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Book Reviews
Featured Essay
Tony Hillerman: A gentle man
THE JOE LEAPHORN MYSTERIES:
The Blessing Way, Dance Hall of the Dead, Listening Woman
By Tony Hillerman
499 Pp. Wings (used only, out of print)
SELDOM DISAPPOINTED:
A Memoir
By Tony Hillerman
Harper Paperbacks $13.95
An essay by Jack Shakely
The year 2008 claimed its share of writers—Michael Crichton, Studs Terkel, David Foster Wallace—but nothing so touched millions of us as the death in October of that gentle and accomplished mystery writer Tony Hillerman. The national outpouring of sentiment in the press at his death was not only a tribute to a wise and prolific writer, but to a man you wanted to know better, a guy you wished lived next door, a friend you could borrow tools from and maybe have a beer with on Saturday afternoon. As the year closes, I’d like to look back on Tony Hillerman.
Tony Hillerman almost single-handedly invented a literary genre—the American Indian novel. That may take a little explaining.
Americans have been fascinated with Indians in literature since James Fenimore Cooper first introduced us to that noble savage Chingachgook, the last of the Mohicans, in Leatherstocking Tales. For the next hundred years or so the Indian didn’t fare so well, however, with “noble” dropping off and only “savage” remaining. In the thousands of “dime novels” that flooded the country from 1850 until well into the twentieth century, the Indian served only as a two-dimensional sub-human foe of Kit Carson, Deadeye Dick, and Buffalo Bill. In The Adventures of Buffalo Bill, a dime novel from 1882, chapter eight is entitled “Killing His First Indian.“
“It’s my Injun, boys!“ Billy cried exultantly. “It are fer a fact, an’ I’ll show yer how ter take his scalp,” said Frank the wagon master.
The many Western authors who followed—Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, A. J. Guthrie—often treated the Indian with more respect (Grey’s 1925 novel The Vanishing American comes to mind). But each of those writers told us only what Indians were doing. It took Tony Hillerman to tell us what they were thinking and feeling.
Born and raised on a hard-scrabble farm in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, Tony Hillerman was white by accident of birth, but Indian by predilection. A newspaperman in Oklahoma, Texas, and finally Santa Fe, he turned to novels, he wrote, when “it became the most truthful way I could tell these stories.“ His tales of the Navaho Way, especially through the eighteen Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee novels, set a standard for cultural understanding.
If you are like me, you discovered Tony Hillerman in 1982, with the publication of The Thief of Time. This was what Hillerman called his “breakthrough book,” the first to hit the New York Times bestseller list. But it was Hillerman’s fourteenth book, and eighth novel featuring Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, or both. Hillerman was 56 years old.
So if you are a Hillerman fan, as I obviously am, you may have missed some of his early Joe Leaphorn novels, as well as his well-written, but amateurishly edited, memoir, Seldom Disappointed.
Navaho policeman Joe Leaphorn grew old along with Tony Hillerman, so when we meet him in The Thief of Time, he is almost sixty years old, a widower looking forward to retirement. What a surprise, then, to find him fit, forty, married and still a little unsure of himself in The Blessing Way, Hillerman’s first novel. Being a first novel, it stumbles a bit in the early going, but springs to life when Hillerman really gets into the character of Billy Nez, a young Navaho who believes in ghosts and witches, and convinces Joe that if you want to solve crimes among an ancient people, you should heed ancient ways.
All of the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee novels are, in fact, far more about clashes of culture than murder mysteries. Hillerman lets us know this early in The Blessing Way by describing a murder victim as “just another poor soul who didn’t quite know how to be a Navaho and couldn’t learn to act like a white.” This cultural conflict became palpable in the Jim Chee stories, where he struggles to learn the old medicine ways, while at the same time working as a modern policeman with a Navaho attorney girlfriend who has turned her back on her heritage.
In Seldom Disappointed you will find a shy, funny man who is so determined not to blow his own horn he almost convinces us that his gritty World War Two reminiscences are no big deal until we realize he got his “million dollar wound,” permanent disability, two purple hearts, and a Silver Star in those muddy French fields.
Hillerman’s humor bubbles over time and again in his memoir, sometimes in unexpected places. He describes being the only white man on a panel of Indian leaders convened in Santa Fe by the Smithsonian Institution. Hillerman wrote that when asked if they preferred to be called Native Americans or Indians, a Modoc said his people preferred to be identified as Modoc, but if you didn’t know the tribe, call them Indians. “The verdict was unanimous,” Hillerman wrote, “with the Apache adding they were only thankful that Columbus was looking for India and not Turkey.”
Perhaps it was because Hillerman was 75 years old and already a literary icon when he wrote these memoirs, but couldn’t his editors have helped him out just a little with fact-checking, verb tenses, and grammar? At one point Hillerman wrote that he and his Army buddies were able to get tickets to a Fats Domino concert in New York. Fats Domino was twelve years old at the time and had never left New Orleans. Hillerman obviously meant Fats Waller, but isn’t that why old men have editors? Another time he wrote that Oklahoma was a “dry” state until after World War II. Correct, but it stayed dry until 1959, almost fifteen years after World War II. Hillerman deserved better, but we should forgive the editors, I guess. Tony Hillerman would have, and invited them over for a beer on Saturday.
Jack Shakely is a senior fellow at the Center for Philanthropy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California. A native Oklahoman of Muscogee/Creek descent, he is the author of the historical novel The Confederate War Bonnet
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