Return to Sender by Craig Johnson
Roughly coinciding with the publication of his 21st Walt Longmire novel, Return to Sender, Craig Johnson was announced as the recipient of the 2025 Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions by the Western Writers of America. This lifetime achievement award is the highest honor the organization bestows. Johnson was previously nominated three times and has twice won their Spur Award for distinguished writing about the American West.
Legendary author Owen Wister (1861 – 1938) is considered to be the father of western literary fiction. His 1902 landmark novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains contains the unforgettable and oft-repeated line, “When You Call Me That, Smile.” It was an immediate bestseller, was adapted for the stage, made into five different films and a very loosely based TV series in the 1960s.
The complex narration and unforgettable characters elevated westerns from what had previously been dismissed as cheap pulp fiction to a respected genre. The novel has never been out of print and has sold over 1.5 million copies.
An Author Posterity Will Surely Remember
Wister was an Easterner, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, educated in Switzerland and England before entering Harvard University at age 18. He was a prominent member of Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard.
Before returning there to earn a law degree, Wister studied music at a Paris Conservatory, where he wrote six operas. After passing the bar examination, he joined a Philadelphia firm where he half-heartedly practiced law until becoming a successful full-time writer.
Wister first traveled to Wyoming circa 1884 to improve his health. Subsequently, beginning about 1891, he made 15 annual trips there, having fallen under the spell of the American West. His observations of its spectacular beauty and the plethora of unique, rugged characters met there combined to inspire his narratives. He wrote numerous short stories and several novels before turning to non-fiction and well-regarded biographies.
The Western Writers of America’s ultimate namesake award is an honor well deserved by western Renaissance man Craig Johnson, who was born in Huntington, West Virginia, 101 years after Owen Wister’s birth.
This brilliant author was also well educated in the East with degrees from Marshall University and post-graduate playwriting studies completed at Temple University in Wister’s hometown of Philadelphia. However, his soul-chosen home for the majority of his life has been in Ucross, Wyoming, population 25, on a 260-acre ranch with a house, outbuildings, corrals and fences that he carefully handcrafted using locally grown timber.
When The Cold Dish debuted in 2004, some of us early readers were dumbstruck by his eloquence, dynamism, literacy and vivid narration with what must be one of the finest works written in the western genre. Although more than a century has passed since The Virginian was published, it is still being enjoyed and studied. This reviewer fervently believes Craig Johnson’s body of work will still be read and appreciated in the 22nd century!
The next 20 novels, novellas, website “post-its” and annual Christmas short stories gifted to his now legion of devoted readers have continued to enrich this blended western and mystery genre. The cast of characters has grown into old, familiar friends who come alive with each new publication.
Craig Johnson has stated in interviews, author talks and on his website, that historical facts and quirky newspaper items may sometimes provide the spark or kernel of inspiration for a novel. The Swedish-built cargo ship, the SS Baychimo that became known as an “Arctic Ghost Ship” was integral to the December 2024 published Tooth and Claw that continued Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear’s youthful adventures.
Rural Mail Carriers and Missing Persons
Dedicated to Johnson’s rural mailman, Andy Ramirez, the impetus for Return to Sender came from a May 2023 article in the Cowboy State Daily written by journalist Jake Nichols.
It lauded the dedication of Tebra Morris from tiny Bairoil, Wyoming on the edge of the Great Divide Basin who, at the time of the article, had served as a rural route carrier for 11 years driving one of the longest mail routes in the country six days per week; 300 lonely, remote miles between Rawlins and Lander often in extreme weather conditions with multiple white-out blizzards not uncommon in winter months.
This sparked an idea for a nuanced, multi-layered, confounding, perplexing new Walt Longmire mystery.
Harvard professor and Greek translator of The Odyssey, George Herbert Palmer, provided the translation of historian Herodotus’ praise of the Persian Empire’s 500 BC courier service, which precedes the Acknowledgments page of Return to Sender. It is the well-known “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
When the inscription was added to the façade of New York City’s James A. Farley Post Office Building by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White in 1914, it soon became the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service. In actual practice, if weather is foul and roads closed, rural mail carriers may choose or be instructed not to attempt deliveries.
When the State of Wyoming’s postal inspector calls upon the Sheriff of Absaroka County to voluntarily locate a missing person outside of his jurisdiction, Walt obligingly reports for duty. It would have been impossible to turn down Mike Thurman, his late wife’s cousin.
Blair McGowan is as reliable as sunrise and sunset. She is the mail carrier with the longest rural route in the country, over 300 miles daily, which takes her on a meandering eight-hour or more jaunt through the remote high-altitude Red Desert located in Sweetwater County.
Blair typically sees more pronghorn antelope and elk than people as she makes her way through the Great Divide Basin near the Killpecker Sand Dunes, the largest living dune system in the United States. Phone service is sketchy in places along the way, and she could be anywhere in this sparsely populated, most desolate part of Wyoming.
