Master of Mystery--Sans Reservation : Hillerman Mixes Realities of Today With the Navajo Culture of Yesteryear in Novels

It was his first trip to Los Angeles’ Southwest Museum and mystery writer Tony Hillerman was taking notes in his mind, squirreling away details from every inch of his tour.

“This would be a great place to hide a body,” Hillerman said with delight as he surveyed some movable racks lined with woven baskets in a storage room. “Or to find one.”

Hillerman had come from his home in Albuquerque to speak Tuesday night to a sellout museum crowd about his unique novels, which combine the realities of modern-day life on the Navajo reservation of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah with the mysticism of the ages-old Navajo culture. His murder-solving heroes are two Navajo Tribal policemen, Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee.

Since his first Navajo-based book, “The Blessing Way,” in 1970, Hillerman has been steadily developing a large following in the Southwest and West, but only recently has national recognition seemed within reach.

Harper & Row, which has published all seven of Hillerman’s mystery novels, has increased the first printing of his 1988 book, “A Thief of Time,” to 75,000, and is sending him on a national book tour in June for the second straight year.

And Robert Redford has expressed interest in making a series of movies based on Hillerman’s mysteries. Northfork Productions, a venture combining Redford’s Wildwood film company and Toronto’s Cineplex-Odeon Inc., recently acquired the option on all of Hillerman’s early crime novels, with their Navajo police protagonists.

“I’ve seen some scripts based on my books and they were incredibly bad,” said Hillerman. “In fact, I wrote one. But having a guy like Redford, who has demonstrated a respect for the (Navajo) people, that’s different.”

As he continued to explore the museum, Hillerman was particularly intrigued by a computer system that can call up on a screen a picture of any artifact the museum has on record. “And I’m going to use it. I’m in the second chapter of my next book and it’s going to be set in a museum. I was going to use the Smithsonian, but this is such a great museum I might change it to this one.”

School for Girls

A big, broad-shouldered man of 62, Hillerman grew up in the tiny Oklahoma town of Sacred Heart, where he got his grade school education at St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic boarding school for Indian girls. His parents felt he would get a better education there than at the public school.

Talk about his roots led naturally to the author’s reasons for writing about the Navajo culture rather than the Seminole and Potawatomie tribes he grew up with in Oklahoma.

“The Seminoles and Potawatomies were cotton farmers like we were,” he explained, adding that his father also ran the general store. “They had pretty well lost track of their identity and their ethnic culture. I have a book I started 20 years ago and it has a couple of Potawatomies in it, but it isn’t about them. I haven’t finished it.

“I was attracted to the Navajo because they do have a culture that is alive and well and it’s interesting.”

Hillerman chose the mystery genre for his novels “because I wanted to write a novel, but didn’t know if I could go the distance. So, I thought I would try something shorter. I had been reading Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Raymond Chandler and was conscious of what you could do with the (mystery) form. I knew I was good at description, but I was concerned about plotting.” He does not outline his books, but writes chapter by chapter, with characters and scenes changing as he proceeds.

The author recalled that he saw his first Navajo people in 1945, when he was driving a truckload of pipe to the reservation from Oklahoma City. He had just come back from Germany where he served in World War II, receiving Silver and Bronze stars.

On his delivery route, Hillerman came across about 20 Navajos on horseback, engaged in a curing ceremony. He remembers watching with captivation.

“I was fascinated,” he said. “Forty years later, I am still fascinated.”

He intersperses a few words from the Navajo language in his novels--his detectives always begin dialogue with another Navajo, with the polite and respectful greeting “Ya-tah-hey.”

Since the mid-1940s, Hillerman has done countless hours of reading and research on Navajo culture and religion, and made friends with many who live on the reservation, interviewing them continuously about customs and traditions.

The Navajo, in turn, seem just as intrigued by Hillerman, a former newsman and journalism professor who is of German descent. A reporter for United Press International in New Mexico and later editor of the New Mexican in Santa Fe, Hillerman moved with his wife, Marie, and their six children to Albuquerque in 1963. He retired as a journalism professor at the University of New Mexico in 1985 to devote his full time to writing.

