Tony Hillerman wrote police procedurals, but these were no ordinary police and no ordinary procedures. Many of their cases were the usual—murder, assault, robbery, missing persons—and were solved through clues, logical deduction, and sudden bursts of intuition. But the cases also often involved witchcraft, sacred desecration, ghosts, and skinwalkers, and their unraveling required an intimate knowledge of intricate clan relationships, ancient rituals and mythology, and the beliefs and practices of a people centuries old. These were the Navajo Tribal Police, and their stories, in eighteen novels from 1970 to 2006, spun out in the canyons and mesas and under the heartbreaking blue sky of Arizona, New Mexico, and the Four Corners territory.
You know how you’re always advised as a writer to start a mystery/suspense novel fast, pull the readers right into the plot, avoid undue description of weather, landscapes, and the like? Hillerman ignored that advice all the time, because to him the weather and landscapes were integral to the plot; they were living, breathing characters just as much as any of the people.
Take the opening passage of Listening Woman (1978), for example:
“The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopovi and Second Mesa. Two hundred vacant miles to the north and east, it sandblasted the stone sculptures of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park and whistled eastward across the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. Over the arid immensity of the Nokaito Bench it filled the blank blue sky with a rushing sound. At the hogan of Hosteen Tso, at 3:17 p.m., it gusted and eddied, and formed a dust devil, which crossed the wagon track and raced with a swirling roar across Margaret Cigaret’s old Dodge pickup truck and past the Tso brush arbor. The three people under the arbor huddled against the driven dust. Tso covered his eyes with his hands and leaned forward in his rocking chair as the sand stung his naked shoulders.Anna Atcitty turned her back to the wind and put her hands over her hair because when this business was finished and she got Margaret Cigaret home again, she would meet the new boy from the Short Mountain Trading Post. And Mrs. Margaret Cigaret, who was also called Blind Eyes, and Listening Woman, threw her shawl over the magic odds and ends arrayed on the arbor table. She held down the edges of the shawl.
“’Damn dirty wind,’ she said. ‘Dirty son-of-a-bitch.’”
Tell me that doesn’t draw you in just as swiftly as any gunshot or murder. There are plenty of those in the books, mind you. People die in all sorts of ways, some quite imaginative, and Hillerman is very skilled at action and suspense as his heroes attempt to catch their malefactors, some of whom are as bad as any in crime fiction. But it’s his sense of place that really sets him apart.
“While I always begin books without really knowing where they’re going,” he’s written, “I never begin a chapter without a detailed and exact vision of the place it will happen, the nature of the actors in the scene, the mood of the protagonists, the temperature, direction of the breeze, the aromas it carries, time of day, the way the light falls, the cloud formations.
“When I was writing The Blessing Way [his first book, in 1970], I climbed down into Canyon de Chelly, puddled around on its quicksandy bottom, and collected a headful of sensory impressions (the way the wind sounds down there, the nature of echoes, the smell of sage and wet sand, how the sky looks atop a tunnel of stone, the booming of thunder bouncing from one cliff to another).”
In The Blessing Way, it is 45 pages before a body is even introduced. Instead, you are introduced to the main players, to the landscape, to the Navajos and their beliefs—and you are riveted by every word.
Hillerman’s two main characters of the human variety are Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee. Leaphorn is a veteran of some twenty years in the Tribal Police when we first meet him: short, with heavy shoulders, a Roman nose, and gray, burr-cut hair. He holds a master’s degree in anthropology, and is intensely interested in American Indian religions, but while he hews firmly to the Navajo concept of hozho—“being in harmony with one’s environment, at peace with one’s circumstances, content with the day, devoid of anger, and free from anxieties” (The Ghostway, 1989)—he is deeply skeptical of some of the Navajo superstitions, particularly those involving witchcraft. He simply doesn’t believe in it—but he knows that many Navajos do and act accordingly, and thus it is a vital component in understanding and solving some of the crimes with which he is faced.
