COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

AFTER 10 YEARS IN THE SOUTHWEST, we moved back to Florida a couple of years ago. I love it here -- I grew up in Florida -- but I love the Southwest as well. When I feel homesick for the place where you can see Earth's bones and the stars in their millions, when I long for the coyote's song, the next best thing to a plane ticket is a Tony Hillerman tale.

In a dozen novels set on and around the 25,000 square miles of the Navajo Reservation, Hillerman has enchanted readers with his loving descriptions of the landscape of northern Arizona and New Mexico and with his knowledge of and empathy with the cultures of the Navajo, the Hopi and the Pueblo tribes scattered along the Rio Grande and its tributaries. His series characters, Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, have grown into old friends so real that, I hear, tourists sometimes ask for them at NTP headquarters.

Hillerman is an Anglo, but he comes by his knowledge honestly, through a lifetime of friendship with and study of Native Americans. Born in Oklahoma in 1925, he grew up next door to a Potowatomie reservation, going to school with kids from that tribe and the Seminoles. After combat duty and serious injuries in World War II, Hillerman worked as a journalist for 14 years and as an academic at the University of New Mexico for another 20, retiring in 1987.

The first of his mysteries, The Blessing Way, was published in 1970, and he has published them, to the delight of a growing legion of fans, ever since. Despite indicating several times in the last decade that he had tired of the series and would write no more, he returned to Chee and Leaphorn even after writing a novel set in Southeast Asia (Finding Moon) a few years back.

Hillerman's mysteries are intricately interwoven with his portrait of Navajo culture, its traditions and its complex relationship to the larger culture that surrounds it. How accurate is that portrait? Well, despite the fact that the Dineh have been analyzed by outsiders to the point of absurdity -- the old joke goes that a Navajo nuclear family consists of a husband and wife, three kids, a grandmother and an anthropologist -- they recognized Hillerman as a "Special Friend of the Dineh" for the depiction of their people in his novels.

Both because of that rich picture of a fascinating culture and because of the pleasures of getting to know Leaphorn and Chee, my advice to new readers of Hillerman is to start at the beginning, with The Blessing Way, and work your way through the series. In the early books, Hillerman alternates between his two main characters, focusing on the older, intensely rational, happily married Leaphorn in some and in others on Chee, who is an intriguing mix of modern cop and traditional mystic.

In several of the later novels, Chee and Leaphorn work together. That's the case in Hillerman's most recent book, The Fallen Man, published in 1996. It begins with the discovery of a skeleton on a tiny ledge high on Ship Rock, a massive formation of volcanic rock that sails into view from all over the Four Corners country. For rock climbers, it's among the greatest challenges; for Navajos, it is a sacred site.

The skeleton is soon identified as Harold Breedlove, a local rich boy who has been missing for 12 years. His widow lives nearby on a ranch he inherited just days before he disappeared. The elderly Navajo who guided Breedlove and his new bride into Canyon de Chelly the day Harold vanished has just been shot by an unknown gunman.

Jim Chee, who has been appointed acting lieutenant and is discovering he hates administration, is assigned to work the case, when he's not wrestling with vacation schedules or investigating cattle rustling. When Leaphorn, newly retired, shows up to offer his insights into Breedlove's original disappearance, Chee isn't sure whether he's glad to have the help or intimidated by the "Legendary Leaphorn." What's more, he's not getting along with his girlfriend, attorney Janet Pete. And everything, as Leaphorn says, is related to everything else.

The Fallen Man is a fine, fast-paced mystery, and Leaphorn and Chee are as interesting as ever -- one of my favorite things about this series is how realistically Hillerman's characters have grown and aged. Here are two more favorite pieces of their lives in the Navajo Way:

Dance Hall of the Dead (1973) -- At 13, Ernesto Cata has been chosen for one of the highest honors his Zuñi community can bestow -- he will dance the part of the Little Fire God in the holy Shalako ceremony. But one afternoon, when he goes out to run on the mesa in training for the grueling ceremony, he does not come home. Searchers find only a huge pool of blood. And Ernesto's best friend, a mystical Navajo boy named George Bowlegs, a boy with a reputation for being a little odd, is missing, too.

When Ernesto's body is discovered, his head nearly severed by a blow from some sharp weapon, Joe Leaphorn takes on the investigation and the search for George. It leads him to George's alcoholic father, to a commune of hostile hippies, and to an archaeological dig where a graduate student, under the direction of one of the most famed archaeologists in the world, has discovered artifacts that could revolutionize ideas about early man.

This novel is rich in background about both Navajo and Zuni cultures. Hillerman also uses here a pattern that recurs effectively throughout this series: Leaphorn solves the case because he understands so well both Native American traditions and the ways of the contemporary world. Unraveling the connections among them is what leads him to Ernesto's killer, and those connections are the source of justice as well.

A Thief of Time (1988) -- Things are out of harmony. Joe Leaphorn has tendered his resignation from the Navajo Tribal Police and is reeling from the death of his adored wife, Emma. Jim Chee's Anglo girlfriend has left him to go to graduate school and he too is adrift.

Chee thinks his assignment to track down a backhoe stolen from the tribal motor pool is a minor annoyance. Leaphorn goes along for the ride when a friend checks out an anonymous tip that a contract archaeologist at Chaco Canyon is stealing priceless Anasazi pottery. But it turns out the archaeologist herself is missing, and when Leaphorn, feeling a faint stir of interest in the case, tracks down a lead to a Navajo preacher of the Jesus Way, he discovers Chee outside the same revival tent, tracking down that backhoe.

Soon, thanks to Chee's instincts and Leaphorn's logic, connections emerge. So do corpses, ancient and all too fresh. And then there are the threads that lead to a prominent Mormon rancher, a man whose family was slaughtered by his schizophrenic son many years ago, a son who was never found, a case Leaphorn remembers well.

This is one of Hillerman's best, intricately plotted and filled with the spirit of the Southwest and of its people, those long gone and those very much alive. It is a case in which, as Leaphorn thinks, "sometimes something might be gained by seeming to know less than you did."

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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