Report from Santa Fe; Michael McGarrity

. . Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future, and by a grant from the Healy Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Michael McGurdy, one of my favorite writers. Thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here today. Thank you for inviting me. Well, you're an internationally known author. Your books are translated into many languages. And one of the purposes that these books do because they're so New Mexican is that people, expatriate, ex -New Mexicans, read these books and it makes them just ache for home. You started out your debut novel was Tula Rosa. That's right. And then shortly followed in rapid succession by Mexican hat, I've got to hold these for five seconds, Serpent Gate, Hermits

Peak, and another aid after that. Eight more after that. What? Plus, hard country, which is the Bickers dozen right now. That's what we are celebrating. Today we're celebrating the trade paperback release of hard country, an extraordinary historical model you've taken years to write. Talk to me about why you chose to do this. Is this not your usual? No, it's not. The first 12 novels I wrote all set in New Mexico are contemporary crime fiction, with a protagonist too. It was an interesting guy in so far that he was both a very professional law enforcement officer, but with a ranching background. Coming out of the Tula Rosa basin, being forced off the basin because of white sand's proving that ground, which became misal range, and still had a love affair and a desire to return to his roots, his ranching roots.

So he really straddled two worlds, the world of law enforcement and the world of the modern rancher. Excuse me. So here's this interesting character from an interesting place in this country that is in some ways unique. There's no other place like it in the United States with an incredible both recent and historical past. And so I kept wondering, what are his antecedents? What did he spring from? Who is his family? Who are his ancestors? And so as I was writing the series over the course of those 12 books, I was constantly thinking about this guy and creating in my own mind his family history. And so I had written, get her alive, which was the 12th in the series, and I kind of felt I'd gone full circle with it, because I had cowboyed him up in the beginning when he goes back to his home ground on the

Tula Roza to look for a lost soldier who happened to be his god son and also a native American. I cowboyed him up there with a young professional female officer who he becomes attracted to. And 12 books later I cowboyed him up with a son, a grown son that he didn't even know he had until halfway through the series. And so I felt I'd sort of done this very kind of native full circle with the story. And it was time to try to write a book about his antecedents, which isn't a trade called a prequel. But a prequel usually is something that just kind of early predates your protagonist before you've introduced him in your debut novel. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to write a book about four generations of his family in 100 years of history. Well, how ambitious is that to do a

prequel that's a trilogy? Well, I didn't know starting out. It was going to be a trilogy. I made a proposal to my editor. I said, let me do one book. I want to do one book about this guy's family background and the Tula Rosa. And they said, OK, we'll take a risk with you on that. Now, it was a risk because this is completely different writing. You know, writing a contemporary novel set in the here and now, there's no problem in terms of how do people speak, how do they dress, how do things look, how do people live, what's in their houses, what are they wear? I mean, that's just all around us and just easy to do. But to go back over 150 years and then try to recreate how the land looked, how the people looked, what was on the land that isn't on the land anymore, how they lived, how they talked, how law enforcement was conducted, what law enforcement was like in 1880, 1895. All of that, all of that was,

the guarantee you better buckle down, do your homework and find out how all of these people lived and how they carried out their day -to -day lives and how they interacted. So the research was incredible. Well, the research really shows not only do you research like the language of the time and colloquialisms and things, but you weave so much real history into the book. And I felt I gained so much, not only is it a very passionate story of this family and this, but what I learned about people that I've always enjoyed reading, there's one of my favorite Western writers, Eugene Mandler -Roads, short story that's so perfect called Paso Por Qui, and he's a character in here. Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, Home Burson, the Old Banking Family, and - It's very interesting is all the things I had to leave out. I mean, I left out 90 % of what I could

have put in there. One of the things I tried to do when I wrote this book, let me back up and say one thing, last night there was a lady at a book signing that I did here in Santa Fe, who was a retired teacher. And she came up to me and she said, this book should be in every high school New Mexico history class, which I thought was just an absolute total compliment to her. Yes, and maybe it should be because I think there is, as you say, so much of New Mexico in the book about the people and the places and some of the really significant events of the last period of time from 1875 to the end of World War I, which still predates statehood. We still want to state them. But one of the things that I wanted to say about this book is that since we were going to call it a Western, I didn't like having a call to Western. I wanted to call it an historical novel, but there's no way it was going to go out there as anything but a Western.

