Western Writers

An Interview with Writer, Pathologist, Professor, and Rancher Robert Greer

By Jenny Shank, 11-27-09

Robert Greer has been a surgical pathologist and Professor of Pathology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver for 35 years and has written a number of books, including ten CJ Floyd mysteries, a series that he began in 1996 with The Devil’s Hatband. Greer’s new novel, Spoon, is the story of an itinerant, biracial, clairvoyant ranch hand, Arcus Witherspoon, who comes to work on the Montana ranch of the Darleys, a family that is overburdened by ranch chores and grief over the long-ago death of their first son. Spoon is filled with earnest portraits of its characters, accurate details of ranch life, and plenty of suspense as a greedy developer plots to claim the Darleys’ land.  I recently interviewed Robert Greer via email about how he came to write Spoon, how a document signed by Warren G. Harding informs him of the mineral rights on his ranch, why African American characters are underrepresented in fiction with Western settings, and how his many vocations have “kept [him] moving ahead rather than sinking since [his] wife’s death.”

New West: You tell Spoon’s story from the first-person perspective of the 19-year-old T.J. Darley, son of the rancher who employs Spoon.  This technique of using a first-person narrator to describe and observe a larger-than-life focus character has a long history in American literature.  Why did you decide to write the book from T.J.’s perspective instead of Spoon’s?

Robert Greer: I rarely in fact write in the first person because I generally write mystery or suspense novels and it has always been my contention that those types of novels need an omniscient, third person narrator. I employed first person narration in Spoon because I needed a tighter, more insightful character-driven book without all the so-called “flash and trash” of commercial fiction. In a literary novel that is largely character-driven there needs to be an immediacy that can sometimes be lacking with third person narration. I also thought the book would be a little less believable if Spoon told his own story, so I had T.J. Darley, who’s struggling with his own identify, tell the story.

NW: You are best known for writing mysteries.  What prompted you to begin work on Spoon, which has some elements of mystery but is not primarily concerned with that?  Did it take the same amount of time to write as your other books?

RG: I’ll answer your last question first. It did, indeed, take the same amount of time to write Spoon as it did with my other books. I can typically write a novel in about ten months and Spoon was no exception. I first wrote about Arcus Witherspoon, aka, Spoon, just over twenty years ago, the summer after I finished my master’s degree in Creative Writing from Boston University.  I was still in full-fledged literary mode at that time and had not started writing mysteries or medical thrillers.  The story of the bi-racial cowboy searching the west for his roots was an idea that I’d had for a long time.  I finally decided to put the idea to paper.  When I finished the story I sent it to the professor who had headed my creative writing program, Leslie Epstein, and asked him what he thought of it.  I’ll always remember his comments because they were telling and I kept them: “Your story’s quite good, but you need to develop the characters more and it should be a novel, not just a short story.” That comment stuck with me for years as I expanded the story in my head and I rewrote it.  I can’t say specifically what it is about the character Spoon that wouldn’t let me go.  Perhaps more than anything it was Spoon’s tenacity and wisdom that keep me tethered to him.  In some ways he is a lot like my father, a captain in an all black unit in World War II who came home to break down racial barriers and leap educational brick walls.  The other thing about Spoon that’s so important is that he is a man of the West, an archetypical hero, who can do just about anything that he puts his mind to.  For me he’s been a man who’s hard to forget. 

NW: How was constructing the plot for Spoon different than constructing the plot for your mysteries?  Do you begin with the solution to the mystery in mind?

RG: As I see it, the thing that Spoon has most in common with my mysteries is that the story is driven by a great deal of suspense. And as most mystery writers know, if you deal well with suspense, you will generally do well with readers, I added a dash of suspense to Spoon.

There was a bit of difference in the construction of the plot for Spoon than with one of my mysteries or medical thrillers. With a mystery the writer has to drop clues along the way, insert red herrings, and all in all perform quite a bit of sleight of hand. However, with Spoon, since the novel is more character driven, I tended to keep the issue of defining my characters at the forefront. The plot for Spoon is an age-old one. A mysterious oddly different loner strolls into town, becomes embroiled in the local scene in ways that might be positive or negative, provides a solution for a problem faced by struggling locals and then moves on. What I hope I added to Arcus Witherspoon was the uniqueness of his African-American and Indian heritage, his clairvoyance, and a degree of suspense.

