Wed 29 Feb 2012
What more painless way is there to learn about another culture than to read Tony Hllierman’s Navajo series. I suggest you start with the first book in the Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn series, The Blessing Way (1970).
This was Hillerman’s first mystery, though it’s not clear whether when he wrote it he intended it to be the first of a series. It is largely a thriller, with Leaphorn off stage during much of the action, about a pair of anthropologists being stalked in the desert and mountains of the Navajo Reservation in Northeast Arizona and Northwest New Mexico. Its pluses are its authenticity about Navajo ways and an exciting climax.
Before writing another Leaphorn book, Hillerman wrote a non-series mystery, The Fly on the Wall (1971), which is even better than the Navajo books I’ve read. Written a couple of years before Watergate, he made use of his own newspaper background to tell how an investigative reporter tries to solve a mystery involving murder and corruption in a Midwestern state capitol. It barely lost out to Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal for that year’s Edgar.
Dance Hall of the Dead (1973) deservedly did win an Edgar. While having Leaphorn solve three brutal murders, Hillerman gives us many insights into the Navajos and their neighboring tribe, the Zuñis, especially the rite of the Shalako dancers, the culmination of their ceremonial year.
Again, the ending is suspenseful, but along the way there is more real detection, with Leaphorn making deductions from physical clues like a Native-Born Sherlock Holmes.
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
March 1st, 2012 at 11:46 am
The first Hillerman book I read was The Thief of Time when it was offered as part of the Quality Paperback Book Club (back in my days of book club addiction). I was so enthralled by the story and the Navajo culture that I went to the Chicago Public Library and read all the books I could find and I think I even read them in order. My favorites are still SKINWALKERS, PEOPLE OF DARKNESS and the one about the guy who dressed up like the Kachina doll (can’t recall the title). I started to lose interest in the series after COYOTE WAITS and stopped reading them altogether when they got a little repetitive and dull. But there is no doubt that these books are noteworthy for cultural insights and for a return to the “backwoods” kind of detective like November Joe and Boney, Arthur Upfield’s great Aussie detective.
March 1st, 2012 at 1:49 pm
I hate to say it, but there are a lot of long-running mystery series in which the stories eventually become repetitive and a little dull. If you think about it, even the great ones fall into the same trap, with few exceptions.
There are a couple of reasons, I suppose. The author finds it harder and harder to come up with new situations to put his characters in, and/or over time he or she begins to lose the creative spark that the early books had. No surprise either way. But both the readers and the publisher want more and more, and sometimes there isn’t more.
In any case, for a reader coming across a new author, the choice is easy. Read his/her earliest books first. Maybe not necessarily in order, but for many authors, it’s hard to go wrong if you do.