Craig Johnson had a blast bringing Walt Longmire back to the past

Craig Johnson says he keeps his storytelling fresh by occasionally taking his famous literary sheriff, Walt Longmire, on adventures outside of his usual setting of contemporary Wyoming.

Readers got their first glimpse of a younger Walt in 2008's Another Man's Mocassins, which flashed back to when he was a U.S. Marine in the Vietnam War.

This year, Johnson returned Walt and his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, to their 20s in a pair of best-sellers: First Frost and Tooth and Claw.

"It was a blast. I had a really good time doing [Another Man's Mocassins]. I learned a lot about him from seeing him when he was in his mid-20s, as opposed to an older man," Johnson told UPI in a recent phone interview.

"I decided to do that again," he added. "In First Frost, I took him back to 1964, before they even got to Vietnam, which was kind of interesting, with this big road trip on Route 66."

Tooth and Claw is set after the war and finds Henry visiting Walt, who is working security for an oil company in Alaska.

After a series of unfortunate events, the men become trapped on an old ghostship with a disfigured polar bear and have to fight for their survival and make it back home.

Johnson intended the novella to be published in 2025, but when he handed it in early, Viking Penguin wanted to release it in spring 2024.

"I really hadn't intended on bookending Walt's Vietnam experiences, both before and after, but when they decided to go ahead and publish it, I was like, 'OK, well, here we go!'"

The next two Longmire books will feature Walt and Henry home in Wyoming and at their present ages, but the author said his publisher and fanbase support his narrative traipsing as long as the stories are mysteries and have Walt Longmire in them.

"Fortunately, I've got a readership that, in general, doesn't hold that against me," Johnson said. "They kind of enjoy taking these trips back in time."

The six-season TV show, starring Robert Taylor and Lou Diamond Phillips as Walt and Henry, is leaving Netflix on Dec. 31. It is, however, available for streaming on Paramount+

Johnson is monitoring the situation closely and hoping -- much like the cast and viewers -- that the change in streaming homes might lead to new episodes of the show.

"It'll be interesting to me what happens with [the show's producers] Warner Brothers," the writer said.

"Are they going to be smart enough to realize that they've got this show that still, almost 10 years after the fact, seems to have an extraordinary audience that's still pulling for it."

In the meantime, those who want new stories about Walt and the quirky denizens of rural Absaroka County can read about them.

"The television show was great, but my bread and butter is always going to be the book. That's the the joy of my life," he said.

"I'm not being smart-allecky or anything like that, but it's very difficult for Hollywood to compete with a book," he added. "First of all, it's hard for a 42-page piece of material to compete with a 300-page piece of material. You're going to have a lot more detail [in the book than a script]."

Johnson also noted how important the readers' imaginations are in creating their own entertaining experiences.

"It's the ability for them to cast it the way they see it, to populate it the way they see it, to have that whole world be what they want to see," he said, adding that before Robert Taylor "had a crack at it," 50 different people would have described Walt differently based on their interpretation of Johnson's descriptions.

"You could have 50 different Walt Longmires," Johnson said. "It's kind of a unique situation to have that, but I don't complain though."

Fans will have another new holiday-themed Longmire short story to read online Christmas Day, in keeping with Johnson's annual tradition.

The inspiration for this year's tale, "Starter's End," was a conversation he had with the owner of a bed and breakfast at which he was snowed in recently.

The woman, who made delicious cranberry and walnut sourdough bread, regaled Johnson with the science of sourdough starters and how they even can be handed down from one generation to another.

"You have to have a stable environment for it and you have to feed it," Johnson explained.

"They have names for them and all this stuff," he added. "I was like, 'You've got to be kidding!'"

The story is about what happens when Walt's office manager Ruby gets ready to go away for the holidays and needs her boss to "babysit" her sourdough starter.

"He's got to do this on a very, very busy Christmas Eve," Johnson said. "It's Walt's worst nightmare."