Leaphorn’s skepticism comes about because he is a highly logical man, a fact often commented upon. “There had to be some sense to it. A reason. It had to fit some pattern of cause and effect. Leaphorn’s sense of order insisted on this. And if the cause happened to be insane by normal human terms, Leaphorn’s intellect would then hunt for harmony in the kaleidoscopic reality of insanity” (Listening Woman). “Everything in Leaphorn’s Navajo blood, bones, brain, and conditioning taught him to be skeptical of coincidences….He would have the phone off the hook, stare at the army of pins on the map of the Navajo reservation, and force his thinking into some sort of equal order. Given quiet, and a little time, Leaphorn’s mind was very, very good at this process of finding logical causes behind apparently illogical effects” (Skinwalkers, 1986).
Ah, that map: sometimes mocked by his colleagues, but a great source of precision and order to Leaphorn. It is an old auto club map of the Four Corners, “freckled with the heads of pins—red, white, blue, black, yellow and green, plus a variety of shapes he’d reverted to when the colors available in pinheads had been exhausted” (The First Eagle, 1998). The pins mark different kinds of crimes—red for alcohol-related, blue for sheep-stealing, black for witchcraft reports, brown with white centers for homicides, and so on. By gazing at them, and his own handwritten notations, he can begin to spot those patterns that link crimes together.
It is part of Leaphorn’s insistence on gathering any scrap of information he can, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, and he is impatient with those who don’t think the same. In one of his early encounters with Jim Chee, he debriefs him on an interview Chee conducted: “What did you learn?” Chee gives him a couple of small things, and then, mentally shrugging, says, “Not much.”
“Silence again. Then Leaphorn said, in a very mild voice, ‘I’ve got a funny way of working. Instead of telling me “Not much,” I like people to tell me all the details and then I’ll say, “Well, that’s not much,” or maybe I’ll say, “Hey, that part about the pawn explains something else I heard.” Or so forth. What I’m saying is, give me all the details and let me sort it out’” (Skinwalkers).
Chee is duly chastened. Also, a little resentful. It is his first time working with Leaphorn, and he’s not crazy about it, though in due time he’ll come to respect him enormously, if not necessarily like him. When they first meet, Chee is a young man, with “a longish, narrow face fitting a longish, narrow body—all shoulders and no hips,” only seven years out of college, where he, too, studied anthropology, and whip-smart. He, too, hews to the Navajo ways, but with a very different emphasis: “Chee believed in penicillin and insulin and heart bypass surgery. But he also believed that something far beyond the understanding of modern medicine controlled life and death” (Skinwalkers).
He is a deep believer in tradition, and is himself studying to become a yataalii, a singer/healer/shaman, at the same time he is a police officer. For him, the gods, the legends, the beliefs, are very much part of everyday life. In A Thief of Time (1988), he stumbles upon a field of bones: “This was simply too much death. Too many ghosts disturbed. He backed away from the excavation, flashlight still on, careful no longer. He wanted only to be away from here. Into the sunlight. Into the cleansing heat of a sweat bath. To be surrounded by the healing, curing sounds of a Ghostway ceremonial.”
He doesn’t absolutely believe in witchcraft—but he doesn’t disbelieve in it, either. “Chee believed in witchcraft in an abstract way. Perhaps they did have the power, as the legends claimed and the rumors insisted, to become were-animals, to fly, to run faster than any car. On that score, Chee was a skeptic willing to accept any proof. But he knew witchcraft in its basic form stalked the Dinee. He saw it in people who had turned deliberately and with malice from the beauty of the Navajo Way and embraced the evil that was its opposite. He saw it every day he worked as a policeman—in those who sold whiskey to children, in those who bought videocassette recorders while their relatives were hungry, in the knife fights in a Gallup alley, in beaten wives and abandoned children” (Skinwalkers).
He is “modern man built upon traditional Navajo,” someone who is at once “the Jim Chee who was an alumnus of the University of New Mexico, a subscriber to Esquire and Newsweek, an officer of the Navajo Tribal Police…holder of a Farmington Public Library card, student of anthropology and sociology, ‘with distinction’ graduate of the FBI Academy, holder of Social Security card 441-28-7272” (The Ghostway) and the “Jim Chee” who knows that is only his “white man’s name.” “His real name, his secret name, his war name, was Long Thinker, given him by Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the elder brother of his mother and one of the most respected singers among Four Corners Navajos” (The Ghostway).
