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(More customer reviews)Tony Hillerman, who died last October, was a wonderful writer about the Southwest, New Mexico and Arizona in particular. His fiction celebrated many locations in both states, and Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, Najaho tribal policemen, seem to live in my imagination as real as Sherlock Holmes.
His daughter Anne has written a excellent travelog describing the locations where the two detectives did their work. His son-in-law Don Strel has done a wonderful job of photographing the various sites (there are over 150 full color photographs), and Anne's quotations from her father's writings greatly enhance the journey.
"The New York Times" obituary described how important both Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn were in Hillerman's writing:
"Hillerman's evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers. But although the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with a purpose, he often said, and that purpose was to instill in his readers a respect for Indian culture. The plots of his stories, while steeped in contemporary crime and its consequences, were invariably instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals for a soldier returned from a foreign war to incest taboos for a proper clan marriage.
"It's always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures," 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."
Hillerman began the series of 18 novels with The Blessing Way in 1970. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is experienced, cynical, logical and passionate about the Navajo Way. He believes in "the ordered, harmonious patterns of life that link man to the natural world. But he is not a fundamentalist in terms of religion;" he recognizes that all humans are frail and he is willing to make allowances for those weaknesses.
Sergeant Jim Chee appeared in the fifth novel in the series, and is younger and more idealistic, and seeks a more spiritual connection to Navajo tradition. "Over the course of several books, he studies to become a hataalii, a singer or medicine man. This ambition often creates friction between the religious faith he professes and the secular rules of criminal justice he is sworn to uphold."
Normally Leaphorn and Chee do not appear in the same novel but when they do, as in Skinwalkers (Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Novels) (1986), the two aspects of Navajo culture come to life.
This lovely picture book faithfully represents the physical surroundings of these novels, and a careful reader can see in the photographs hints of many aspects of the Navajo world as Tony Hillerman saw them. Anne Hillerman has done an excellent job of fleshing out many of those hints.
For example, she writes:
"Don and I head north toward Shiprock. We pass a store with a hay barn, horse trailers, bags of coal, and huge piles of wood for sale, a ready-mad setting for a Chee-Leaphorn novel."
At Zuni Pueblo, she describes a ritual: "I'll never forget the clear, bitterly cold November night, the crowd of mostly Indians, and the unearthly music." She quotes from her father's Dance Hall of the Dead which describes the same ritual, and Don Strel's photograph help bring the ritual to life.
If you have any interest in Hillerman as a writer or in Navajo culture in particular, this lovely book is a great introduction to the treasures of both.
Robert C. Ross 2009
Addendum: in addition to the novels linked above (a full list of the Chee and Leaphorn books appears in the first Comment), following are my favorite Hillerman books:
The Spell of New Mexico. Tony Hillerman did an exceptional job of writing the Preface and the Introduction, and in collecting the eleven other essays contained in this excellent compilation. If you have any interest in New Mexico, this book is essential reading.
The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories of the Southwest. Key words from the nine essays hint at the pleasures here: Dinetah, Rio Arriba County, Shiprock, Tierra Amarilla, Reies Tijerina, bubonic plague, Folsom Point, Las Trampas, Pecos Wilderness, Navajo mythology, Shalako, Black Death, Santa Fe County, rodents, Carson National Forest, Ales Hrdlicka, anthropologists, pressure flaking, Mount Taylor, pickup truck. Priceless Hillerman.
R.
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