell audience.

Now that’s a good story.