Playing with expectations: When you pick up a literary novel, you usually have an open mind. You hope for a great work, but in terms of structure and plot, the author is free. Add the word “crime,” “mystery,” or “thriller,” and everything changes. You expect someone to die in the first few chapters; you expect to be amused by a story about greed, fear, sex, and hate. If it’s a legal thriller, there are moral conundrums, dubious evidence, bad cops, compromised jurors. If it’s a cozy crime thriller, you expect grumpy old people, poison, and food. LA Noir: private detectives, actresses, shady producers. A thriller set in New York can be anything it wants to be, or just any facet of Robert De Niro – gangsters, restaurants, art galleries – with a hundred possible con artists in between. Florida: The weather, the real estate, and the invasive Burmese pythons are causing everyone to frenzy.
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And if a reader sees a review of a novel set in Montana, he might assume that it will include handsome, rich ranchers with trophy wives, big feasts, taxidermied heads, a dozen guns, and some token cows, while I, who have lived in this state for decades, will give them abandoned cemeteries, overflowing rivers, fatally misinformed tourists, and college graduates who like psilocybin. A reader could expand his preconceptions to include rich skiers in the winter, big haircuts in the bars, and brave lawmen against weirdos. I could stick with convention by building my story around the Fourth of July rodeo and then blowing up the clown. People expect cowboys; I don’t bump cows in my latest book, but I do cook up a Russian travel agent and hitman in a Yellowstone hot spring.
The West is a vast potential for cliché, and few places in the world are as susceptible to stereotyping as Montana. The setting is always fraught with misunderstanding, but the gap between assumption and reality is particularly stark here. Visitors want a version of the West that simply doesn’t exist for the people who live there, and as a writer, busting the myth is unbearable, perhaps even a moral duty. Every device in literature tries not to become cliché, and no form of literature benefits more from subversion and misdirection than a crime novel. I find ideas and scenes in the odd details and banal corners that are specific to the place where I live—the ravines where you might dispose of a body, the overlooked guns in the roadhouse kitchen, the river corners where drowning people wash up.
Writers are opportunists who always steal moments. One day during the halftime show, a skydiver’s parachute failed, landing in the arena just before the rodeo queen and her court were due to make a triumphant gallop. I’m not proud that I used this incident in the novel I was working on at the time: the story begins with the discovery of a dead, naked man in the wet sand of Brighton Beach, with no water in his lungs, every bone in his body broken. I see birds circling above a grove of trees and set a scene with birdwatchers finding a dead body. I hear of a foot turning up in a hot spring in Yellowstone and decide to put it in a red Keds high-top sneaker. Some hotelier friends find a prosthetic in their rooftop hot tub—of course I use it. When I worried that our tent might blow into a reservoir one night, taking my two-year-old with it, I started another novel this way. And when my mother found a drowned body while walking her dog, I used that too.
Another flaw in the myth: Most Montana towns don’t look like Deadwood. The mountain west has a Depression-era feel to it, and many downtowns look like frozen, dusty Art Deco sets for a noir film. It’s the neon lights, the glass-brick bars now frequented by hipsters, carpenters and cowboys, all temporarily united by billiards, weed and music. Our alleys are as intensely urban and lonely as Chicago’s, and they often still look like something out of The highlight. In winter they are covered with ice and filled with wind; I remember slipping once, and as I lay there surveying the damage, I saw the blinds on a window above me move and decided to write the sniper scene that opens my first novel. Montana’s urban nooks and crannies have been put to good use: by Dashiell Hammett in Red Harvestin every novel by James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss, The Wrong Case), in James Welch’s dark, beautiful Winter in the blood and Debra Magpie Earlings Perma Red and Jim Harrison’s “Legends of the Fall”, in the central death in A river flows throughfilmed in my hometown of Livingston. Red Harvestis set in Butte, is probably the first noir crime thriller and features no cowboy hats.
And yet people cannot do otherwise.
Another way to shatter expectations, rather than blowing up a rodeo clown, is to focus on the underlying, untamed place, the world most visitors don’t understand. The preconceived notions are as annoying to me as a local as they are to me as a writer, and in hindsight, much of what I write about is a reaction. I do terrible fictional things to tourists and rich cosplaying immigrants with mini-mansions and closets full of Western clothes, but terrible things actually happen: It’s deadly out here, in a dozen ways, and tourists, often oblivious to the extremes of the environment, are easy fruit, the gift that keeps on giving. The bears! The wind! The meth and the poor people! Gravity and alcohol!
If I were to rewrite Local on site (which involves a fatal rodeo accident and the exploding clown) I’d probably add a murder involving fireworks noise, a character driven to the brink by traumatized pets, random fires, the drunken movie star peeing in her flowerbed. It’s the little things that hit you, the strangeness of what’s really happening, that make murder interesting. I’d focus on bad divorces, embezzling county officials, and hunters who head out in late September without really checking the weather. If I were really being realistic, I probably wouldn’t write about ranchers or cowboys at all – small operations are becoming increasingly rare because real ranching is hard, heartbreaking, and unprofitable, and rich outsiders buy up the land, subdivide it, and build very large houses on 40 acres. One of my favorite characters Is a rancher, but he’s an old killer with secrets. His wife, a war bride, is Italian and his henchmen travel in off-road vehicles. He’s lifelike.
There are mixed feelings about the real West: part of the idea of the place is beautiful, part is a very real tragedy, and sometimes it just gets turned into a joke. A friend who writes noir gave me a blurb for a book (which he had obviously read) that mentioned cowboys. I cooked a Russian in a hot spring, but I didn’t poke cows in that book. And rodeos, which give everyone a chance to celebrate the myth and ignore the dark side, are too often co-opted by politics. The white hat and black hat thing: today it’s the feds against the weirdos, poorly trained cops dealing with heroin, methamphetamine, alcohol, and suicide. There’s something painful about this place, and maybe part of it is the shrinking of the old, real West, the disappearance of small ranches; maybe it’s the shadow of what we did to the people who were here first. Maybe the comfort of the open spaces is forgetting.
I don’t ignore traditions. I broke my protagonist’s jaw in his youth while riding bulls, and I love to get him involved in bar fights with lawyers and real estate agents, other cops and reporters, hitmen and love rivals. I made him a sheriff and a sheriff’s son, but I also gave him a college degree in archaeology and a few years in New York and Europe. He camps and skis, he cruises the river, he hunts. He eats well and travels and takes illegal drugs. He is not tormented in love, is not an alcoholic (or at least he doesn’t think about it), and is not particularly serious. He makes mistakes and rarely wears cowboy boots. He does not suffer nobly and silently, and he does not always do the right thing. He is as human as I can make him, and he is still a Westerner. And he understands the cowboy whose real job between rodeos might be plumbing, carpentry, EMT work, or writing little poems. We all wear different hats here.
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