Tony Hillerman Illuminates A Mystery: Himself

Josh Shaffer
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

   His mysteries draw readers into red-rock canyons, introduce them to medicine men and born-again crooks who drop clues along cliff walls and into the jawbones of ancient Anasazi skulls.
   Tony Hillerman launched into novels after life provided him with a dozen plots: the Navajo curing ceremony he witnessed as a World War II soldier, the wartime explosion that burned him and broke his bones, the last request of a killer on New Mexico’s Death Row. Find my mother, the doomed man said.
   Now 76 with a long string of bestsellers behind him, Hillerman stands in front of his own lens with his memoir, “Seldom Disappointed.’’
   It traces Hillerman from Oklahoma farm boy to wounded soldier, from chief of New Mexico’s two-man United Press International bureau to creator of Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee, beloved Navajo cops who inhabit his pages.
   “Usually, I can take a look at a crowd and kind of tell something about what they’d like to hear,’’ he says from his Albuquerque home. “I once did a talk for the Independent Petroleum Association. Two minutes into the speech, I knew there wasn’t a son of a [gun] out there who had ever read fiction. It was a long 30 minutes, for them and me both.’’
   Hillerman yearned for fiction as a young journalist, sketching plots in his head, finding stories in the world around him. He imagined an American stumbling into the diamond mines of the Belgian Congo, finding himself immersed in lawless chaos.
   “I always wanted to write that great American novel,’’ he says. “A guy learning who he was in the fiery furnace.’’
   Opportunity arose while Hillerman was still a UPI reporter, struggling with relentless budget cuts from on high. He found himself interviewing a murderer about to become the first to die in New Mexico’s gas chamber.
   He expected the standard innocence plea, but it didn’t come.
   The man hadn’t known his mother. Her drunken companion had tossed him out of the family’s trailer as a young boy, and he subsisted in a friend’s garage.
   On his 12th birthday, the boy set out to find the mother he lost, but found the trailer gone. All he wanted now was a chance to be buried in the hometown he couldn’t name.
   “How about that for a story?’’ Hillerman says. The convict later turned up in his fiction.
   The publishing world took slowly to his Navajo characters. Hillerman’s early work met with this criticism: “Get rid of all that Indian stuff.’’
   “I really did think it was good advice,’’ he says.  “Nobody then gave a damn about the Indians. There wasn’t any interest in them.’’
   In the late ‘60s, he says, even Carlos Castaneda, now known for his stories of the Yaqui, was just starting to experiment.
   Hillerman’s Navajo defy stereotypes. They earn master’s degrees and practice law, all the while keeping traditions. Jim Chee moonlights as a medicine man and takes sweat baths to ward away ghosts.
   The depictions are real enough that Hillerman is sometimes mistaken for a Navajo, a misconception he considers an honor. It is the richness of this culture, he says, that makes his books endure.
   “I’d like to say it’s because I’m a dandy writer. A heck of a lot of people apologize and say, ‘I don’t normally read mysteries.’ A lot of people, and I’m one of them, feel like they’re wasting their time if they don’t learn anything.’’