By Susan Gray Gose

Riverside– C.J. Box walks into the Beartrap Café wearing a baseball cap, Carhartt jacket, jeans, and low-riding hiking shoes. He greets Margaret, the owner, and nods to her two dogs as they wander in. He orders a cheese-steak and iced tea. And he points to a spot at the bar where he likes to catch Nuggets games.

But this is also a place where the best-selling author dreams up the latest adventures for Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. Box cranks out 1,000 words a day—whether here at the Bearside, in his stream-side cabin, or at home in Cheyenne.

C.J. Box is possibly this state’s most successful homegrown author, and is certainly its more prolific. The Kelly Walsh High grad who couldn’t find a journalism job after college and was snubbed by his first agent, now publishes two books a year. The first Pickett book appeared in 2001. In less than a decade, Box has scaled the heights of the publishing world; millions of copies in the Pickett series have been sold worldwide.
(more)

"The Men From Laramie"

Interviewed in Chicago by Steve Bertrand.

http://media.barnesandnoble.com/index.jsp?fr_story=26d27b91e5ef41d0f751a...

By Tamara Chapman
A lifelong Westerner, C.J. Box (pictured) sets his novels in the landscape he knows best. Photo illustration by: Wayne Armstrong

Visit www.CJBox.net for more about C.J. Box, including a fan blog and calendar of upcoming appearances.

Charles James Box (Chuck to those who meet him face-to-face; C.J. to the legions of crime fiction fans who snap up his every release) often wears a black hat and black leather jacket. In the iconography of the wild and woolly West, that would make him one of the bad guys.

Box (BA mass communications '81) is far from that, but he can rustle up an evildoer and depict an evil deed with the best of them. Some eight years and 10 additional novels after the publication of his first page-turner, Open Season, he is hailed for his fast-moving plots, likable protagonists and surreal showdowns. He's also heralded as one of the literary world's foremost chroniclers of a modern-day West, one where avaricious individualists and deadly earnest do-gooders ride into town on their high horses.

"A crime novel peels away the culture," Box says, explaining why he works within the genre. "It exposes the culture in a way that other books don't."

More: http://www.du.edu/magazine/archive/2009/02/Mystery_Man.html