Review: Laughing one minute, wiping tears the next
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 12, 2012
Craig Johnson's Christmas stories had me laughing one minute and wiping tears the next. Also included, the first chapter of Johnson's first Sheriff Longmire novel, THE COLD DISH.Story #1 "Ministerial Aid." Still mourning the death of his wife, Sheriff Walt Longmire is hung over, hasn't bathed or cut his hair. He throws on a bathrobe, drives to his substation to deliver his deputy's paycheck and encounters an abused housewife who mistakes him for the Messiah. A startled Walt thinks: "Returning after two thousand years and he chooses the Sinclair station in Powder Junction, Wyoming?"Story #2 "Slick Tongued Devil." A careless newspaper reporter picks up an old obituaries folder and runs the obits as if they are current. A flim flam man sniffing out obits tries to collect money from Sheriff Longmire for a cheesey but expensive Bible supposedly ordered by his wife before her death.(Quote) A few granules of snowy sleet swept across the ridges along the Bighorn Mountains and collected in the low spots and lee sides of the European blue sage, and on one of the escaped structural limbs of the sweat lodge, a great horned owl sat with his back to me. The Cheyenne believe that owls are messengers of the dead and that they bring word from worlds beyond. (End Quote)Story #3 "Toys For Tots." While his daughter Cady does her Christmas shopping at the mall, a grumpy Sheriff Waltmire befriends the young Navy chaplain manning a Toys For Tots box.Walt muses: "I thought about how the Army and Marines had lost a hundred chaplains during WWII--the third highest mortality rate behind the infantry and Army Air Corps--and how, on the USAT Dorchester in 1943, four chaplains had given their life jackets and lives for others."When a shoplifter comes running out of a store, Walt seizes the moment to turn the chaplain into a hero.Story #4 "Unbalanced" On his way to pick up his daughter Cady at the Billings airport, Sheriff Longmire stops at a gas station. He offers a ride to a half-frozen young woman who has two possessions: a guitar and a small wood-gripped revolver. She's wearing an ID bracelet from a psychiatric hospital and she has an experienced way of tuning the truck's CD player.Walt's observation: "The Little Bighorn country is a beautiful swale echoing the Bighorn Mountains and the rolling hills of the Mission Buttes--a place of change that defies definition. Just when you think you know it, it teaches you a lesson--just ask the Seventh Cavalry."THE COLD DISH, Chapter One, from the opening:"Bob Barnes says they got a dead body out on BLM land. He's on line one."... I looked at her, looking being one of my better law-enforcement techniques. Ruby's a tall woman, slim, with a direct manner and clear blue eyes that tend to make people nervous. I like that in a receptionist/dispatcher, keeps the riffraff out of the office. She leaned against the doorjamb and went to shorthand, "Bob Barnes, dead body, line one."A tip of the hat to Craig Johnson. May he never run out of great stories.