But to make it work, I had to try to avoid every cliche that there was, that there ever was in Western pulp fiction and in Western movies. And I think I did a pretty good job. I don't think there's one cliche in the book. I actually didn't notice any at all. It's very, very fresh in that respect. The first one is called Hard Country. The second one will be Backlands. It took you three years to do Hard Country. Now most of that research is in two years so far you're working on Backlands. I hope to have that done by the middle of October with the release date of next year. People are dying for it. People really want to know. And the third one is called The Last Ranch. The Last Ranch, yeah. And that title really is poignant to me because anybody who knows the history of the two of the Rosa Basin knows that when White Sands proving ground came along, when they brought, when they snuck all those German scientists across the border of Mexico

into New Mexico to begin to develop the American version of the V2 rocket, they basically took from dozens of hard scrap, hard scrap old ranchers, their land, and created this massive, massive military installation that is better than several, bigger than several states combined. So calling it The Last Ranch is a very, I think, accurate end -point title for the book. Well, one thing that you do, you use place as a character. You so fully develop where these people are from, what it's like as they write home, what they see, what they smell, what they hear. And there are other writers who write about the West that use place beautifully. Also, Max Evans, when he talks about the High Low Country, it's named after the place. This passionate, love story that he writes about. And of course, Tony

Hillerman with his Navajo land, but you with two La Rosa and a hard country, you absolutely evoke the place so strongly that people who are homesick become even more homesick, you make us re -experience it. And it's one of my strengths as a writer. I do it for not just because I want to be able to put people into a setting and have them be able to see it in their mind and know that it's real, but because it informs and helps create the characters. Because a character who is at home in Tula Rosa, New Mexico, or in reserve, New Mexico, or in Sameran, New Mexico, is going to act differently than a person who comes to that place who was raised in Brooklyn, or was brought up in LA. I've known people to come west to

Santa Fe and to New Mexico and just be totally freaked out by the spaciousness of it. I mean, they can't handle the vastness of the land. They feel undone by it. I, on the other hand, have gone to places like Vermont where the trees are all around me and I'm looking for the horizon. You know, I'm looking for a break in the tree cover so I can see a mountain or a sky or something. So, you know, where you're from is going to affect who those characters are on the page. Well, I want to look at where you're from in another context. I want to look at your background a little bit. You got degrees in English and psychology, then in masters and clinical social work. And you, I just love this progression. You bring almost like a Renaissance man, you bring such experience. During the prison ride in 1980, you reestablished a mental health services system for the corrections department that resulted in your being named the 1980 New Mexico social worker of the year.

And then you went to the law enforcement academy and you were named the Santa Fe police officer of the year in 1987. And then in 2004, you're going to rub it in. I am. No, no, no, but you see how you put all this together in 2004. You got the governor's award for excellence in the arts for literature. And you've taken all of this knowledge and experience from these diverse fields. And you have used them so well in these crimes in the crime series. We, you know, your experience has a police officer really shows, but also your understanding of some of the social issues that are, you know, troubling our society. I know. I do bring that up. I like to weave some of some of the issues that I think are important to us in our contemporary society into the books. You know, I did 25 years in criminal justice, basically, one way or the other. And looking back at it without even realizing it, it turned into an

apprenticeship for my writing, basically what it did. One of the, you have one of the books there that I'm kind of a special book for me. It's the third book in the series called Serpent Gate. And it opens with a scene outside that wonderful hotel in Mount Nair, pop shafers hotel in Mount Nair with all the folk art work that he did. The hotel is an amazing, amazing piece of folk art. It's, I, I equated to our version of the Watts towers. You know, pop shafers hotel in Mount Nair is our version of the Watts towers. I open that book with a schizophrenic who winds up being a key element in the solution of the crime that's committed in Mount Nair. And I came across a guy who challenged me on that. He said, I started reading that book and was about a schizophrenic. I said, whoa, gee, I'm sorry. Did I do something to offend

you? He said, no. I want to thank you for putting somebody on the page who wasn't a caricature of mentally ill person. And so those are the kinds of things I like to try to do as a writer. Well, we're speaking today with Michael McGarrity and we're celebrating the paperback release of his new book, Hard Country, but I want to come back again. So you had 25 years of apprenticeship as you call it in criminal justice. But what made you decide to write? My sweetie, who I met at UNM in 1961, been with me for a long, long time, said she knew all along that I was going to be a writer. I didn't know. She must have known it before I did. I took one creative writing course at UNM as an undergraduate because I needed an easy grade because I was working real hard. I was working down at the Rillyard, unloading freight trains from midnight to eight in the morning and then going to class during the day. And so she's convinced that she knew right from the get -go that I was going to write. I had done a

