MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Walter Benjamin famously stated that “The original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd” (43). This, however, is no longer the case when one addresses novels by prominent North American crime writers such as Craig Johnson and C.J. Box. Their characters do not roam through crowded labyrinthine city streets, but drive across the vast State of Wyoming. The change of scenery offers a new chronotope to the detective novel, as Walt Longmire himself puts it: “time in our part of the high plains meant driving” (Johnson 239). These long drives through the apparent immensity of the American West encourage introspection and tint the narratives with spiritual, almost mystical overtones. Longmire indeed often has prophetic dreams and visions stimulated by his long-standing friendship with his Cheyenne comrade Henry Standing Bear. In more general terms, the long drives provide time for the detectives to think either about the case at hand or about their personal life, often raising existential questions that are far more difficult to answer. In the same way, when Joe Pickett, Box’s game warden, is driving, he always seems to be tormented by family and money issues rather than by the actual crimes that were committed in his county. Accordingly, this paper would like to discuss a different vision of space and time displayed by writers who decided to set their novels in the West (where they also actually live), providing a shift from an urban chronotope to a rural one in which the reading of tracks, traces, and clues is slowed down by time-consuming drives, weather conditions, and existential questions.