I’ve now finished the second Jim Chee novel and can tell you why I don’t like Tony Hillerman novels. This is obviously the place for someone who disagrees or who hasn’t read his books to stop reading.
At the end of The Dark Wind, published in 1982, this is what I understand of the plot. A corrupt DEA agent created a situation in the New Mexico Penitentiary that led someone still unknown to kill the son of Jake West and his first wife. West had later married a Hopi woman who disappeared. The pock marked West remained in Arizona operating a trading post.
A drug deal goes bad when a courier plane crashes in an arroyo because Joseph Musket, the Navajo friend of West’s son, set up landing lights in the wrong location. The pilot and his passenger die. West shoots the man meeting them and hides the body in a vehicle driven up a feeder to the arroyo. He also kills Musket.
There’s never an explanation for why Musket set the lights wrong, if that was the plan of the drug dealers or if he was in some kind of double deal with the powerful cartel and the sorrowing West. Neither makes sense, and mere incompetence doesn’t seem likely either.
When someone representing the next layer of the cartel arranges a meeting to ransom the drugs, West kills him, but not his young assistant. The corrupt DEA agent appears, fatally wounds West who, in turn, kicks him into the now raging arroyo. Chee makes sure all evidence also washes away and that West, no longer able to defend himself, is known to have been guilty of Musket’s death.
Simple tales of vengeance. Except, of course, I can tell you nothing about Tom West or Joseph Musket except their arrest records, nothing that would explain the original incident that sets the plot in motion. Making “some bad friends in El Paso” is not an answer, if those friends are not identified. Reading bits in Wikipedia about the use of snitches to control convicts at the New Mexico penitentiary before the 1980 riots provide background missing from the book, but not a motive.
I also know nothing more about Jake West, beyond more examples of his doing magic tricks to amuse his customers.
Having imagined his “all is revealed” scene, Hillerman was unable to create a narrative that would explain the three men. He wastes no time having Chee talk casually to people who knew the men when they were children or young men, who knew them when they getting sucked into lives of petty crime. He talks to no one who knows any more about Jake, though such people obviously exist. I suspect gossip about strangers is easier to hear than that about the witchcraft Chee’s always hearing.
The excuse: Chee’s not supposed to be investigating the drug case, only a petty theft by Musket reported by Jake West.
Instead of developing motive, Hillerman filled 214 pages with a genuine subplot, one that grew out of conflicting Hopi and BIA solutions to drought in land being transferred from the Navajo to the Hopi in 1974.
He makes sympathetic comments about the uprooted Navajo, but doesn’t mention the leases to Peabody Coal made by Peter McDonald, the later convicted head of the Navajo Nation at the time, or the competing ones made by the Hopi The corruption, known but not proved when he was writing, would have been a more natural source for crime and intimidation than outside drug dealers.
The rest of The Dark Wind is filled with descriptions of the land that are intended to prepare the reader for the suddenly running arroyo, descriptions of Navajo traditions that are supposed to develop Chee as a character to replace the abandoned Joe Leaphorn, and descriptions of Hopi life Hillerman needs to set the scene where West murders the second level drug dealer.
I see from my book shelf that his later books get longer. I’ve read in interviews with Hillerman and descriptions of his work that he spends more time creating personal adventures for his two detectives. I suspect these take even larger roles, substituting for the development of suspect character and motive one expects in a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery.
When one writes in the optimistic American tradition this is what readers expect. They aren’t really interested in exploring evil, are quite happy to accept it in its most stereotypic form. For them the important narrative is the temptation and triumph of the hero, a secular version of John Bunyan or Saint Augustine. They identify with the detective or his lady friends and read the books as a kind of Perils of Pauline, or, if they are women, as more Nancy Drew adventures for their Bess or George selves.
In Hillerman’s early novels, a white crime story is transported to an unusual location, one so far that has changed from novel to novel. An exotic detective is available to help a white lady navigate the difficulties of the terrain without, in any way, compromising her reputation. In this case, the woman is the sister of the dead pilot who has been brought in by the second level drug dealer as a decoy. She gets her dose of adventure when she works a hotel switchboard to overhear the cartel delivering a message. She can then retreat to her room satisfied she has done what she can for her brother.
In contrast, the English writer had to create a world of potential evil that would draw in a reader who would recognize some of the characters, like Jane Marple continually said, as people like his or her neighbors. Detectives were simple conventions that often devolved into mere lists of odd traits in later books, Hercule Poirot’s penchant for straightening objects, Nero Wolfe’s orchards, Albert Campion’s owlish classes. Motive, the incident that pushed one over the edge of civilized behavior, was key.
Anomalies like Chee finding it easy to start tumbleweeds burning were the heart of the traditional mystery, the clues that alerted the reader to possible guilt. Agatha Christie has one story hinge on someone claiming to be scratched by a thornless rose, another dependent on knowing the names of dahlia cultivars. One had to be part of the world to understand its hidden language.
The fact tumbleweeds burn easily once a fire is started, but are difficult to ignite with a match unless they are compacted, is irrelevant to the American reader. He or she treats Chee as a guide who stages events that introduce them to the southwest, and really doesn’t care if things are true so long as they appear true.
It’s a fact tumbleweeds do burn. Anyone who’s driven through northern New Mexico in the fall has seen them burning. Who cares how a fire starts if the plot requires a fire, except, of course, those of us trained by traditional mysteries writers to spot clues who’ve also tried to burn Russian thistles.
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