lot of professional writing in my career in criminal justice, but that was about it. I tried one small book of poetry, which I'm really embarrassed about. I hope no one has any copies if they do please burn them. And I came to a juncture in my life after having worked with chronically mentally ill patients for a couple of years, or I just needed a break. So I quit the job, went home, and Mimi, my wife said to me, what are you going to do? I said, I'm going to try to write a novel. So that was in 1982. And a mere 14 years later, I became an overnight sensation. After going back to work and doing a lot of other stuff, too. Well, one of the things you do as a writer is that you look at the culture, you look at social issues, and you manifest how you feel about things through the action and the characters in the book. There's nothing preachy at all. Thank you. Thank you. Because I think if you're soapbox when you're writing a book, it just pull the reader right out of the story.

A character can say something of social importance, but it's got to be woven into who that character is. It can't just jump up at you. And one of the issues that you lead us to think about is the issue of the way police departments are changing. The militarization, the thing called death by cop, and we have in the Albuquerque, that's shareable examples of death by cop, and then by taser, there's so much tasering going on. And the SWAT teams, where is all that going? And can we put the horseback in the barn? I don't know whether we can. I think it would take some very strong activism on people's part. And what's happened is it's become commonplace. I mean, you can not watch a cop movie or a cop television show anymore without seeing a SWAT team going into a building, dressed in their combat fatigues with their strapped on side arms and their

AK -47s or M -1 or M -15s or whatever they're carrying. And it's become almost part and parcel, most iconic part and parcel of the whole police story, if you will. I don't know if you can pull back from that. I really don't. I mean, I'll give you an example of what's troubling me right now. There's a national push on through homeland security for all police vehicles to look the same. They're all going toward the black and white model of police vehicles. In fact, the Santa Fe Sheriff's Department is already transitioning over to the black and white police vehicles. That, to me, begins to smack of a national police force. Up until now, we've not had one. The closest we've had has been the FBI and they're limited. They have no local authority. More or less, they can be called in on cases. But I don't want to stab a

national police force. I don't think that's healthy for our civil liberties. Another issue I addressed in one of my earlier books that just now is a hot button item is this whole idea of the rape of women in the military. Is this brand new? No. It's been going on ever since women began to be folded into the regular Army Navy Marine Corps. There are units and it's tragic that it's allowed to continue. What are we have going on right now? We have generals saying we have so many generals. It's pathetic. The number of generals and admirals we have. We have more now than I think we ever had during warfare in Korea or World War II. But we have these generals now saying, oh no, no, you can't take from us the right to decide whether a case should proceed to court march. Well, that's a dictatorial authority in my book. While I believe in the general idea of the military code of the uniform code of military justice,

I don't think one commander should have that kind of absolute power. And it also means that many times the rape victim has to salute her rapists and as long as it's in the chain of command, you get no one objective or a female working with a female victim to say, well, you know, we have to look at what are their 22 ,000 alleged rapes and assaults a year and only what 300 of them are brought to trial. Something like something horrible like that. It's absurd. So we're watching this as citizens and going back to the militarization of the police. We used to think, you know, it's cop consumable on patrol and to protect and to serve and, oh, thank goodness you're here to help us. And instead you get this faceless, mass bulletproofed, almost like non -human coming. It's pretty scary. I'm not going to go as far as you have in that because I have a great respect for our law enforcement professionals. I really think the guy on the street, the police officer on the street, the detective working a felony

or a homicide or some major case are all out there doing doing the best they can. So the professionalism of law enforcement in that regard has been a good thing. It's the militarization aspect of it. It's the borrowing of the whole costume and a show of force model that it's just too easily used. It's too easy to pull the trigger on that and say, oh, well, there's someone who's hold, hold up inside a house. We don't know if anybody's in there with them or not. We better call out SWOT. You know, let's do a little bit more thinking before we act that way. I don't know. I don't know whether there are law enforcement officers out there who agree with me or not. I do know that there are a heck of a lot of law enforcement officers and chiefs and administrators who think that it would be a really smart thing if we could ban assault weapons in this

