Author Bruce Borgos Brings Mystery To The Modern West

Bruce Borgos has quickly established himself as one of today’s standout voices in crime fiction. With his Porter Beck mystery series—praised by the likes of Craig Johnson and C.J. Box—Borgos delivers stories that are equal parts sharp-edged thrillers and rich explorations of the modern West. In this conversation with Cowboys & Indians, he reflects on his journey from voracious young reader to USA Today bestselling author, the inspiration behind Porter Beck, and why Nevada’s wide-open spaces and untold histories provide the perfect backdrop for his blend of mystery and Western storytelling.

Transcript

Cowboys & Indians: You've got three stellar books out so far in the Porter Beck mystery series. What drew you to writing and eventually to crime and mystery fiction?

Bruce Borgos: Great question. People ask me that all the time. I guess I was always interested, and certainly at the beginning in reading. Like most authors, I was kind of a voracious reader early on, and my parents would get books all the time. I remember back in the day when there was a Book of the Month Club type thing, and they would get books in the mail. I would start picking those up when I was a teenager, and most of them were spy-type stories or mystery/thriller fiction. I just really ate those up. That kind of made me think, wow, what a cool thing to be able to actually write one of these stories and create this world and these characters. So when I was in high school, I really started to try to work on that a little bit, and I had some good English teachers who encouraged me.

I kind of continued that in college, although I still at that point did not see writing as a legitimate career path for most people. Stephen King might be able to do it, but it probably wasn't going to be what I ended up doing. So I dabbled in writing over the next 30 years before I really started to get serious about it. Around 2015, I self-published my first two novels, then finished another in 2016 and one in 2018. At that time, I knew—or at least I felt—that I was good enough to get traditionally published, to try to get a literary agent, and go that route. Then everything just kind of snowballed for me, quite honestly. It happened very quickly in 2020. And here I am, three books later. I'm just finishing up quarterback number four, and we'll see where it goes from there.

C&I: Were there any books that led you toward the mystery and crime fiction side?

Borgos: Yeah, I mean quite literally, without putting my finger on one particular author—just anybody you could think of who wrote in those genres. I was reading all the way back to Jack Higgins and Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy and John Sandford. Everybody over the last 40 years—including, and this is probably why I write about the West predominantly—a lot of Western authors and even the old classic Westerns. I'm a huge Zane Grey fan, and of course currently I'm a huge Craig Johnson fan and C.J. Box fan. To some extent, I've tried to emulate what they do, but I've kind of tried to combine those two genres.

C&I: You’ve published five total novels so far, three in the Porter Beck series, and The Blue Horse just hit the USA Today bestseller list. How does it feel to have your work start to resonate at such a high level?

Borgos: It really feels great, and I see this every day. I pay very close attention to the reviews I get on Goodreads or Amazon because I love the feedback. Sometimes it's not always the best, and I just had one this morning. I think it was on Goodreads, and I was reading a review that a woman left. She said something like, “You made me gasp at the end.” So I responded to her and said, anytime I can make a reader gasp, I know that I've done my job.

So yeah, it's a great feeling to answer your question, Tyler—to get feedback, to be where I am today, and to have my books now starting to resonate and pick up a much wider audience. It's a little bit of an organic thing. You start with Book One, you try to get an audience, you try to hang on to it, and you try to grow it a little bit with each successive book. And now I’m getting a lot of people who picked up The Blue Horse having not read any of my previous works, and they’re telling me, “Oh, I can’t wait to go back and read the first two books.” So it’s a wonderful feeling.

C&I: You mentioned Craig Johnson and C.J. Box—and in much the same way that they've adopted Wyoming not only as their home but also as the home of their fictional characters—Nevada’s been the same for you. What about living in the Silver State has helped really drive your story and helped you find your voice as an author?

Borgos: Well, much like Wyoming, where those two guys write about for the most part, Nevada is a sparsely populated state compared to other places across the country. So there's a lot of wide open space. And because of that, especially in Nevada, honestly, there is what I like to refer to as a lot of low-hanging fruit for books. Because in Nevada—and a lot of people don't know this if you don't live here—the federal government owns about 80% of all the land.

And again, because we don't have a huge population (I think we have three to four million people here in the entire state), yet the state is huge geographically, the federal government starting in the 1950s began to purchase and use a lot of the land here for very secretive things. That’s what the first book in the series, The Bitter Past, starts out with.

Part of it takes place in the ’50s when we were developing our nuclear weapons in a big-time race with the Soviet Union. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on here that nobody knows about, including all the shenanigans out at Area 51 that people like to speculate on. And literally all of that is located right next door to the county that I write about, which is Lincoln County, Nevada. So there's just so much material here. And for me, it's great, because not a lot of people—even some who live in Nevada—are really familiar with all the things that take place.

