I lost a friend this week. He died at age 83 of Pulmonary distress. He was a friend I never met, but spent many hours enjoying his storytelling. I will miss his engaging tales of life in the Four Corners area. Most of my Utah friends will say, “Tony who?” Most of my New Mexico friends will agree. Tony Hillerman was a great story teller.
Tony Hillerman was a journalist who decided that if he was going to make up stories he might as well sell them as novels. He wrote mystery novels with a twist. The twist was the primary mystery solvers were two Navajo Policemen, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee. The books contained insights into the life and culture of the Navajo. One article said that an early book agent told Hillerman he should lose the Indian stuff.
Reading a Hillerman mystery was about traveling the Navajo Reservation and the area around it, Albuquerque, Farmington, Gallup. I can see in my mind’s eye Jim Chee’s trailer house down on the San Juan River in Shiprock. The reservation roads to the trading posts, the mountains, the canyons, the sheep meadows are not understandable to those whose life has been spent in the city. I have driven on many of those roads and hundreds more like them in the four corners. I could lose myself in a Hillerman book and day dream my way back to a simpler life.
Fiction is not my favorite read. But over the years there have been three authors whose books I bought on the day they were released. (Well at least on the day they showed up at Sam’s Club or Costco.) I didn’t even wait for the paperback version. Now one of them is gone. I will miss Tony Hillerman and the adventures of Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn.
Oh, the other two authors for those of you who don’t know are John Grisham and Tom Clancy.
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