Evocative mystery novels set among Navajos

Kelly Campbell/HarperCollins, via Associated Press -Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels, died on Sunday.

October 28, 2008
Tony Hillerman, Novelist, Dies at 83
By MARILYN STASIO

Tony Hillerman, a former newspaperman whose evocative mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest took the American detective story in new directions and made him a best-selling author, died Sunday in Albuquerque, where he lived. He was 83.

The cause was pulmonary failure, his family said. A daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father had survived two heart attacks and operations for prostate and bladder cancer, The Associated Press reported.

In the world of mystery fiction, Mr. Hillerman was that rare figure: a best-selling author who was adored by fans, admired by fellow authors and respected by critics. Though the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with an avowed purpose: to instill in his readers a respect for Native American culture.

His stories, while steeped in contemporary crime, often describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world. The books are instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals to incest taboos.

“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures,” Mr. Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. “I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”

Mr. Hillerman was not the first mystery writer to set a story on Indian land or to introduce a Native American detective to crime literature. (Manly Wade Wellman, for one, had done so.) But beginning with “The Blessing Way” in 1970, the 18 novels that Mr. Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations, featuring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, gave the traditional genre hero a new dimension.

Joe Leaphorn, grizzled and a bit cynical, has a logical mind and a passion for order that reflects his upbringing in the Navajo Way. His code of behavior is dictated by a belief in the harmonious patterns of life that link man to the natural world. But he is not a religious fundamentalist; he is a skeptic who holds a master’s degree in anthropology.

Jim Chee, younger and more idealistic than Leaphorn, seeks a more spiritual connection to Navajo tradition. Over several books he studies to become a hataalii, or singing medicine man. This ambition creates friction between the religious faith he professes and the secular rules of criminal justice he is sworn to uphold. Chee first appears in “People of Darkness” (1980), Mr. Hillerman’s fourth novel in the series.

Leaphorn and Chee appear in separate novels in Mr. Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police series. Each story challenges one or the other officer with a crime that seems to be entangled in the spirit world but that is also rooted in the reservation life that Mr. Hillerman knew so well.

When murder is the crime, Native Americans find it easier to attribute the killing to witches, a superstition that horrifies the rational Leaphorn but one that makes sense to Chee. Chee sees witchcraft metaphorically, “in people who had turned deliberately and with malice from the beauty of the Navajo Way” — “in those who sold whisky 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.”

Mr. Hillerman first brought Leaphorn and Chee together on the same case in “Skinwalkers” (1986), a novel that allows for illuminating interplay between these two different representatives of Navajo culture.

In the story the officers investigate three murders linked only by pellets of bone associated with the murder weapons. Is this an indication that the killings are the work of skinwalkers, witches who can fly and take the shapes of dogs, wolves or other animals?

Leaphorn hates witchcraft and holds superstition, unemployment and whisky responsible for much of his people’s suffering. But Chee knows the power of forces that the science of the white man cannot explain. The detectives blend their disparate views of the world to solve the case.

Mr. Hillerman wrote with intimate knowledge of the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes; he grew up with people very much like them. “I recognized kindred spirits” in the Navajo, he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1986. “Country boys. Folks among whom I felt at ease.”

Anthony Grove Hillerman was born on May 27, 1925, in Sacred Heart, Okla., to August Alfred Hillerman, a farmer and shopkeeper, and his wife, Lucy Grove. The town was in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and the family’s circumstances were so mean that Mr. Hillerman would later joke that “the Joads were the ones who had enough money to move to California.”

“In Sacred Heart, being a storyteller was a good thing to be,” he said of his country village, which was 35 miles from the nearest library. Growing up on territorial lands of the Potawatomi Tribe, he went to St. Mary’s Academy, a school for Indian girls run by the Sisters of Mercy, and attended high school with Potawatomi children. He said he owed much of the veracity of his stories to his friendships.

“I cross-examine my Navajo friends and shamelessly hang around trading posts, police substations, rodeos, rug auctions and sheep dippings,” he wrote of his research methods.

After attending Oklahoma A&M College, Mr. Hillerman enlisted in the Army in World War II. During two years of combat in Europe, he said, his company of 212 riflemen shrank to 8 as its members fought their way through France. In 1945, in a raid behind German lines, he stepped on a mine. His left leg was shattered, and he was severely burned. He never regained full vision in his left eye.

He returned from Europe in 1945 with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, where he met and married Marie Unzner, a Phi Beta Kappa student in bacteriology, and took up journalism. He went on to find jobs as a crime reporter for The Borger News-Herald in the Texas Panhandle; city editor of The Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Okla.; a political reporter in Oklahoma City; bureau manager in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for United Press International; and executive editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican.

By the mid-1960s Mr. Hillerman and his wife had one child and had adopted five more. He was almost 40 and had put in 17 years as a newspaperman. But he was becoming restless.

“The yen builds to work in something more malleable than hard fact, an urge grows to try to deal with the meaning of all this,” he wrote.

So with his wife’s support he quit The New Mexican and took his family to Albuquerque, where he enrolled at the University of New Mexico. He earned his master’s degree in 1966, joined the journalism faculty and later became chairman of the department. Fascinated with Native American culture, he also became something of an authority on the Southwest.

In the late 1960s, he said, he began to “practice” writing by working on a mystery, drawing on an earlier encounter he had had with a group of Navajos on horseback and in face paint and feathers in Crownpoint, N.M. They had been holding a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony for a soldier, a curing ritual that exorcises all traces of the enemy from those returning from battle. Mr. Hillerman had himself just returned from the war after a long convalescence.

He was so moved by the ceremony and so stirred by the rugged landscape that he resolved to live there. The experience became the basis for “The Blessing Way” (1970).

He spent three years writing the novel and sent the manuscript to Joan Kahn, a respected mystery editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins. She published it after he complied with her suggestion — that he expand the role of a secondary character, the Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn.

He departed from Indian themes for his second novel, “The Fly on the Wall” (1971), a political story of big-city corruption. But he was already yearning to get back to the country where all his other novels are set, the vast tribal lands that straddle northeast Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.

There he would “collect” sensory impressions — “the way the wind sounds down there,” he wrote, “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 a Hillerman mystery violent crime disrupts the harmonious Navajo world. “Everything is connected,” Jim Chee reflects in “The Ghostway” (1984). “The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”

Some critics found Mr. Hillerman’s writing humorless, moralizing and too reverential toward the Native American characters he favored. But even his detractors usually praised the ingenuity of his plots.

His third book, “Dance Hall of the Dead” (1973), won the 1974 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery novel, given by the Mystery Writers of America. In 1991 the group gave him its highest honor, its Grandmaster Award, after he had solidified the Navajo Tribal Police series with “A Thief of Time” (his own favorite novel), “Talking God” and “Coyote Waits.” His last book in the series, “The Shape Shifter,” was published by HarperCollins in 2006. Mr. Hillerman also wrote children’s and nonfiction books, including a memoir and a celebration of the Southwest called "Hillerman Country," with photographs by his brother, Barney.

Besides his daughter Anne, Mr. Hillerman is survived by his wife, Marie; their five other children, Dan, Tony Jr., Steve, Monica Atwell and Janet Grado; a sister, Mary Margaret Chambers; and 10 grandchildren.

For all the recognition he received, Mr. Hillerman once said, he was most gladdened by the status of Special Friend of the Dineh (the Navajo people) conferred on him in 1987 by the Navajo Nation. He was also proud that his books were taught at reservation schools and colleges.

“Good reviews delight me when I get them,” he said. “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.”