C&I: In The Bitter Past you weave together Cold War espionage, atomic secrets, and Russian assassins. I never associate Nevada with that, so I thought it was interesting to connect international intrigue and desert landscape. Was there an inspiration for you—one specific story or piece of history—or was that just a conglomerate of all these different stories you’d heard over the years?

Borgos: Well, it was more the latter. I had always been a big history buff and paid very close attention to that part of our history in this state in the 1950s especially. And it continued on for several decades. Obviously it actually still goes on at our test site here. But there were so many interesting scenarios, and when I started to research The Bitter Past, they were very helpful to me at the Atomic Museum. They’ve got all the material, they’ve got all the archives, they’ve got all the documents. So I started just looking through that stuff, actually looking for a story to write about. And I stumbled across this thing called Project 57, which is a real thing that happened in 1957. I used that as the basis for the story of the book. I fictionalized it to some extent, but it's all about Project 57 and kind of an alternative historical account of what happened with that. But honestly, I could have picked 30 other things to write about.

C&I: In Shades of Mercy we see something completely different with drug addiction and the dark web. It felt a lot more current. How do you balance some of these more current issues that we're all dealing with in this world, but still make it have that timeless western kind of mystery feel to it?

Borgos: Yeah, it's an interesting balance to try to strike. And I do try to do that because even in rural counties in America, they have the normal problems that everybody else has. So I opened the book with a fentanyl overdose, and the reason I did that was because when I was interviewing the real sheriff of Lincoln County—who was the prototype for my character Porter Beck—I asked him, “What are your everyday problems here?” And he said, “Well, drugs is a big deal.” I said, “What? You’ve got like 6,000 people here. How bad can the drug problem be?” He said, “Bad.”

He said especially with how easy it is for people to get drugs, fentanyl overdoses are a real issue. So I thought, yeah, that's a great way to portray the everyday life of a modern Western county with a small population, and infuse it with other things that are particular to very rural areas and that feeling of the West, which is something that I try to do in each of my books.

C&I:  Can you talk a little bit about this lawman who was the model for Porter Beck and what surprised you in learning about the day-to-day activities of being a modern western lawman?

Borgos: Yeah, so after I had the idea for the first story in The Bitter Past, I went up to Lincoln County. I knew I was going to have to do some research. It's only a couple hours north of me—I live in Las Vegas. So I went up there and had called ahead, and the sheriff was all too happy to sit down and spend some time with me, which is always great if you're a writer, to be able to get firsthand accounts.

I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. What are the everyday challenges in real-life Lincoln County? And I was surprised by a lot of things. One is that—and I make this plain in my stories—Lincoln County is geographically the size of the state of Maryland. It’s about 11,000 square miles, but it is patrolled by a group of officers in the sheriff's department that are literally no bigger than a Boy Scout troop.

It's typically 10–12 officers at most, at any given time. So I asked them, “Given that, what do your deputies do if they're out there patrolling alone somewhere in the county and run into a dangerous situation? What does he do for backup?” He said, “His backup is the other guns he has in his unit, because nobody's coming for some amount of time. That’s the real thing about it. That's the difference between big-city law enforcement, where backup is going to be there in a matter of seconds, and a rural county, where it may easily take an hour.”

So we talked about a lot of things like that, and he gave me a lot of great insights. I still use him to this day, to bounce things off of him: “How would you guys have handled this situation?”

C&I: He's not your typical sheriff either. Porter Beck has secrets, moral challenges, night blindness. How important was it for you as an author to give him vulnerabilities that not only create central conflict he must overcome, but also his own shortcomings?

Borgos: Yeah, it's a great question. Porter Beck is not Jack Reacher. As much as I like Jack Reacher, he is not indestructible. He has obstacles and challenges to overcome. You mentioned one of them: he suffers from night blindness. It's called retinitis pigmentosa. While he can see pretty well during the day, he’s essentially blind at night—when lights go low, or it gets dark outside, he can't see. That's a real challenge for a law enforcement officer.

It was something he initially tried to keep fairly secret. It got him bounced out of the Army earlier than he would have hoped, cutting short a career there. But he's dealing with it, and he's taking some interesting steps to try to ameliorate some of those conditions. In Shades of Mercy, he picks up a dog from the Reno Police Academy that flunked out of K-9 school. His idea is, well, I'm not going to use him for that—I'm going to train him to be a guide dog.

