Arthur Upfield

My last experience reading Tony Hillerman wasn’t simply unpleasant, it was aggressively so. After I finished the fifth chapter of The Dark Wind, I didn’t want to go on. When this happens, I usually put a book in the garage or trash. It’s been a long time since I felt compelled to finish what I began.

In this case, people I liked had made so many positive comments, I really did want to read his books about the southwest. For days, I circled the table where the book was laying telling myself it really couldn’t have been that bad, I must have had a bad day at work or something. When I was finally able to force myself to resume reading it was OK, until the end when my negative reaction was even stronger.

After this unpleasant experience, I reread an Arthur Upfield mystery set in Australia featuring a half-native tracker policeman, Napolean Bonaparte. I’d always found them readable but forgettable, even forgetting the beginnings of books before I finished them. I wondered how Bony compared with Jim Chee, Hillerman’s semi-detribalized Navajo policeman.

I should say I never took Upfield’s books as accurate descriptions of life in the Australian outback. I have no idea what native life was like when he was writing and always suspected his half-breed hero was some white man’s idea of the best way to modernize the natives. I treated the characters as theater set pieces, not as human beings.

Hillerman writes in ways that make you want to take his characters as somehow real. Such an expectation raises the standard for developing motives for villains and secondary characters. If they don’t ring true, then the premise they are true is shaken, and then your willingness to believe Hillerman is lost. When you begin with an assumption of artifice, you’re more forgiving.

The novel I read was selected randomly. The Bushman Who Came Back, published in 1957, happened to be on top of a stack of books in storage. The plot was trivial but something you’d expect in isolated ranch life, a vain ranch hand kills a cook, the only white woman in the area, because she doesn’t take his advances seriously.

No motive was necessary and little time was spent developing one. There were four ranch hands and the ranch owner. In an Agatha Christie novel, any one of them could have been the killer. The isolation would have become oppressive. In this, you know who it is because it’s the only person mentioned more than once.

The point of the book was not “who done it” but finding a child who was taken by a Brit gone native. His motive for taking the girl before she discovered her dead mother was confused by alcohol and deliberate misdirection by the real murderer.

Much of Upfield’s novel was spent describing the ways Bony learned about a dry lake bed before he began his trek across it to rescue the child under conditions that were deteriorating as water from rains to the north was seeping underground and turning the narrow, solid path into swallowing mud.

In Hillerman, the chase scene involved following the villain to his night meeting with a drug dealer in a Hopi village temporarily deserted by ritual. From there he followed the pair to an area near an arroyo swollen by the first rain after a drought.

I think the reason I preferred Upfield to Hillerman here is that readers in the 1950's accepted a more leisurely pace than do modern ones. This allowed the Australian to spend time describing the weather, and thus build suspense. The American had to focus on people so the gully washer was as much a surprise to the reader as it was the villains.

Reader expectations of pacing also affected the ways the authors could handle a critical problem for their heroes, prying information from suspicious natives. Upfield could spend time showing Bony using increasingly abusive or manipulative techniques to eventually learn something. To speed the narrative, Hillerman bypasses the problem by having Chee use intermediaries, in this case a Hopi policeman.

I’m not sure what role success had in my reaction to the two books. Upfield rescued the girl and her captor before turning the real villain over to the police for public trial. The finale was a wedding scene. Hillerman failed to save anyone. Chee destroyed all the evidence in the final scene so only he and the reader are the ones who know the truth.

In the end, my reasons for preferring one to the other are simply matters of taste and temperament. First, I prefer plots that flow organically from situations rather than ones imposed from outside, even when the situations themselves are highly artificial.

Second, though both are readable, I preferred the way Upfield dramatized tracking and reading signs from nature. While I don’t read novels for information, I also happened to absorb a great deal more information about nature from Upfield than Hillerman. What little I’ve since read on Wikipedia later about Lake Eyre, a real place it turns out, didn’t undermine my trust, my willing suspension of disbelief, the way the burning tumbleweeds made Hillerman suspect.

Realism is a two-edged sword; melodrama carries its own cushion.