Outdoors humor columnist Patrick F. McManus dies at 84

BOISE, Idaho — Patrick F. McManus, a prolific writer best known for his humor columns in fishing and hunting magazines who also wrote mystery novels and one-man comedy plays, has died. He was 84.

McManus died Wednesday evening at a nursing facility where he lived in Spokane, where he had been in declining health, Tim Behrens, who performed the one-man plays, said Friday.

“He was a warm man, he was a good man, he was a funny man,” Behrens said. “I look at him right up there with Mark Twain.”

McManus wrote monthly humor columns for more than three decades for the popular magazines Field & Stream and Outdoor Life, the columns later appeared in books. He also wrote other books, more than two dozen in all, that included a guide for humor writers, and a series of mystery novels with a darker form of humor involving fictional Blight County, Idaho, and Sheriff Bo Tully. Altogether, he sold more than 5 million copies and appeared on the New York Times best-seller list.

Many of his characters are drawn from real people from his childhood in Sandpoint, Idaho, about 75 miles northeast of Spokane, said Bill Stimson, a journalism professor at Eastern Washington University and former writing student of McManus at the same school. The two became lifelong friends.

The fictional Rancid Crabtree, for example, is a loner living in the woods who cares only about fishing and hunting and has no one telling him to go to school. Stimson said McManus told him that Crabtree is based on a real person that he found in the hills around Sandpoint as a child.

While many of his characters involve country bumpkins, McManus himself loved reading.

“He had a very scholarly interest in writing and literature,” Stimson said. “He read everything.”

McManus is survived by his wife, Darlene, four daughters, nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

A private service is tentatively planned for next week at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Sandpoint.