Mystery books fall into many categories, but the most important are readable and unreadable. The distinction is all a matter of taste, for there are many very popular writers I put in the second group.
There’s a subcategory of the readable I call airport books. They’re the ones that are readable enough not to be rejected out of hand, but not the ones you race home to finish. You keep a mental list, so if you’re ever stuck somewhere with no amusements, you know at least you can buy and read one of them in comfort.
Tony Hillerman fell into this category after I read one of his books sometime in the early 1980's. I don’t remember now why I didn’t much like it. I don’t even remember which book was. All I remember is something hadn’t felt right.
This summer there’ve been evenings when I’ve done little more than watch clouds and smoke patterns across a small section of the Jemez where the Las Conchas fire was burning. I’ve realized many painters who claim to be showing the same place in different conditions really never looked carefully enough to see the many variations that exist in the sky. They show only the extremes, winter, summer, thunderstorm.
For unrelated reasons I read a little about Navajo medicine, enough to realize that it’s a very complicated subject, much more complicated than the ethnobotany of many people because staying well, or perhaps the fear of becoming ill, is a major preoccupation of their communal ceremonial life.
Looking again for something to read, I decided maybe it was time to revisit Hillerman. The Blessing Way was one of the books I’d bought back in the 80's and kept for that proverbial rainy day. From what little I’d read by anthropologists, Navajo rituals could be divided into those that dealt with sickness and those that dealt with other things. Blessing Way was the primary healing group and the most important of their chant ways.
Blessing Way, published in 1970, was Hillerman’s first mystery set among the Navajo. It’s more a book about white men set in an exotic setting than it is about native crime and punishment. It should have been called Enemy Way, for that’s the primary ritual described in the book. It’s the rite that would most attract the interest of outsiders for it’s the one that deals with problems caused by witch craft, rather than more mundane sicknesses.
The hero’s a white anthropologist who’s feeling sorry for himself because his wife had left him years ago for a man with more money and an exciting career. He’s the one who pursues and is pursued, trying to figure out what’s going on, all the time accompanied by a sweet young thing. The Navajo detective, Joe Leaphorn, is simply a tracker who provides information.
The villain is also white, a poor but brilliant young man who must make money before he can marry the sweet young thing.
As a first novel, it shows the mechanics of composition. I’ve since read his book written in 1973, Dance Hall of the Dead, in which his narrative skills had improved tremendously.
In the first, the plot device was an anomaly on Navajo land, an army radar station used to track missiles from Nevada to White Sands. The contrivance was much too complicated to be cleanly explained in the “all is revealed” scene. It was more a fantasy from the cold war or a conspiracy theorist’s view of the mafia, a baroque decoration that added nothing to the story.
The setting was more something seen from the kitchen window augmented by an encyclopedia. Early, before the murder victim dies, he’s looking at a “plateau’s granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away” while that night the “Wind People moved across the reservation” as the “wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau.”
These are the ways I, an educated Anglo would see these things. Despite the veneer of a phrase or two, I doubt either the perception of changing geology or the weather are terms or concepts for the typical Navajo, anymore than they are the way a fundamental Christian would see them who denies the evidence of evolution and climate change.
The primary Navajo background was provided by the son of a family relocated to California in the 1930's who only knows Navajo tradition second hand. As part of the radar interception conspiracy, he disguises himself as a wolf who turns into a man and slaughters livestock to inspire a fear of witchcraft in the area where they are working. The murder victim is a drunken, half-acculturated Navajo hiding in the area from the law for seriously injuring someone in a fight.
Leaphorn is still undeveloped, a suggestion for a hero being proffered by a hesitant writer for a public that’s never seen an Indian detective. He reminded me of Bony, the Australian aboriginal tracker created by Arthur Upfield, and apparently that was one of Hillerman’s inspirations for the character.
The tracking was perfunctory with most of the hunting being done by the white anthropologist. By 1973, Hillerman was able to use Leaphorn as the hero. The tracking sequences were much more detailed, probably drawing on Hillerman’s own childhood in rural Oklahoma and in the army.
In the second, the realization of the motive for the murder follows from Leaphorn’s experience as a human, not necessarily as an Indian. The writing skills weren’t completely polished enough yet to disguise important clues in unimportant details. Leaphorn’s thoughts seemed so out of character with the rest of the narrative, they made it easy to guess what was going on.
In many ways the later book is a rewrite of the first. The villain is another poor, bright white man who needs to make money to marry the sweet young thing, who this time accompanies Leaphorn on the chase. The anthropologists are present again as is another fantasy from thriller novels of the time, this time drug dealers who lurk in the wilderness.
The setting is the border between the Navajo and Zuñi. The murder victim is another lonely son of a drunken Navajo father, this time a teenager who wants to become a Zuñi. The real ritual here is the Zuñi Shalaka. The false is a subversion by an outsider of the kachinas used to scare the young boy. The descriptions of the land and weather are no better than lists of place names.
In the first book Hillerman got some things right. As a journalist he knows something about interviewing people. Getting information as quickly as his hero was simply the necessity of plot development. The scene in Shoemaker’s store feels right, and indeed, Hillerman says he spent a great deal of time in such places gathering information.
In the second novel I read, he got many more things right. It’s a book that makes you want to read more, though with a fear for that point when the books become too influenced by the marketing feedback and reader adulation that seem to destroy so many modern mystery writers after the fifth or sixth book.
Note: Biographical information from Wikipedia entry on Hillerman.
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