Tony Hillerman left great legacy
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The world is a poorer place today because one the great American writers is no longer with us. Tony Hillerman, author of the Navajo Tribal Police novels, died Sunday at 83.
To mystery fans, and I count myself among them, he wrote books that not only are great mysteries but also great literature in the sense that one came to know the characters he wrote about as if they were real people living just down the road.
He especially captures the nature of the Navajo people in his books, which are set in the high country of Arizona and New Mexico. He paints the Navajo as a people of contrast — living as modern Americans, and also as keepers of social, economic and religious traditions which stretch back before the first white people ever set foot in the Americas.
I started reading Tony Hillerman books before I moved to Arizona, and when I finally did move there, I felt I already knew the place, so true are Tony’s books to the land and the people. When I began to meet Navajos, mostly among the arts community of Prescott, I found them to be as Tony depicts them — people of great depth and humor.
He doesn’t coddle the Navajo characters in his books. Some of them turn out to be alcoholics and crooks. Some of them are practitioners of the complex Navajo religion. Some of them are scientists, lawyers doctors.
One of his principal characters, Jim Chee, constantly wrestles with his Navajo identity. A sergeant in the Navajo police, he also is a medicine man who falls in love with two women who want him move away from Navajo land. It is a tribute to Tony’s skill that the reader knows Chee will make the right choices.
