What ex-cop Wambaugh did for Southern California in his long series of best-sellers starting in the 1970s, ex-cop Michael McGarrity is doing for New Mexico.

Wambaugh, with an ear to die for, captured the patois, the posturing, and the panorama of the Southland with unmatched verisimilitude in novel after novel. Singlehandedly he moved California detective fiction from the perfect prose miniatures of noir (Hammett, Chandler, et al.) onto a larger, all-encompassing canvas. From the early over-worked, conflicted-cop books through the later tragicomedies of manners, Wambaugh breathed new life into old formulas, proving once again that talent tells, and that all it takes to transcend the narrow boundaries of genre fiction is a really good writer.

Where Wambaugh tilled the endlessly rich, often rotting soil of the California megalopolis, Michael McGarrity, since the mid-1990s, has been quietly working away in the seemingly infinite landscapes of New Mexico. McGarrity’s books are proof enough that geography—like biology—is destiny.

A former Santa Fe police detective, McGarrity can, when the story requires it, get down and dirty with cop talk and cop conflict in the best Wambaugh manner. He also, as necessary, throws the full range of probable and improbable characters inhabiting the Land of Enchantment across his pages with such ease and convincing detail that the reader instantly understands the social circus of latter-day New Mexico: the unhappy mix of displaced Native Americans, old landed Hispanics, old landed Anglos, illegal migrant workers, the scientific and military elite working at Los Alamos and White Sands and Sandia, and the ever-growing tsunami of the rich, the talented, and the dilettantes who’ve been flowing into northern New Mexico ever since D. H. Lawrence and Frieda fled to Mabel Dodge’s mountain hideaway far above the Taos Pueblo in the early 20th century.

McGarrity gets those people, meaning that, like all good writers, he puts them in front of you, foibles and all, and lets you make—or not make—whatever judgments you are prone to make.

But what sets our New Mexico Wambaugh apart is geography.

You can’t see Southern California geography nowadays for the people. Oh, here and there you catch a glimpse of the ur-landscape—a desolate cove, a remote mountain trail, but for the most part the geography is noticed only when there’s a problem with it: earthquakes, mudslides, forest fires, drought.

In New Mexico, geography still rules. You have your pockets of civilization in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, your mini-pockets in resort areas such as Ruidoso and Cloudcroft, but vastly, the rest of the state is deserts, canyons, forests, and mountains.

All in all, a grand and grandiose setting, and it is one to which McGarrity responds with all the writerly ploys and appreciations at his command. His people are never far from the land, with the best of them, as he puts it, animated by "a richness of spirit" that comes from the beauty surrounding them. The beauty is no mere backdrop. McGarrity repeatedly evokes it and its power:

     "Elephant Butte, a startling blue-green man-made lake, spread out in front
     of them just before the highway dipped into a narrow sheared-off granite
     pass, climbed again to meet the Jornada—the ancient route of the Spanish
     into North America—and ran straight toward the San Andres Mountains.
     Cactus savanna flowed across the desert interrupted by large thickets of
     creosote brush and mesquite. The long plumes of the sotol cactus rose on
     thick bases, protected by hundreds of spiny leaves, bearing the first signs
     of flowering growth. Clumps of green grama grass, pale rabbit-brush, and
     yellow wildflowers erupted wildly on the flat plain."

Throughout the novels the landscape is a figured bass, always going on in the distance no matter whether the story moves takes us among the poseurs of Santa Fe or into the poverty of the Reservations.

This is making the books sound like travelogues. They’re not. McGarrity above all is a storyteller.

Most people can tell a story. A few people can tell a story well, with characters you care about, conflict, humor, suspense, resolution, beginning, middle, end.

Yes, McGarrity’s characters occupy—and are shaped by—a huge, beautiful, varied landscape. McGarrity the story teller knows this but he also knows the story’s the thing. Like Wambaugh, he tells us all we need to know, and not a syllable more. When landscape impinges on characters, or vice-versa, we hear about it with a fine economy of words. But most of the time we relax into McGarrity’s stories, which have their own well-directed momentum.

In Tularosa, the first book of the series, Kevin Kerney, a Santa Fe cop forced to take medical retirement after being wounded in a drug bust, has gone back to his childhood roots, working as a caretaker/handyman on a rich doctor’s ranch in the southern part of the state. A Vietnam veteran, he’s a walking bundle of emotional and psychological conflicts, given to long spells of sitting and looking at the vastness spread beyond his front porch, with perhaps a bit of Bach on the stereo. His dream is somehow to acquire his own ranch but on his limited retirement pay he sees no way forward.

With that difficult beginning as a benchmark, McGarrity takes Kerney through a complex series of adventures where the good guys are only slightly outnumbered by the bad guys, adventures which have an unusual effect on Kerney as a continuing character in a genre series: he grows.

The most successful series protagonists—think Hercule Poirot, Spenser, Mulhone, or, for that matter, Holmes himself—are successful primarily because the writer makes them intriguing from the git-go, and then sticks with the formula in book after book.

Daringly, McGarrity nurtures Kerney, lets him learn from his failures and his successes, so that by the eighth book he’s a different, more mature, and far more interesting character than he was at the outset.

The stories range from tales of stolen ancient artifacts hidden on the White Sands Missile Range to a vengeful serial killer to Kerney’s discovery of a son he didn’t know he had. McGarrity can write villains with the best of them. The most recent, one Samuel Green in Everybody Dies, Makes Hannibal Lecter look like a fumbling amateur when it comes to evil.

Taken together the books amount to a multipart picaresque novel in the best, endlessly adventurous sense of the word. The only thing better than reading the McGarrity books is going to New Mexico. Your choice.