He also possesses a phenomenal memory, “the recall of a People without a written memory, who keep their culture alive in their minds, who train their children to memorize details of sand paintings and curing ceremonials….It was something Frank Sam Nakai had instructed him to do. ‘Memorize places,’ his uncle had told him. ‘Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind.’” (The Ghostway).
With all this, he becomes a worthy partner to Leaphorn—skilled; flexible; intuitive; deeply in tune with his people, but curious about the white man’s way of doing things, in an anthropological kind of way.
“Don’t you believe in justice? Don’t you believe that things need to be evened up?”
Chee shrugged. “Why not?” he said. As a matter of fact, the concept seemed as strange to him as the idea that someone with money would steal had seemed to Mrs. Musket. Someone who violated basic rules of behavior and harmed you was, by Navajo definition, ‘out of control.’ The “dark wind” had entered him and destroyed his judgment. One avoided such persons, and worried about them, and was pleased if they were cured of this temporary insanity and returned again to hozho. But to Chee’s Navajo mind, the idea of punishing them would be as insane as the original act. He understood it was a common attitude in the white culture, but he’d never before encountered it so directly.” (The Dark Wind, 1982)
“It seemed an odd thing to put on a tombstone, but everything about the white man’s burial customs seemed odd to Chee. The Navajos lacked this sentimentality about corpses. Death robbed the body of its value. Even its identity was lost with the departing chindi. What the ghost left behind was something to be disposed of with a minimum risk of contamination to the living. The names of the dead were left unspoken, certainly not carved in stone.” (People of Darkness, 1980)
Chee was conscious again that Bales was waiting for him to say something. This white man’s custom of expecting a listener to do more than listen was contrary to Chee’s courteous Navajo conditioning. He’d first become aware of it at the University of New Mexico. He’d dated a girl in his sociology class and she’d accused him of not listening to her, and it had taken two or three misunderstandings before he’d finally fathomed that while his people presume that if they’re talking, you are listening, white people require periodic reassurance.” (The Ghostway, 1980)
There is a good deal more you learn about the Navajo—about how it is considered rude to peer into another’s face during a conversation; about their soft, barely touching handshake (“the compromise between modern convention and the need to be careful with strangers who might, after all, be witches,” A Thief of Time); about the significance of names (“Among traditional Navajos, it’s very impolite to say someone’s name in their presence. Names are just reference words, when the person’s not there” People of Darkness); about families (“’Takes care of his relatives.’ That was the ultimate compliment for a Navajo. The worse insult was to say he acted like he didn’t have any relatives. In Navajo country, families come first,” The Ghost Way); even about how an Indian’s sparse beard is a blessing (“’No whiskers is proof,’ his grandfather had told him, ‘that Navajos are evolved further from the apes than those hairy white men,’” The First Eagle).
Initially, Hillerman’s books (The Blessing Way, Dance Hall of the Dead, Listening Woman) only featured Leaphorn. In the very first book, in fact, he was only meant to be a secondary character to a white anthropologist. “As the plot began to gel,” Hillerman said, “I began learning that this Leaphorn guy was a much better character than my plot gave him a chance to be.” And then when an editor, the legendary Joan Kahn, showed interest in the book, but gave him a blizzard of notes, it gave him a chance to revise everything and put Leaphorn front and center. His only regret: “I had given him a non-Navajo name. I was very careless. I hadn’t developed him as I would if I’d known he was going to be an important character, so I was kind of stuck with it.”
These were the Navajo Tribal Police, and their stories, in eighteen novels from 1970 to 2006, spun out in the canyons and mesas and under the heartbreaking blue sky of Arizona, New Mexico, and the Four Corners territory.
Then after those first three books, he found he had a need for a different kind of character. The plot of People of Darkness required someone younger, less seasoned and sophisticated, and with a more traditional background. Hillerman had also sold the movie rights to the series by then, which, to his irritation, included continuing character rights, so he figured it was a good idea to create a new lead character anyway, “and this time I’ll give him a real Navajo name instead of the damned thing I called Joe.” Chee alone would feature in the next three book (People of Darkness, The Dark Wind, The Ghostway). By that time, Hillerman had the character rights back, and Leaphorn and Chee joined forces in Skinwalkers, as they would for every book thereafter.
