Hillerman, Tony (1925—)

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Hillerman, Tony (1925—)

Since 1970, writer Tony Hillerman has developed the detective fiction genre with his highly regarded series of detective novels set on Navajo customs and culture. His two Native American detectives, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, pursue their investigations in and around the Navajo reservation that covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Hillerman's major innovation to detective fiction has been to transplant an essentially European American method of detection into the Native American cultural context. The effect is to reveal the method's shortcomings and address Native American concerns by showing that a detective must have intimate knowledge of the specific culture in which a crime takes place. Without that knowledge of cultural difference, the so-called analytical method of detection cannot be used successfully to solve a mystery. For a white writer even to consider entering such a difficult cultural arena as this is remarkable in itself, but criticism of Hillerman's work suggests he has done so with great sensitivity, subtlety, and no little success.

Hillerman was born and brought up in a small farming settlement near Konawa, Oklahoma. His father and uncle ran a farm and a general store during the 1930s, and Hillerman attributes his skill as a storyteller to the social gatherings on the front porch of the store; he describes his mother in particular as a great storyteller. He escaped dust-bowl-struck Pottawatomie County first by attending Oklahoma State University and later, having dropped out of his chemical engineering degree to help on the farm, by enlisting in the army and going to fight in Europe.

Extracts from his wartime letters home were published as a story by a journalist with the Daily Oklahoman, and it is this that pushed Hillerman toward writing as a career. After the war he returned to the University of Oklahoma where he gained a bachelor of arts degree in journalism. Suitably qualified, he found work as a journalist for newspapers and news bureaus in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. His decision to begin writing fiction coincided with his return to academic study, and after completing a master of arts degree in 1965, he became a faculty member at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he eventually became chair of the Department of Journalism.

Only one of Hillerman's fourteen published detective novels does not have a Native American setting or theme. In 1995 he departed a second time from the Navajo theme, and also from detective fiction, to write a novel, Finding Moon, based in Asia at the time of the fall of Saigon. He has written detective short stories and nonfiction essays and books on subjects such as the southwestern states, Navajo culture, and the process of writing. He has also written a children's book, edited various collections of essays about the West, and (with Rosemary Herbert) is the editor of a collection of American detective stories.

For a man who grew up in relative poverty and cultural isolation, Hillerman has achieved remarkable success, both in his career on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, but especially as a writer of detective fiction. Critical responses to his fiction have been almost universally good, and his books have sold well. Among the several awards he has won are the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award for Dance Hall of the Dead (1973) and the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award (1989).

—Chris Routledge