He’s very good at figuring out interesting ways to handle difficult situations. But in addition to his challenges, he's got some unique gifts. He has an audio memory—that’s a real thing, though only a few people in the world have been documented with it. He can remember everything he hears for the rest of his life. So any conversation or song on the radio, he will remember forever.

While that sounds like a great thing, it can also be a curse. Because sometimes in life you get hurt by words, and unfortunately he can never forget those. So he's got that to deal with as well.

But he's a unique guy. He’s got a great sense of humor, very quick-witted, very intelligent, and a little bit of a fish out of water—even though he grew up there. Because he’d been in the Army for 20-plus years, away from Lincoln County, and then he comes back. Rural Lincoln County was not where he thought he'd spend the second half of his life, and suddenly he’s the sheriff there.

C&I: It was so interesting to put him in that fish-out-of-water scenario in The Bitter Past. In my experience, a lot of my local law enforcement have spent most of their lives in the area where they patrol. Like you said, Beck is from Nevada, but it's changed so much—and he's changed so much since he left for the Army. Was that a layer you really wanted to add to help us get to know him—reacquainting himself with where he’s patrolling?

Borgos: Yeah, I think that's exactly what I was thinking at the time. I wanted a character my readers could relate to, because they’re all outside of this county and don’t know it too well. So as the reader, you’re discovering Lincoln County as he rediscovers it. He’s asking his people, and his dad—who’s very old now and suffering from dementia—about things in the county. He simply hasn’t been there for close to 25 years. That’s a challenge for him as well. But yeah, I really wanted to bring the reader along on his journey there.

C&I: As any good fiction reader knows, being a secondary character is a dangerous job in any novel. But you tend to flesh out a lot of these characters—whether it's the cartel enforcer or Porter Beck's neighbors. They all feel layered and real. How important was it to you to flesh out these secondary characters? And how do you make sure to give these characters enough time to really develop?

Borgos: Well, it's an important part, I think, for any author. We all do it to different degrees. I'm not overly descriptive when I introduce or build on a character's description, because I like to leave something to the reader's imagination. If you look at any of my books, you'd be hard pressed to find a really hard-drawn physical description of any of my characters—including Porter Beck.

I give you a general sense of what they look like, their habits, their history. But I don't spend pages describing these people. That said, it is important, I think, Tyler, to give the reader a good sense, and to layer information about each of these characters so the reader feels like, “Oh, I know who this person is. I know where they've come from.”

But it's a difficult balance. As authors, we have a tendency to want to over-tell and over-describe, because we have a picture in our minds and we want readers to understand it to the nth degree. The trick is to allow the reader the ability to imagine a little bit, while still having a solid sense of who these characters are.

C&I: Let’s discuss your writing for just a second. You have high praise on the front of your books from Craig Johnson of Longmire fame. I loved how he described your writing—he said it’s “100 proof.” And when I think of a hundred-proof whiskey, it's sharp, it's strong, it leaves you with an aftertaste. Is that something you've had to develop?

Borgos: I think it's my natural style, but I have been paying attention to it over the course of these five books—really six books now. And I get comments all the time from readers who say, “I can see the development of your writing from book to book.” I take that as a good sign.

Most writing is editing. I typically write four or five drafts minimum of each of my books. In each of those edits, I’m always going back, trying to trim, trying to get rid of excessive description or anything that might slow the action down. That way the writing stays sharp, distinct, “100 proof.”

It’s become my own voice. It's a voice I like, and it’s the kind of voice I like to read. I've emulated people like Craig and C.J. Box, and other writers I've widely read. I love Nelson DeMille and what he does with dialogue—his John Corey character. Porter Beck is somewhat of a version of John Corey, but out West.

C&I: I read another review of your books that mentioned carrying on the western thriller canon of writers like Johnson. I think of Tony Hillerman, Zane Grey, and Louis L'Amour—there was always kind of a mystery element to these westerns. For a long time, we had a gap where the publicity wasn’t there once L'Amour passed away. But now we’re seeing a resurgence with Johnson, Box, and yourself. Why do you think there's an appetite for this hybrid genre of western and mystery again?

Borgos: Yeah, I think you've hit on something there. The West has a particular allure for a lot of people. We've kind of fallen in love over the years with stories of the West. And unless you've traveled the West extensively, you may not know a lot about it.

So even though we're not writing stories that take place in the 1800s, there's still so much to turn into mystery. People love it. Most of that has to do with geography—the natural formations, the mountains, the rivers, the landscapes. They make for great stories. Zane Grey did that early on. Louis L’Amour did it more. Craig Johnson continues to this day.

And I think even on your show, when you had Craig on recently, he described this as a hybrid genre now—writing about the West. Critics say on a regular basis that the Western is dead. Well, I disagree. The Western is not dead. It's never going to be dead. It's too fascinating an area to ever die off.