country. There is no, no reason. I don't want to hear this junk about how it's for sportsmen or it's for target practice or it's for whatever. It's just it's unnecessary. Those are killing machines and you shouldn't even have them allowed anywhere else, but in the military or in law enforcement. I think I've lost a bunch of fans here. No, no, no, no, no. You develop all of your ideas very carefully in your books. There's no surprise for anyone and they're very well thought out. Now, coming back to the historicity and the arc of history that you present, there are two issues that are really important to all of us. As you in these hundred years of following the history, drought comes and goes and we're in a position now where you know the West is on fire, we have terrible situations. What have you learned from history about how we can approach the drought maybe in

a different way, a more reasonable way? We can't do anything about it, but we can measure our resources better. I think one of the major problems that's facing us as a whole society, not just here in New Mexico, is this idea that everything has to grow. There has to be growth, growth, growth, right? It's not good enough to have homeostasis. It's not good enough to have a heavy state. We have to have more jobs, more houses, more highways, more of everything. Well, more isn't always necessarily good, especially when you have finite and limited resources. Now, the droughts that we had in the state in the fifties were terrible. The only difference was they were more manageable because we had half the population. So we had half of the demands on our resources, on our natural resources. If we continue to let development occur without any thought

to where we're going to put houses, are we going to put houses in forest? Forests burn. Houses in forests are going to burn. Are we going to continue to draw on our already depleted groundwater supplies? Well, eventually it's going to run dry. The wells are going to run dry. How do we begin? Are we going to continue to allow just growth, the growth of population, without any fourth thought? As long as population grows, as long as there's the demand on our natural resources, and as long as there's a sinking supply of those resources, we're in trouble. What do we need? We need something more than a knee -jerk reaction to a single problem when it comes along. We need to start thinking that these things are interrelated. We need to start saying, well, maybe population and water use and home building in high -risk areas, and on and on and on, all come together under one

heading of a heck of a big problem that we better sit down and start to solve. But I don't know whether they're capable of that. Our government tends to work only in these short little spurts. The vision thing, we're missing the vision thing. And then, of course, we've got, on the federal level, a government that's crippled. Yeah. One other element, every one of your characters had a deep and profound relationship with their horses. And so, reading as the arc of progress through the west, it was all on the backs and hooves of horses. And now, we're at a point where horses are thrown away. They are thrown away. What can we do for horses? And they got us here, don't we? So, it's a dance with the one, what brought us? Well, we should. As Bruce King would say. I had a character in hard country, Caldoran, who encounters his first automobile and says something akin to that he didn't think he wanted to live in a world where people weren't a

horseback. And, you know, what does that say? Well, that says that you put a man on a horse or a woman on a horse, and they are still connected to nature. They're still connected to the real world. They're not whirling down a dirt road or a super highway in a motorized vehicle. With windows up, air conditioning on, listening to... Now, what can we do for the horses? Well, I mean, I think the BLM adoption program that was in effect for a while was a great program. It sort of fell apart. They used to even use inmates out of the state penetrator. I remember those pens are still there. Yeah, the pens are still there. At the pen. The pens at the pen to try to gentle those horses and then put them out for adoption. And they gentle the men at the same time. That's right. It makes them better people. Now, this may surprise you. But rather than seeing those animal starve, you know, I am not opposed.

I am not opposed to a horse slaughter facility for animals like that. I don't want to see them dead and dying out on the pastures, out in the range land. If we have a situation like that, I think it would be more you main. To put them down. And put their remains to use, if you will. Then it would be to just simply let them die. So my love affair with horses is a strong one. I love horses. It had them since. It was out of respect since I was a kid. But it's not all inclusive to the point where I believe that there isn't a place for horses to be slaughtered. And for their carcasses to be put to use. I don't know whether that's going to offend people. It's going to offend some people. But I think probably ranchers would also agree with me. Because ranchers especially, I don't know a rancher yet who wants to see a critter suffer. Anyone, I know. Well, we've

run out of time on that note. I want to thank you. Our guest today is Michael McGarrity. We're here celebrating the paperback edition of his wonderful historical novel, A Book of the Old West, called Hard Country. I want to remind you, if you haven't read his books before, Serpent Gate that he talked about. And the first one of the whole series is to Larossa. I urge you, if you want some summer reading, Michael McGarrity is your author. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. You've been very kind. I appreciate it. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.

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