Outdoor humor writer's newest novel is a mystery

Intermountain Catholic

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Patrick McManus, outdoor humor writer, regales readers of his first mystery novel ?The Good Samaritan Strikes Again,? at the King's English Bookshop. People say his style of writing brings to mind Mark Twain and Garrison Keiller.IC photo by Chris Young

SALT LAKE CITY — Outdoor humor writer Patrick McManus had his audience hanging on his every word and crying with laughter as he told the hilarious and exaggerated stories of his childhood at the book signing for his first humorous mystery novel "The Good Samaritan Strikes Again," at the Kings English Bookshop March 24. He is somewhat of a stand-up comedian who makes two half-truths out of a whole truth.

McManus finds humor in everyday life and has written 14 novels and four plays. He said it is very interesting to have your work performed on stage. He wrote short humor pieces for 40 years, writing for Outdoor magazine for 25 years, and for Field and Stream for 15 years. He has written humor pieces for numerous magazines over the years including The Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Sunset magazine, Sports Illustrated, and TV Guide.

McManus is a lifelong Catholic and a member of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parish in Spokane, Washington. He said his faith plays a part in his writing in that faith is what a writer goes on.

"I have always had the concept that I could do what ever I wanted to do. I grew up in a very religious family. Our house was full of saints. You could not always see them, but you had a sense of them being all around you all the time. My father died when I was 6, but my step-father was also a very devout Catholic.

"I tend to have a religious view of life as opposed to a philosophical view," said McManus. "I also think there is an underlying absurdity there. I will look at things, and naturally see the humor in them, and fortunately other people do to.

"I grew up in a story telling family," said McManus. "Maybe not much would happen to us each day, but we would turn our everyday events into a story sitting around the dinner table.

"Story telling is a very important part of people’s lives," he said. "It is the way we share our lives. People love to tell stories of their experiences, and they see the humor in their own stories. I kind of feel sorry for people who do not have that experience."

He said a lot of his stories are based on the childishness of grown-ups, and what they retain from their childhood. That is a big part of his writing.

McManus said his most popular stories are those based on his childhood friends and his memories of growing up on a farm three miles north of Sandpoint, Idaho. The farm was located in a valley between two ranges of the Rocky Mountains, the Selkirks and the Cabinets on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille, which, at one time was one of the great fishing lakes in the country.

When he was very young, his family moved to a cabin in a remote mountain valley in Idaho. His mother was a school teacher in a one-room cabin heated by an old barrel stove and lit by kerosene lanterns. She also chopped the firewood, hauled the drinking water from the creek, did the janitorial chores, shoveled the snow out of the path to the privy, cooked and served hot lunches, and put on school dances for the adults of the community. When his father died the family moved back to their farm.

From the age of 6, McManus intended to be an artist, and drew and painted constantly. He entered Washington State College (now Washington State University) as an art major who loved Norman Rockwell, which he said was the "kiss of death" because his art professors did not like Rockwell. Although McManus never became an artist, he thinks the effort he poured into drawing and painting helped him greatly as a writer.

"There is not too much difference between painting with paints and painting with words, except the latter is a lot less messy," said McManus. "I saved enough money from construction work to get me through my freshman years at Washington College. Because my academic career had been distinguished only by its unrelenting mediocrity, I feared I might not be smart enough to survive in college.

"In my freshman English composition class we had to write a little essay every week," said McManus. "My first half a dozen essays came back with F’s. Bit by bit, however, I became fascinated with writing and began to spend as much time on writing essays as I had once spent on drawing pictures. My diligence paid off with a major breakthrough, my F’s turned into A’s.

"I decided I might just as well keep going and become a writer," he said. "Besides, it seemed perfect for me. You could get into it for practically nothing, which is what I had at the time: a typewriter, paper, envelopes, and postage stamps."

His first job after college was as a reporter on the Daily Olympian in Olympia, Wash. While completing his Master’s Degree, he began teaching English and journalism at Eastern Washington University. He continued writing and sold his first humor piece in 1967.

"Short humor has to be very structured, and people expect it to be funny," said McManus. "With a mystery novel, the humor occurs kind of incidentally. People read the book for the story of how the mystery is solved and who the villians are and so on. But the humor itself arises out of the characters, the way they are, and the way they see the world.