C&I: And it seems like just when all the stories have been told, someone comes along with a new angle. Your latest book, The Blue Horse, does just that. I've always been enamored by the wild horses out West, and yours puts them at the center of the conflict. Why was that such an important issue for you to explore?

Borgos: Well, I'm glad it resonated with you because I always hope to reach an audience east of the Mississippi. I know that's sometimes difficult to do, but the wild horse issue is very big out here in Nevada—especially as I described in the book.

A lot of people elsewhere may not even know there are still wild horses in this country. There are. The numbers vary depending on who you talk to, but it's estimated that maybe between 70,000 and 80,000 wild horses are left. The majority—more than 50%—are in Nevada.

It’s a huge issue for the government, trying to balance the numbers of those herds with everyone else’s interests—the cattle industry, the sheep industry, the mining industry. Everybody wants a piece of that land.

This conflict isn't new; it's been happening for over 50 years. But it's really coming to a head now because of how the government rounds up wild horses today. That includes helicopters, which I describe in detail in the story because that’s really how it happens. Helicopters fly low to the ground, chasing the herds, literally scaring them to death in some cases.

The government might take issue with my description, and I understand that. But on nearly every roundup, a few horses die or have to be put down because of injuries. Maybe helicopters are the most efficient way—it’s faster, it’s cheaper than hiring people to go out on four-wheelers or horses like they used to—but it's very dangerous for the animals.

So it comes into conflict with a lot of other interests. I thought it was important to bring the rest of the country up to speed on what's going on with wild horses and how the government is trying to handle it. I interviewed some great people—wildlife managers and horse advocates—for this story. They're all trying to do the right thing, but everybody’s coming at it from their own standpoint. I guess I now count myself among the wild horse advocates.

C&I: The Blue Horse tackles the government’s involvement with wild horses, while The Bitter Past took on Cold War espionage, and Shades of Mercy addressed the drug crisis. It didn’t surprise me to learn you have a degree in political science. How does that background help inform not only your writing, but the research that goes into these books?

Borgos: I would probably never advise anyone to get a political science degree, Tyler—unless they were adamant about going to law school or going into the diplomatic corps—because otherwise it's not very useful. But it is remarkably useful for writing stories like this.

It gives you a bigger worldview, if you have that interest. And I always had that interest, even as a kid—reading about things happening around the world, political intrigue. It really informs you on that level and opens your eyes when you're thinking about potential stories that might take place out here, but that involve the world at large instead of just a small place.

So I try to bring the world into Nevada in every story I write. Like Shades of Mercy—there are a lot of forces at play: not just drugs and cartels, but the Chinese government, hackers, all sorts of real-world threats. I try to put an exciting, interesting spin on them, something people can relate to, while also making them say, “Wow, I never knew this actually happened.”

C&I: What’s your typical writing process? Are you a heavy outliner? A discovery writer? What works best for you?

Borgos: Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I consider myself very fortunate once I decided to get traditionally published. That was when I was writing my third book. First, I had self-published the first two, but I thought, okay, I'm ready to write this next story, The Bitter Past.

I turned that out pretty quickly in 2020. COVID was happening, there wasn't much going on with work, so I snapped out five drafts in about six months. Then I started shopping it to literary agents. Because when you want to be traditionally published, you need an agent to negotiate with publishing houses on your behalf.

It’s very difficult. I know many authors who have been rejected by agents more than 100 times. You send out a one-page query letter telling them what your book’s about, why they should read it. They get like 10,000 of those a year, and can only sign a handful.

I did a lot of research, took online classes on how to get an agent, really tried to use what I learned. By the time I’d sent my fifth or sixth query, I got a nice response from the woman who became my agent. She read my manuscript, signed me right away, and two months later she sold it to Minotaur Books and St. Martin's Press.

I say I was lucky. In this business, you make your own luck, but you also have to be in the right place at the right time. Everything happened quickly. They told me right away they wanted it to be a series. Now I’m finishing the fourth book, and I’ll probably know in the next few months if it will continue beyond the original two-book deal—which became a four-book deal. Hopefully it’ll go on further.

To answer the other part of your question: I’m a serious plotter, much like my good friend Craig Johnson. I cannot go into a story without a strong idea and a very specific outline from beginning to end. I just don’t have the patience to fly by the seat of my pants.

C&I: Craig Johnson is now 20 books into his Longmire series. He said that at some point, the series is no longer just yours—readers have stakes in it too. Now that you’re four books in, what has reader feedback been like for you? What have you enjoyed most about that engagement, and does it give you confidence or pressure?