Not only did the books get deeper and richer in their plots and understanding of Navajo culture, but the combination of Chee and Leaphorn deepened the characters as well. We became invested in them, and their personal lives became as important as their professional. We grieved with Leaphorn when his beloved wife Emma grew sick with cancer, survived an operation, then died of a blood clot and infection (“What will I do tonight, when I am back in Window Rock? What will I do tomorrow? What will I do when winter has come? And when it has gone? What will I do ever again?” The Thief of Time). His conflicting tides of curiosity and sorrow drive him to retire from the police force, then un-retire, then retire again, though even then his deep ties keep pulling him back in (just as a lovely new relationship with an anthropologist named Louisa Bourebonette pulls him back to life personally).
As for Chee, his romantic life is decidedly rocky. At first, he thinks he can make a life with a beautiful, blue-eyed white woman from Wisconsin who teaches on the reservation, but it slowly dawns on him that she would not be happy raising kids there and he would not be happy if he moved away and took that FBI job she wanted for him (“He would be an alien living in exile. Mary Landon would not enjoy life with that Jim Chee.” A Thief of Time). Then he meets Janet Pete, a half-Navajo, half-white lawyer. She, too, is beautiful and whip-smart. Though their first encounter on opposite sides of a case is not promising, a friendship blossoms over several books (“She tells me her troubles. I tell her mine. Then we give one another bad advice.” Talking God, 1989), then romance, and then…it all falls apart. Janet thinks Chee has great things ahead of him in Washington, but he can’t bring himself to do it, and finally has to admit the bitter truth: “He had been thinking that because her name was Pete, because her father was Navajo, her blood somehow would have taught her the ways of the Dineh and made her one of them. But only your culture taught you values, and the culture that had formed Janet was blue-blooded, white, Ivy League, chic, irreligious, old-rich Maryland” (The Fallen Man, 1996).
Then, at long last, poor Chee meets Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito, a full-blooded Navajo and member of the Tribal Police, who’s a bit green but just as smart as he is, but even more important, just the kind of woman he should have fallen in love with in the first place. Every reader knew it but Chee. They get married at the end of Skeleton Man, and still live on, along with Joe Leaphorn, in the books of Tony Hillerman’s daughter Anne.
***
How did Hillerman become interested in Native American life in the first place? It started at birth. He was born in the tiny town of Sacred Heart, Oklahoma (pop: 75), grew up with Pottawatomie and Seminole kids, and went to the Indian School for the first eight grades. “At about nine, I became aware that two kinds of people make up the world. Them and us—the town boys and the country boys. The town boys got their hair cut in barber shops, knew how to shoot pool, didn’t carry their lunch in sacks…and were otherwise urbane and sophisticated…Our Seminole and Pottawatomie Indian neighbors were part of Us, fellow barbarians teamed against Them…When I met the Navajos I now so often write about, I recognized kindred spirits. Country boys. More of us. Folks among whom I felt at ease.”
Then, when he came back from World War II—where he earned a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart, the latter for an injury that left him lame and partly blind in one eye for the rest of his life—he was driving a truckload of pipe to an oil rigging site when he stumbled upon a party of about twenty Navajo horsemen and women dressed in ceremonial regalia. Unknown to him, he was witnessing the Enemy Way, a curing ceremonial for a Navajo Marine returned from the war in order to cure him of the disharmony of exposure to foreign cultures. That ceremony would become a key plot component of Hillerman’s first novel, The Blessing Way. (The book was originally called The Enemy Way, but Harper & Row changed it to that of a ceremonial that had nothing to do with the book. Hillerman claimed sardonically, “This sometimes caused folks to buy it as gifts for pious relatives.”)
It’d be many years before he wrote that book, however. From 1948 to 1962, he worked as a journalist for newspapers in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, graduating from police-blotter stories to politics to the editorship of the Santa Fe New Mexican. But he was eager to try something else: “I wanted to work with the plastic of fiction, instead of the hard rock of truth.” Influenced by Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler, and the Australian author Arthur Upfield, who wrote detective novels featuring an Aborigine policeman, he left the paper to study creative writing at the University of New Mexico, then stayed on to teach journalism there until 1987.
