Tony Hillerman Bio.pdf

is a "strong, neatly worked novel with a shocking climax," according to Sadler.
Writing in People, Campbell Geeslin noted that Hillerman "packs his novels with
compelling details of Navajo life and beautiful descriptive passages about the
land and weather." Geeslin concluded, "Chee . . . is a perfect guide through
Hillerman's effective, dreamlike world."
Skinwalkers was, according to Michael Neill in People, Hillerman's "commercial
breakthrough," selling 40,000 copies in hardcover and 100,000 in paperback. Yet
it was his next title, A Thief of Time, that secured him a place on the best-seller
charts and propelled Hillerman to national attention. Beginning with a murder at
an Anasazi historical site, the book features a psychopathic killer and more
development of the relationship between Leaphorn and Chee. In this novel,
Leaphorn has to cope with his wife's death as well as his own impending
retirement. As Hillerman's main recurring characters, Leaphorn and Chee serve a
dual function. On one level, the officers act as guides into a world of traditions
and customs unfamiliar to most readers; on another level, Hillerman's depiction
of Leaphorn and Chee's day-to-day struggles--with bureaucratic red tape,
discrimination, and intimate relationships--helps readers understand the difficulty
of living in what amounts to two worlds with different, and often contradictory,
sets of rules.
This culture clash is not always depicted in a negative light, however. In books
such as Listening Woman and The Ghostway, Leaphorn and Chee use both
standard police procedures and their special knowledge of tribal customs to solve
a wide variety of baffling crimes. In Listening Woman, Leaphorn finds clues to a
double murder in a group of ritual sand paintings. An oddly-performed death
ceremony puts Chee on the trail of a missing girl and a killer in The Ghostway.
Stolen pottery from a "lost" tribe becomes the focus of Leaphorn's investigation
into artifact trafficking in A Thief of Time, a book that is at once "careful with the
facts," and one that "transmutes knowledge into romance," as a contributor to
Time magazine wrote. Karl G. Fredrikkson and Lilian Fredrikkson called A Thief
of Time "probably Hillerman's best novel," in the St. James Guide to Crime and
Mystery Writers, and they further noted, "History and tradition play integral parts
in all Hillerman's novels and especially in this one." The Fredrikksons concluded
that the main theme of all Hillerman's work "is the clash between the Navajo Way
and the so-called American Way of Life, between tradition and the emptiness of
modern society."
As with Dance Hall of the Dead and A Thief of Time, Hillerman's novel Talking
God deals with anthropology. This time, both Chee and Leaphorn desert the
reservation for Washington, D.C., in search of missing Native American artifacts.
"The plot," noted Louise Bernikow in a Cosmopolitan review, "comes to a
crashing finale in the Smithsonian Institute, and the evil that has disturbed the
spirits of the Navajo is laid to rest." Bernikow also commented that Hillerman's
story "is complicated, emotional, and incredibly suspenseful." In Coyote Waits,
an officer in the Navajo Tribal Police, Delbert Nez, is gunned down, and
Leaphorn and Chee set out to find his killer. It looks as if a Navajo shaman might
be responsible for the killing, until other suspects turn up, including a Vietnamese
teacher. Behind it all lurks the mythic Navajo character representing chaos, the