2025 Readings 99

 I don't really think of myself as someone who routinely reads detective novels, but there are some exceptions. I'm sure over the years I've read all the Sherlock Holmes short stores and novel several times, although I suppose that's true of most folks. I may also be a James Ellroy completest, including multiple readings of the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz), American Tabloid, and My Dark Places. Oddly, I'd also have to add to that Craig Johnson's Longmire series, which I suspect, like many people, I first encountered on Netflix. The novels are very different than the series, and, as might be imagined, better (although the casting of the Australian actor Robert Taylor was a great choice). Yesterday I finished First Frost, which I believe is the 20th in the series. If you're familiar with the Longmire series, you know he's a sheriff in a small town in Wyoming, supported by a cast of characters who run throughout the entire series (again, the TV series had different supporting characters, and some of the casting of the characters from the novels was a bit iffy - although Lou Diamond Phillips as Henry Standing Bear turned out to be an inspired choice). I remember travelling on a bus through the scrubby desert of Jordan while reading one of the earlier Longmire novels, and as I passed in and out of consciousness I started to believe that I was in Wyoming. The series is not great, but it's definitely entertaining and I'm always happy when I return to it. The one thing I would add is that it works when they're actually set in Wyoming. There's one where Walt goes down to Mexico and another when he's in Philadelphia and this last one which is a flashback a period before he and Henry go to Vietnam (don't try and sort out the timeline, especially on the TV series), and they never quite work out as cleanly as the ones where the action occurs in Wyoming. There's sort of an internal logic, a mood, in the Wyoming stories that are never captured in the stories outside of  Absaroka County. It's not that the non-Absaroka County stories are bad (and I completely understand why Johnson occasionally tries to mix things up), rather, they just feel a little unnatural and forced. Having said all that, I'm looking forward to reading the next one, and carrying out a massive reread once retirement hits.