“I’ve run into Navajos who thought I was Navajo (because of his writing),” Hillerman said. “I have in-laws and relatives who are part-Indian, but I don’t think I have any Indian blood in me.”

Honored by Navajos

At the 1986 Navajo tribal fair in Window Rock, Ariz., Hillerman was given a plaque by the Navajo Tribal Council and acclaimed “a special friend of the Dineh” for his “accurate and sensitive portrayal of the strength and dignity of traditional Navajo culture.”

Hillerman, whose novels have been published in 10 foreign countries, is extraordinarily proud of the award--and of the fact that his books are required reading in Navajo schools.

“I talked with one boy about reading my books and he said, ‘We got to either read your books or drop out of school,’ ” Hillerman said. “Navajos are great at put-down humor, either on themselves or others.”

Navajo teachers and parents have told Hillerman that his books also have peaked an interest among Navajo youth in the Indian nation’s old customs and culture.

‘Bridging the Gap’

“His books are another way of bridging the gap of what’s happening in today’s world and the teaching of our culture,” said Jennie Joe, a Navajo anthropologist who serves as director of the University of Arizona’s Native American Research and Training Center in Tucson and is on leave from her position as a professor at UCLA.

“They are something students can identify with,” Joe said . “And an important vehicle to get students to read material they can relate to. They have an application outside normal leisure reading.”

The tribute the Navajo council presented to Hillerman, Joe said, is “like getting the Academy Award” from the tribe. “Hillerman gets involved in social causes and raises concerns about human rights issues. He’s more than someone just out there using the scenery and the people for a story.”

Although Hillerman’s third book, “Dance Hall of the Dead,” won the 1973 Edgar Allen Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, his following still consisted mostly of regional readers and avid mystery fans. But last year’s “Skinwalkers,” a story about Navajo witches, gave him a broader base of appeal. It also received France’s Grande Prix de Litterature Policiere for best foreign crime book.

“Tony’s had a long haul,” said Otto Penzler, a board member of the Mystery Writers of America, the 2,000-member international organization of which Hillerman became president last month. “But he’s getting there. He’s developing quite an audience.”

Penzler, who runs a mystery bookstore and Mysterious Press publishing group in New York City, said Hillerman’s crime novels have sold “extremely well” at his store over the years, but feels that with the last two, “The Ghostway” (1986) and “Skinwalkers,” Hillerman has “begun to take a firm foothold.”

Before “Skinwalkers,” Hillerman’s novels had been selling in the 10,000- to 15,000-book range, according to Dan Harvey, Harper & Row’s director of advertising and publicity. But Harper & Row now has 40,000 hardback copies of “Skinwalkers” in print and an additional 100,000 in paperback.

“For me, ‘Skinwalkers’ was the book that unlocked the power of his writing,” Harvey said of Hillerman. “He’s respectful of Indian culture and lore. He teaches (about Indians), but it’s very painless. There are not many writers who do that.”

Hillerman’s latest work, “A Thief of Time,” features anthropologists working at an ancient Anasazi ruin and pothunters involved in multiple murders that Hillerman’s two Navajo Tribal Police officers must solve. It is due out in June and has been named a Book of the Month Club alternate selection.

“He doesn’t write about mayhem and violence and blood and guts,” Harvey said. “He uses the keys of the Navajo culture to solve mysteries. It’s a powerful backdrop.

“All of us felt ‘Thief’ is the strongest (Hillerman) book and has the potential . . . for a major breakout and national recognition.”

No less a literary light than Robert Parker, author of the popular Spenser detective novels and inspiration for ABC-TV’s “Spenser: For Hire,” is a Hillerman fan. “I don’t think he’s selling as many books as he should be,” Parker said by phone from his home in Cambridge, Mass. “He should be on the best-seller list of the New York Times every time. But whether you make it, is a publisher’s triumph, not a writer’s. The publisher has to make a commitment. That happened to me about five years ago. Dell decided it was going to put me on the best-seller list.

“Hillerman writes good fiction about interesting people. He’s here in every way except public recognition,” Parker said. “Like Ross Thomas, he has insufficient recognition. But his time is coming, I’m sure. He has transcended the form of it (mystery story) with the input of Indian culture of the Southwest.”