NW: Spoon is also a departure for you because it has a rural setting, in Montana, rather than a city setting, like your CJ Floyd mysteries, set in Denver.  How was it different to write a rural setting?

RG: Spoon really wasn’t that much different from my CJ Floyd mysteries which are set in Denver. In each of those novels CJ always takes one or more trips away from the Mile High City to the hinterlands. So setting Spoon in Montana was not much different than moving CJ Floyd from Denver to say, Cheyenne, Wyoming. I have a great love of rural America, and quite honestly, much prefer a rural setting to that of the city. So in writing Spoon I had an opportunity to add some western regional flavor. I’ve traveled relatively extensively in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Montana, so I know the territory pretty well. Capturing a sense of place for any novel, however, can be difficult, and the difficulty I had with writing Spoon was in being true to the landscape and not trying to romanticize it. I wanted to depict not only the beauty but the harshness of the land, a sometimes difficult perspective to write from.

NW: The bio in your website mentions you own a ranch in Steamboat Springs, and the one on your book jacket mentions you own a cattle ranch in Wyoming.  In Spoon, a greedy developer is trying to buy up the land in Big Horn County, Montana to exploit for coal and gas.  Did you base this part of the plot on any personal experience?

RG: For eighteen years I owned a ranch in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, however, after my wife’s death in 2002, I sold that ranch and bought a ranch on the Laramie River in southeastern Wyoming. I have had my share of interactions with “greedy developers” but nothing that compares with the problems that the Darleys have in Spoon when a coal company tries to usurp their land. Most of my interactions with developers have centered around them wanting to turn the rural landscape of the Rockies I love into one continuous subdivision. I have never had any experience with oil and gas developers moving in for a land grab. Interestingly enough, the mineral rights on my Wyoming ranch, like most of the mineral rights on cattle ranches in the west, don’t belong entirely to me. Half of the mineral rights on my Triangle Long Bar ranch belong to the United States government and I have a paper signed by President Warren G. Harding that rather emphatically lets me know that.

NW: How much time do you spend at your ranch and do you do much writing there?

RG: I spend as much time on my ranch as I can, writing approximately half of any novel there. I had a library in my ranch home in Steamboat and I have a library in my home in Wyoming. When I’m at the ranch, it is usually only for a couple of days a week except for the summer when I’m there longer, I write for three to five hours a day. The ranch has an unbelievably beautiful setting looking across the Laramie River valley as it does and I seem to be able to write to my heart’s content when there.

NW: In addition to writing, you are professor of pathology, medicine, surgery, and dentistry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  How do you balance the time for writing with your other job?  Do you work on your writing for a set amount of time every day, or whenever you have the time?

RG: I am a pathologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver and I’ve been there for thirty-five years. During that time I’ve somehow been able to balance being a practicing pathologist with my writing and my other interests. I think it is the scientist in me that forces me to live with structure and find time to do the things I do. That and support from a cadre of unbelievably loyal secretaries, administrative assistants, research and laboratory technicians and colleagues. I generally start a novel on July 1 and finish it the following April 1. I write each night when I’m working on a novel during any ten-month period generally for two to three hours during the week and for three to four hours on the weekends.  I consider writing to be simply another job and although some of my writer colleagues consider it to be heresy to call writing a job, that’s the way I have to define it so it works for me.

NW: In the introduction to the new short story anthology Best of the West 2009, editors James Thomas and D. Seth Horton note that in the stories with Western settings that they reviewed for the collection, “the most disturbing feature of our research…was that African Americans and Native Americans, both as authors and characters, were heavily underrepresented.” Are there any authors writing stories with African American characters set in the West that you would care to recommend?  For me, your books, the novels of Carleen Brice, and the fascinating memoir If The Creek Don’t Rise by Rita Williams, about her childhood growing up in Steamboat Springs, spring to mind.

