Author Uses Navajo Lore in Mysteries : Books: Tony Hillerman says a wrong turn put him on the right literary track. He sees his novels as weapons against cultural ignorance.

Among the prizes and awards author Tony Hillerman relishes, his favorite is a plaque he received in the 1980s from the Navajo Tribal Council.

“It’s for my sensitive and accurate depiction of traditional Navajo culture,” he said. “I’m really proud of it. That’s just exactly what I try to do.”

Hillerman writes mystery novels for people who like good writing and puzzle-solving wrapped up in interesting details about an unfamiliar culture. (They’re the type of people who read Arthur Upfield mysteries set in Australia, Robert Van Gulick’s mysteries of ancient China and H. R. F. Keating’s tales of Inspector Ghote in present-day Bombay, India.)

The first of Hillerman’s 10 mystery novels about American Indians, “The Blessing Way,” was published in 1970. “I thought: ‘What an opportunity this gives me to grind this ax of mine.’ That ax is putting a dent in the ignorance of Americans about Native American culture.”

He’s not an Indian, just a friend of Indians. “I like them and they like me. We get along fine.

“I’m not out there as a researcher in cultural anthropology, but I’m always reading stuff. Somebody publishes a paper, I read it. It’s grist for my mill. I’m interested.”

Crimes in Hillerman’s books these days are solved by Lt. Joe Leaphorn, a widower, and young officer Jim Chee, a bachelor, of the Navajo Tribal Police. They patrol an area bigger than West Virginia.

Witches, whom the Navajo call skinwalkers, turn up in some of the books. “Leaphorn believes in the problems witches cause,” Hillerman said. “As far as their powers go, no. He’s a rationalist, I guess you’d say.” Chee is more of a believer in skinwalkers, spells and spirits.

One book, “The Dark Wind,” has been made into a movie, with Fred Ward as Leaphorn and Lou Diamond Phillips as Chee. It is scheduled for release early next year.

After serving in World War II, Hillerman, at age 20, was driving a truck. By mistake he drove onto the Navajo reservation and witnessed an Enemy Way ceremony, a cleansing ritual for warriors returning from battle. He began to read about Navajo culture and to visit the reservation. The friendship had begun.

He enrolled at the University of Oklahoma and earned a degree in journalism. He worked for newspapers in Oklahoma and New Mexico, got a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of New Mexico at 38, and stayed on to teach.

He wrote “The Blessing Way” while teaching. Because he had a family, he didn’t quit teaching until 1986.

Tony and Marie Hillerman live in Albuquerque, as do four of their six children.

Joan Kahn, his editor at Harper & Row for his first six books, gave him a lot of good advice, Hillerman said. “She wanted the books to be right and not drag. She didn’t care whether anybody bought them or not. I learned a lot from her. About the time I had it pretty well down, she went to another publisher.

“The next editor was interested in selling the books. So they started sending me out on book tours. I think they thought ‘The Ghostway’ (his seventh Indian mystery) might make it on the best-seller list. It didn’t.”

“A Thief of Time” did, in 1988. So did “Talking God” in 1989 and “Coyote Waits” in 1990.

“A Thief of Time” opens with an anthropologist searching for pottery in Anasazi ruins and goes on to describe the plundering of ruins by looters. The Anasazi, ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians, intrigue Hillerman. They deserted their pueblos and nobody knows why or where they went.

“When the Spanish got there they found empty Anasazi pueblos up and down the Rio Grande,” Hillerman said.

Hillerman was in New York recently to be named a grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America. Then he went to France for his first book tour abroad.

“I’ve got a really good French translator. I’m getting well read there, apparently,” he said.

“You’re totally at the translator’s mercy. In Japan, in one book, I had a cop stopping at a Conoco station. They translated it as a police station. He stopped to call a police station. It created a certain amount of confusion.”

A Boston reviewer said Hillerman’s books reminded him of Upfield’s.

“I went to the library and checked that out,” Hillerman said. He was amazed to find that he had read Upfield’s works serialized in magazines as a boy in Sacred Heart, Okla. “I used to sell the Saturday Evening Post. . . . I remembered his vivid descriptions of the Australian Outback.”

Hillerman is contributing to “The Perfect Murder,” a new book in which he and four other authors parody themselves, suggesting “a classy murder method.”

Also just out is “Hillerman Country,” featuring photographs by his late brother, Barney, and Hillerman’s text about the Southwest they both love. He also wrote the “connective tissue” for “Best of the West,” a collection of memoirs, government reports and letters, including George Armstrong Custer’s last letter to his wife.

His next mystery, Hillerman said, will be about Hopi Indians and clown fraternities. “The Hopis don’t have internal police to impose tribal mores on everybody. (They) developed these clown fraternities. They’re sort of thought police. They show up at religious ceremonies and mock and make fun of things going wrong. Kids are scared to death of them.

“I think it’s striking. We enforce our ethics and mores with guns and force. They enforce with laughter and mockery and scorn.

“Navajos would try to cure a wrongdoer. He would be the patient. He’d have to admit he was out of line.”