Borgos: It’s really both. I do feel a little bit of pressure from expectations, because people have adopted these characters and they’re constantly giving feedback—either in person or online.

I hear things like, “Oh God, I love Brinley, she’s the best character ever.” If you took a poll, most people would say Brinley—Porter Beck’s sister—is their favorite character. She’s unique, with some interesting things going on.

Readers take real ownership. I’ve been at book clubs where people break into arguments about the decisions my characters made. One person will say, “He had no choice, he had to do it that way.” Another will argue, “No, that was too risky.” They treat it as if they have a vested interest in what happens to these people.

I get so many people asking, “What’s going to happen with Porter’s eyesight? I don’t want him to go blind.” They’re almost trying to make me write it a certain way. I’m cognizant of that, and I want to satisfy readers—but I also have to be careful not to overindulge them.

C&I: Judging from the events list on your website, you’ve been actively on tour since 2024. Had you ever done anything like that before, and what has the experience been like?

Borgos: It’s been wonderful. I’d never done anything like that before The Bitter Past came out. When you self-publish, it’s different—you’re doing your own marketing, but it’s very difficult to get bookstores to carry your books.

Once I had a real publisher, all of that was handled. I’ve got a marketing team at Minotaur, a publicist who helps me set up events. It’s been fabulous—if for no other reason than getting out there, shaking hands, getting feedback, hearing things like, “You made me laugh” or “You made me cry.”

I could never make another dollar on my books, and if I got that kind of feedback regularly, I’d still continue. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. It does cut into writing sometimes, but it usually only lasts for a few months after a book comes out. And I’m enjoying every bit of it.

C&I: And then they’re asking for the release date on the next book.

Borgos: Oh, absolutely. “When is the next book? I can’t wait another year.” Publishers are sly about this—they want to keep readers dangling, but not too long. That’s why a lot of authors release on a 12-month cycle—unless you’re James Patterson and it’s every two weeks.

C&I: I know you can’t give too much away about the next Porter Beck book, but can you talk about any new directions or themes you’d love to explore if the series continues?

Borgos: I’ll give a few snippets. In book four, which will be out next summer, a lot is happening for Porter and his crew. Starting in Shades of Mercy, he developed a love interest in Charlie Blue Horse, a Paiute state detective with the Nevada Highway Patrol. She’s very good at her job. They hit it off, dated long-distance for a while, and in The Blue Horse things get more serious. But with them living 400 miles apart, some difficult life decisions come into play.

Beck’s eye disease is still very much a part of his life. He worries about it constantly. People with retinitis pigmentosa often eventually go blind. He doesn’t know if or when that’ll happen for him, but he fears it could be soon—even though sometimes it takes decades. He’s worried for all the right reasons: his family, Charlie, his dad. Who will take care of them if he can’t see?

The book picks up with a body being found in a barrel in Lake Mead—something that actually happened recently in real life. It leads to a hunt for a serial killer.

C&I: Right up Porter Beck's alley, for sure. Beyond Porter Beck, do you ever see yourself branching into other genres or writing standalones again?

Borgos: My first two books were standalones. I loved writing them—creating a new universe, a new set of characters. It’s nice revisiting old characters in a series, but I love the challenge of creating something new from scratch.

My second published book took place in East Africa, South Sudan during the civil war. Fascinating. From a research standpoint alone, I love learning more about the areas I’m writing about. I can’t wait to write another standalone. Hopefully I won’t be forced into it if my publisher decides not to continue Porter Beck. But I think I’ll end up doing both—more Beck, and some standalones too.

C&I: Where can our listeners find your books, and how can they connect with you online? Do you have any in-person events coming up?

Borgos: The easiest way to find my books is really any bookstore. If they don’t have it on the shelf, they can order it. My books are available anywhere—Barnes & Noble, Amazon, even Target online.

You can also find me online at bruceborgos.com. My last name is spelled B-O-R-G-O-S. You’ll see all my information there. People can reach out directly through the contact form, and I like to stay in touch that way.

As for events—I’ve got a couple things in September, including a book club in Southern Nevada and an event in St. George, Utah. In October, I’ll be at a big library author event in Carmel Clay, Indiana, with 750 people expected. After that, there will be festivals in the spring. All of those are listed on my website.

C&I: We've enjoyed speaking with you today. We can’t wait for the fourth Porter Beck book to come out next year, and we’ll have to have you back on the podcast.

Borgos: Thanks so much. I love listening to your show. I love Cowboys & Indians magazine—always have. I really appreciate you having me on, and for the prep work you did getting to know me before asking your questions. Thank you very much.