As difficult as it is for anyone to imagine, 6’5” 250-pound former college football star Sheriff Walt Longmire poses as a contract laborer/substitute letter carrier as his posture and mien all but scream “law enforcement.” Despite a beard and fake ID, when he begins to question and interview everyone at the post office, in town and along her route, his thin disguise fools few.
This missing person case is most unusual. Blair’s distinctive turquoise and white ’68 International Travelall adorned with a multitude of summer of love era stickers proclaiming peace, love and band names in the rear window was left in the post office parking lot with keys in the vehicle and the day’s mail delivered. It was her prized possession, well maintained with a recently rebuilt engine and transmission and new tires.
When she failed to show up the following morning, Tess Anderson, her supervisor, was shocked and surprised that notice hadn’t been provided. Blair was more than reliable; she was a warrior when it came to mail delivery, as was abundantly demonstrated when she set off on her rounds in a snowmobile pulling a sled one year during a blizzard that closed roads. When rescued after completing most of her route, she had lost two toes to frostbite.
Worried but unsure how soon she could file a police report, Tess waited a few days before reporting Blair as a missing person.
Benny Schweppe, Blair’s no-account boyfriend, provided no assistance, hadn’t a clue, nor did he seem terribly concerned. This brazen opportunist sold her possessions, including her vehicle, about a month later. Walt laid down $5,000 cash and rescued the Travelall from a used car dealer to use on her route. Blair’s friends were worried her environmental activism might be linked to her vanishing and hoped she hadn’t been murdered and dumped somewhere in the Red Desert.
Clam-Headed Aliens and Ex-KGB Agents
In fine Longmire tradition, Walt got into a kerfuffle with Benny his first day in town, during which Benny was divested of his gun and unceremoniously stuffed into a trash can. Walt was arrested, handcuffed and transported to the Sweetwater Canyon Sheriff’s office, much to the amusement of Sheriff Grossnickle.
It was here he learned that Blair had been part of a weird, now cult favorite “documentary” film about being the victim of abduction by clam-headed aliens from outer space. Every Longmire tale has unanticipated twists and turns with danger ever present.
The story is about to get even weirder as Walt stumbles upon the Order of the Red Gate, a secretive new-age nomadic doomsday cult moving often, frequently dwelling near the Killpecker Sand Dunes and rumored to have ties to the Heaven’s Gate Cult notorious for 40 deaths in a mass suicide in the 1990s. He suspects they are bilking senior citizens out of their life savings, drugging them to keep them compliant and possibly committing even more nefarious crimes.
His hometown crew in the Absaroka Sheriff’s Department, including his dispatcher Ruby, Deputy Santiago Saizarbitoria and Walt’s tough-talking fiancée Vic Moretti, are holding down the fort and making good use of his absence to clean up the office.
Walt has his marching orders to be on time for a black tie reception a few days hence in Cheyenne when his daughter Cady may be announced as a candidate for Wyoming State Attorney General. Everyone who matters will be there, including feisty retired Sheriff Lucian Connally. Vic has his dress clothing organized and will send the cavalry in the form of Henry Standing Bear if necessary. No excuses would be acceptable.
Meanwhile, Walt learns from the DOJ that federal agent Ruth One Heart, a distant relative, childhood companion and major character in First Frost, filed a flight plan but disappeared before the plane landed in Iowa three weeks ago. Ruth is a former US Air Force Intelligence Officer and now a special agent with the Treasury Department’s Rapid Response Team.
Later that evening, ex-KGB agent Maxim Sidorov, wearing an ankle monitor and illegally packing a Russian-made Poloz 9mm pistol, shows up unexpectedly at Walt and Vic’s hotel after the reception. He proffers his services as an operative to rescue Ruth in exchange for a lesser sentence. This encounter confirms unfinished business, suggesting a plotline in a future Walt Longmire novel.
The Red Desert investigation resumes as the action, adventure and peril step up. Walt’s life is in jeopardy, but ultimately the series depends on his ability to survive in a series of death-defying dramatic maneuvers with assistance from unexpected quarters.
Return to Sender is a love song of gratitude to rural mail carriers in Craig Johnson’s inimitable, eloquent voice. It delivers the exciting escapades one anticipates, lyrical descriptions of the landscape of the American West, with the addition of heart, endearingly demonstrated in the human relationships that matter.
Walt, his family, closest friends and a growing number of boon companions are now well-known and loved larger-than-life characters. Until next time, when we can have another slice of pie at the Busy Bee or raise a glass at The Red Pony, rest easy, Walt and friends, while Craig Johnson weaves his magic spell.
About Craig Johnson:
Craig Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Longmire mysteries, the basis for the hit Netflix original series Longmire. He is a two-time recipient of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for fiction, multiple Will Rogers Medallion Awards, and his novella Spirit of Steamboat was the first One Book Wyoming selection. Craig is the 2025 recipient of the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature. He lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population 26.
