This Cowboy Has Issues

He wears a cowboy hat in his author photos, looking a little bit like Garth Brooks. He lives outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming. He has guns on the wall of his writing room. His series hero, Joe Pickett, is a game warden. But C. J. Box is no redneck with a laptop. Talking on the phone from his home office (which has “a bad view of a window well”), Box says, “I never thought I was writing mysteries—I always wanted to explore issues.”

A Wyoming native, Box started his career as a journalist in the tiny town of Saratoga. Then he went to work promoting tourism for the state, traveling extensively in Europe and Asia. “I always wanted to write novels, so I always did that on the side,” he says. “I wrote fiction, short fiction, three or four manuscripts that never went anywhere.”

In the early 1990s, he wanted to write about the Endangered Species Act, exploring how well-meaning laws can sometimes go awry on the ground. Setting his tale in the fictional town of Saddlestring, he first tried a sheriff protagonist, then a journalist, before settling on a game warden: “When I found out more what a game warden does, it fit perfectly, because they can really get to all sides of an issue.”

Open Season (2001), Box’s debut, won starred reviews and awards. Offered a deal for three more Joe Picketts, Box suddenly realized he had become something he hadn’t planned to be: the author of a mystery series. “Out here, they’re not really considered mystery books, but more issue or topic oriented,” he says. “But crime lends itself very well to what I’m doing. It’s the skeleton you can hang the meat on.”

Most of Box’s topics have a particular resonance with the West: endangered species, ecoterrorism, survivalists. And one of the immensely appealing things about the series is the balanced way Pickett thinks things through. In a region where fence-line squabbles have resulted in gunplay, does Box ever feel pressured to choose sides?

“It’s not that I’m not trying to take a side, or that I don’t have an opinion, because I do,” he says. “But most of these issues are way too complicated to come down on one side across the board. I tend to present characters whose opinions are the extremes, and let the reader and Joe Pickett decide.”

Though their gumshoes travel dramatically different beats, Box has a lot in common with John Shannon, another writer whose sleuth grapples as much with issues, conscience, and morality as with bad guys.

In Out of Range, Pickett butts heads with a developer who wants to create a “Good Meat Community,” an enclave where the super-rich can bond with the animals they’re going to eat. “Not that I think it’s ridiculous or that I’m a proponent of it,” says Box. “I’m just fascinated by the idea: people have gotten so far from where their meat comes from that they’re trying to reconnect with that, but in a phony way.

”It has as much to do with ‘good meat’ as it does with authenticity,“ he continues. ”People want to have an authentic experience, but it’s impossible now to identify what’s authentic and what’s not. People move out here and create an authenticity that’s their own.“

Does Box really wear a cowboy hat? ”I do quite a bit,“ he says. ”I’m not going to pretend that I grew up wearing one all my life, but it is comfortable and I do enjoy it—plus I don’t have any hair!“