It's funny how life interferes with your plans. When I started this I had planned to do a few updates a week, nothing earth shattering to be sure, I'm simply not that interesting. Ah well, I'm here now and I want to say something that's at once clever and insightful, deep and thoughtful, but instead ...
Walt Longmire.
Who? Walt Longmire!
Who? Ok, I'll tell you. Walt Longmire is a character created by Craig Johnson in his series of mystery novels with the completely original subtitle "Walt Longmire Mysteries". The series of novels, which currently stands at nine in number with a few more short stories. The novels have been adapted into a TV series on A&E entitled "Longmire". When I say "adapted" I should say that the producers took the characters and situations of the novels and completely ignored them. Well, I'm not being fair when I say that, because most of the book series is comprised of internal dialogue from Walt's perspective and by and large the reader only sees and hears what Walt sees and hears, that works great in a novel(or short story) but doesn't really work when it has to be depicted on screen with 40 or so minutes to tell the story, so changes had to be made.
As seems to happen a lot to me lately, I only "discovered" the novels after watching the TV show(the same happened with the "Dexter" series, and the "Sookie Stackhouse" series, which served as the basis for the now(pardon the pun)long in the tooth HBO series "True Blood").
I first became aware of "Longmire" the TV series through following one of its stars Katee Sackhoff on Twitter (@kateesackhoff) who I liked in Battlestar Galactica when she played Starbuck.
Longmire is the Sheriff of Absaroka County Wyoming, he and his small force of Deputies deal with all sorts of problems in the TV series, from running for re-election against one of his long time deputies, to a brash young woman Deputy from Philadelphia who has more than a few skeletons in her closet. It's a fun show to watch, strong characters and interesting plots, but like with the other two series I mentioned, the novels are so much better.
One of the things that is missing in the TV series, is Walt's sense of humor, Walt(in the novels) is a great at observational humor and a lot of funny one liners, it helps to have the humor in the novels to break up the often dark storylines,(in the novel "As The Crow Flies" Walt and a new Cheyenne Reservation Chief of Police have to investigate the death of a young mother who plunged to her death off a high cliff while holding her 6 month old son).
Remember what I said about planning? Yeah going to have to end this for now, I hope to get back to this some time soon. In the mean time if you would like a good read to get you through those cold winter nights you could do a lot worse than "The Cold Dish", the first Walt Longmire novel written by Craig Johnson.