In the meantime, he started that book. Well, actually, a different book. His intention was to write the Great American Novel about journalism and politics, “War and Peace, American style,” but he figured he ought to try something less ambitious first, and returned to his fascination with the Navajos, one that had been stoked even further by his eleven years in New Mexico. It took him three long years, and finally, “sick of the entire project,” he tacked on an ending and sent it to an agent: “I waited a month, then I called the agent. Any luck? No. The only editor she had shown it to didn’t like it. Neither did the agent. Why not? Well, to be candid, because it was a bad book. It fell between two stools. Not a mystery novel. Not a mainstream novel. Showing it around would do no good to my reputation, nor for hers. What should I do? Come to my senses and go back to nonfiction. Failing that, rewrite it and get rid of all the Indian stuff.”
Yes, the agent actually said that. Instead, Hillerman wrote to Joan Kahn after reading an article by her, she said she’d read it, the blizzard of notes followed, and his new career began, one that lasted the rest of his life.
He died at the age of 83. He’d won the Edgar, Anthony, Nero, Agatha, Macavity, and Spur awards, as well as France’s Grand Prix de Litterature Policier. He’d been made MWA’s Grandmaster in 1991, got a lifetime achievement award from Malice Domestic in 2002, and received the Owen Wister Award in 2008 for “outstanding contributions to the American West.”
But those weren’t the things that meant the most to him.
“Good reviews delight me when I get them. But I am far more delighted by being voted the most popular author by the students of St. Catherine Indian school, and even more by middle-aged Navajos who tell me that reading my mysteries revived their children’s interest in the Navajo Way.
“The best review I ever received was from a Navajo librarian with whom I was discussing the work of Indian novelists Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Scott Momaday. ‘They are artists,’ I said. ‘I am a storyteller.’
“’Yes,’ she said. ‘We read them and their books are beautiful. We say, “Yes, this is us. This is reality.” But it leaves us sad, with no hope. We read of Jim Chee, and Joe Leaphorn, and Old Man Tso, and Margaret Cigaret, and Tsossies and Begays and again we say, “Yes, this is us. But now we win.” Like the stories our grandmother used to tell us, they make us feel good about being Navajos.’”
For this, and a great deal more, in 1987, Tony Hillerman was awarded the status of Special Friend of the Dineh by the Navajo Nation.
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The Essential Hillerman
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With any prolific author, readers are likely to have their own particular favorites, which may not be the same as someone else’s. Your list is likely to be just as good as mine – but here are the ones I recommend.
Listening Woman (1978)
Listening Woman is Margaret Cigaret, who “had the rare gift of hearing the voices in the wind and getting the visions that came out of the earth.” When she goes into a trance to determine the cause of an old man’s sickness, she awakens to find him murdered, and her own niece as well.
The FBI agent who talks with her is impatient with her answers, which seem meandering and illogical, but when Joe Leaphorn listens to the interview tape, he notices oddities in her account that make him decide to find her and ask the questions the FBI man did not. But it’ll have to wait, because there’s a lot going on. A government helicopter is missing. A fringe Indian Rights group is robbing banks. And a laughing man with gold-rimmed glasses and a ferocious dog has very nearly run Leaphorn over with his car. It is indeed a lot, but there is worse to come. As all the plot strands come together, Leaphorn finds himself in an extraordinarily hellacious confrontation, with seemingly no way out.
It’s a haunting story, filled with peril, and is typical of how well Hillerman could set several plates spinning without dropping a single one. It also, Hillerman once said, “taught me that inability to outline a plot has advantages.” He was planning something about orphaned brothers colliding, and a shaman with critical information. “After a series of first chapters that led nowhere, I wrote a second chapter in which Leaphorn stops the villain for speeding and, more or less out of whimsy, I had him see a big ugly dog in the backseat of the car, intending to use the delete key on my new (and first) computer to delete said dog later. That unoutlined dog became crucial to the plot.”
Skinwalkers (1986)
Leaphorn and Chee join forces for the first time, as Leaphorn is forced to confront part of the Navajo culture he’s always rejected, while Chee is forced to confront just trying to stay alive.
The lieutenant has three pins on his wall map that denote three unsolved homicides, and he nearly has a fourth when someone fires shotgun blasts through Jim Chee’s trailer. Leaphorn is skeptical about this young guy and his shamanizing, plus it’s been his experience that cops who get shot at are not all that innocent: “Chee was said to be smart. He seemed smart. A smart man should have some idea who was trying to kill him. And why. If he wasn’t a fool, was he a liar?”