RG: I was surprised to learn that Best of the West has been resurrected as a 2009 anthology with James Thomas, who I know, as one of the editors. One of my stories, and I can’t remember if it was “Spoon” or a story called “The Can Men,” was picked by James as one of the Best One Hundred Western Stories selected in Best of the West 3 or 4. I’m not surprised that the anthology’s new editors, Thomas and Horton, had a difficult time finding African American and Native American authors and characters in the pages of literary magazines and I think I know the reason why. I have friends who are among the top African American mystery and suspense writers and to the man or woman they’ll tell you that one of the reasons that they don’t publish in literary magazines is because lit mags generally paid little for their work. The other thing that might be reflected in the inability of Best of the West editors to garner stories about or from African American writers writing about the West, relates to the fact that there is just simply a very small cadre of such writers around. And in fact, those writers who have national reputations are often asked to contribute directly to anthologies where the pay is significantly higher than in literary magazines. This past year for instance, I wrote three stories for such anthologies. The stories didn’t have to be screened by a committee of reviewers as they so often are with literary magazines. They went straight to publication and they were quite financially rewarding.

There are a host of African-Americans writing short stories besides me, Gary Phillips, Walter Mosley, Gar Anthony Haywood, all typically write about Los Angeles, and although some might not include Los Angeles as part of the true “western scene”, as James Thomas himself would say, “it’s certainly on the wide side of the Missouri.” The question you pose is so intriguing in fact that I’ve made myself a note to make certain to write a short story that is true blue western in flavor and send it off to a literary magazine this year. I’ll encourage other African American writers who are friends to do the same. Hopefully, James Thomas, who I’ve known for quite some time, will find a gem or two out there for Best of the West next time around.

NW: You have one of the most interesting, varied backgrounds of a novelist that I’ve encountered.  Did you always know you wanted to do all the things that you’ve done?  Did you ever come to a point where you felt you had to choose one path or the other, and how did you get past that?

RG: Interestingly enough, I pretty much knew what I wanted to do when I was a teenager. I hadn’t, however, at that age figured out the order in which I would do those things. I always wanted to be a journalist and a doctor/scientist and it turns out I’ve been able to do both.  I wrote pieces for several Ohio newspapers while I was in college at Miami University earning degrees in journalism, chemistry, and zoology. I didn’t really come back to writing in any serious way until I was in my late thirties and had established my medical career. Realizing that I wasn’t quite as polished or skilled as I wanted to be as far as writing was concerned, I returned to Boston University where I’d done my pathology residency, to get a Masters Degree in Creative Writing.  I was fortunate enough to be mentored by Leslie Epstein, a tough taskmaster and head of the Boston University Creative Writing program. From there I came back to Denver, returned to my practice, wrote a few short stories, and then moved on to writing novels. I never have felt that I needed to choose one career path and fortunately the multiple things that I enjoy doing have really kept me moving ahead rather than sinking since my wife’s death. I would be bored doing just one thing and I know for certainty that I would be boorish doing one thing. So, I’m quite happy to have been fortunate enough to keep, as they say, several irons in the fire, and delighted that writing is among them.

NW: What are you working on next?

RG: I am currently working on my eleventh CJ Floyd novel entitled First of State. This novel is a prequel to the CJ Floyd mystery series. The first CJ Floyd mystery novel, The Devil’s Hatband, began with CJ at age forty-four. In that novel he is an established bail bondsman and bounty hunter. First of State lets readers meet CJ more than twenty years earlier, in the months following his return home from Vietnam. In First of State, I define what his life is like prior to becoming the bail bondsman and bounty hunter that readers first meet twenty-plus years down the road. Prequels aren’t new to the mystery genre. Walter Mosley did a wonderful job defining his Easy Rawlin’s character in his prequel to Devil in a Blue Dress, Gone Fishin’. Just last year, Joe Gores did the same with his novel, Spade and Archer, which was a prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. I can only hope that First of State approaches the quality of those two works.

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