Nevertheless, they’re soon working the cases together, especially when it becomes clear that the violence is all somehow wrapped up in witchcraft. Are skinwalkers behind it all—or are they the victims?
“Talk to everybody about everything,” Leaphorn says to Chee. “Who people talked to. Who people saw. Try to get a fix on whatever the killers were driving. Just try to find out every damn thing. Work on it day after day after day until we get some feeling for what the hell went on.”
But when they finally do get that feeling, it’s nothing like what they expected. Just as deadly, though.
This was Hillerman’s breakout book, a novel that walked a tightrope between the supernatural and all-too-human failings. Taut, disturbing, haunting, with death around every corner.
A Thief of Time (1988)
“Bones. Bones scattered everywhere.”
A woman anthropologist is about to violate Navajo law, federal law, and professional ethics to unravel an ancient Anaszai myth. But the bones do not bode well. And then she disappears.
Leaphorn, deeply mourning the death of his wife Emma, is on leave, but something about the missing woman reminds him of her, and pulls him in. Meanwhile, Chee, trying to track down a missing Tribal Police backhoe that was humiliatingly stolen right in front of his nose, stumbles upon two bodies that seem to connect to Leaphorn’s case. He doesn’t know if he wants to work with the lieutenant again. He doesn’t particularly like him. What’s more: “The word that spread about the 400 employees of the Navajo Tribal Police was that Joe Leaphorn had lost it. Joe Leaphorn had a nervous breakdown. Joe Leaphorn was out of it.”
But Chee is pulled in, too, and uncovers a plot of murder, greed, and ambition that has both men reconsidering their previous beliefs about what it means to be a Navajo. It is a novel steeped in mystery and soul and meaning, and it was Tony Hillerman’s favorite among all his books.
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BOOK BONUS #1: Tony Hillerman
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Hillerman wrote two novels that weren’t in the series. The Fly on the Wall (1971) was intended to be the “big important book” for which he warmed up by writing The Blessing Way. It was about journalism and corrupt politics and featured an introverted political reporter named John Cotton: “I was totally comfortable in Cotton’s mind, prowling a state capitol as familiar as the palm of my hand and dealing with people I know as well as my own family.” The book turns on a big contracting scam and there’s plenty of danger and dead men. “I will always have ambiguous feelings about Fly,” Hillerman wrote. “It fell far short of what I intended. But it is still a favorite.” For good reason. It’s a crackling good read, “important” or not.
The second book was Finding Moon (1995). It involves a small-town newspaperman named Moon Mathias, who in April 1975, when the South Vietnamese government is collapsing and the evil Pol Pot is surrounding Phnom-Penh, Cambodia, discovers that his dead brother’s baby daughter is alive in Southeast Asia—a child Moon didn’t knew existed. Moon is highly reluctant to take on the task, figures he can prove it’s hopeless and fly home, but instead gets embroiled in a high-stakes Amblerian adventure across a chaotic Vietnam amidst all kinds of peril, and in the process discovers that the Moon Mathias he encounters in Asia is a far better man than he thought he was. Another good read.
He also wrote or co-wrote several books of nonfiction and photos-and-text about the Southwest, such as Hillerman Country and The Spell of New Mexico, and if you’ve fallen in love with the territory after reading his novels, these make marvelous companions. There are two other books of note: Talking Mysteries (2004) is a book-length conversation with long-time friend Ernie Bulow about his approach to plot, characterization, setting, and his brand of fiction, and also includes a Jim Chee mini-mystery. It was so well-received that it was nominated for an Edgar and won the Macavity.
And in 2001, he wrote a memoir called Seldom Disappointed. “Blessed are those who expect little,” his mother used to say. “They are seldom disappointed.” She taught him to seek adventure, never to whine, and never to be afraid. His father taught him never to envy and never to bear a grudge. He took all those things to heart as he grew up hard-scrabble, went to war, and charged into journalism, picking up along the way “some of the sort of knowledge of human behavior in stressful circumstances that writers need.” It is, as you’d expect, a delightful read, and won both an Agatha and an Anthony.
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BOOK BONUS #2: Anne Hillerman
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As noted earlier, Anne Hillerman is continuing in her father’s footsteps. She has five books out now—Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013), Rock With Wings (2015), Song of the Lion (2017), Cave of Bones (2018), and The Tale Teller (2019)—and they do a lovely job of moving Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito forward, while keeping true to her father’s keen interest in the Southwest and the Navajos and adding her own touches. In particular, she’s made Bernie Mauelito a full-fledged crime-solving partner, a very welcome complement to the testosterone of Chee and Leaphorn.
Anne Hillerman was inspired to pick up the pen after publishing a book of photos and text called Tony Hillerman’s Landscape: On the Road with Chee and Leaphorn, which came out in 2009, after Tony’s death. “He’d thought it would be great to do a book for people who don’t live in the beautiful Southwest, but might have thought he was exaggerating a bit about those places where, say, Joe Leaphorn has to pull off the road because the sunset is so beautiful.” People would ask if there were any more novels, and when she said no, they’d say, “I’ll just have to read those books again,” and she realized how much she, too, was missing “Uncle Joe” and “Uncle Jim.”
She realized something else, as well: “Until I went out into the world as a speaker, I didn’t realize how many lives my dad’s books touched. People say, ‘I was never really much of a mystery reader, but I liked your dad’s stuff because of the Southwest and the Navajos.’ Maybe they go on vacation to the Grand Canyon, maybe they go through Tuba City or visit the dinosaur tracks. Then they come back. The next thing you know, they’ve retired and moved out here. I’ll bet I’ve heard that story two dozen times.”
Anne also oversees the Tony Hillerman Prize for the Best First Mystery set in the Southwest. To date, there have been eight winners, all published by St. Martin’s Minotaur, most recently Carol Potenza’s marvelous Hearts of the Missing (2018).
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TV / MOVIE BONUS
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Robert Redford produced a movie version of The Dark Wind in 1991, starring Lou Diamond Phillips and Fred Ward, but no one was particularly happy with it, and there was considerable controversy over the fact that Phillips was not an Indian.
Redford had more success when he adapted three more books—Skinwalkers, Coyote Waits, and A Thief of Time—for the PBS Mystery franchise in 2002-2004. Starring Adam Beach (a Cherokee) and Wes Studi (a Saulteaux from Manitoba), they received considerably better reviews. I saw them when they ran, and thought they were true to Hillerman’s spirit. Liberties were taken with the texts, but, hey, it’s television. Hillerman agreed: “You know, when you sell an old car to old car dealers, it’s their property. If they want to take the fender off and paint it green, that’s their right.”
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CROSS-CULTURAL BONUS
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Having recently published a “Crime Reader’s” piece on the South African writer James McClure, I find the following comparison fascinating. Here you’ll find Joe Leaphorn musing on the difference between why Navajos and white men kill:
“Why? Why did Navajos kill? Not as lightly as white men, because the Navajo Way made life the ultimate value and death unrelieved terror. Usually the motive for homicide on the Reservation was simple. Anger, or fear, or a mixture of both. Or a mixture of one with alcohol. Navajos did not kill with cold-blooded premeditation. Nor did they kill for profit. To do so violated the scale of values of The People.” (The Blessing Way)
Now, compare it to the similar thoughts of Bantu Detective Mickey Zondi on white killing versus non-white killing in James McClure’s The Song Dog (1991):
“Zondi had always derived a particular pleasure from a white killing. Not for the reasons that many might suppose, being quick to suggest racial, political, even arithmetical implications well worth a lick of the lips – but because nonwhite killings tended to be so banal, so straightforward: hotblooded outbursts of violence that left nobody guessing. Here was the hacked-up body, here was the kindling axe, here were thirty-six eyewitnesses, and here was the murderer, still hanging around, looking a bit weary, but quite prepared to go to his fate in order to spare the spirits of his ancestors any further turbulence.
“A white killing, on the other hand, almost invariably – possibly because there had been so many ingenious books and films made about them – contained a strong element of mystery, making a man really ‘put his thinking cap on,’ to use one of Sister Theresa’s favorite expressions. Yes, it was as though most white murderers felt they had a tradition to maintain, certain standards to uphold, and so acted accordingly. Or was it because they tended, in the main, to be less passionate, less impulsive, and far more cold-blooded in their killing, more calculated, and certainly more conscious of the possible consequences?”
