Tony Hillerman boomed onto the New Mexico and national literary scenes in the early 1970s. His magical mystery novels and his provocative handling of Navajo society and culture entranced numerous readers. A superb storyteller, Hillerman produced a series of novels that grabbed expanding attention. In addition, he adroitly combined the mystery genre with positive, illuminating portraits of Native American peoples. Hillerman became a major literary participant in the new, supportive treatments of American indigenous individuals beginning to appear in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hillerman’s early years were spent in Oklahoma. Born there in 1925, Hillerman attended Oklahoma public schools with many young members of the Potawatomi tribe. About that experience, he wrote later, “knowing that Indians are just like everyone else” shaped his later accepting attitudes about Native Americans and his upbeat treatment of them in his writings.
After serving in World War II from 1943 to 1945, Hillerman began attending the University of Oklahoma. There, he finished with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism in 1948. He also met and eventually married Marie Unzner, a fellow student at Oklahoma. Eventually they were the parents of six children, one biological and five adopted.
Hillerman launched his career as a journalist in 1948 and four years afterwards moved his family to Santa Fe. Fourteen years later he and his family moved to Albuquerque, where he gained a master’s degree in journalism at the University of New Mexico and then taught journalism at the university from 1966 to 1987. Alongside his teaching, Hillerman began to write novels.
Hillerman’s first novel in his long Navajo series, The Blessing Way, appeared in 1970. The major character in his initial novel, as he would be in the next two novels, was Joe Leaphorn, a Navajo policeman. In the fourth novel of the series, Hillerman introduced Jim Chee, another member of the Navajo police. Chee was the central character in the subsequent two novels. But the seventh work in the Navajo series, Skinwalkers (1986), brought the two policemen together in one novel, an artistic system Hillerman used later. Altogether, Hillerman published more than 30 books, including 18 in the Leaphorn-Chee series. His daughter, Anne, continued the series after Hillerman’s death in 2008.
Skinwalkers furnishes a revealing, emulative example of Tony Hillerman’s first-rate talents as a writer of mysteries focusing on Native Americans. A close study of Hillerman’s novel and his handling of a vicious set of murders, his treatment of his two leading characters, and his storytelling talents tells us much about why he attracted so much attention and praise as a writer.
In the opening pages of his superb novel Skinwalkers introduces his central figures and the mysteries they face. Leaphorn and Chee are confronted with several murders on the reservation, and two taxing questions emerge: Why should these terrible events occur, and who were the guilty parties? These questions remain in the novel and power its plot until the closing pages.
In facing these major anxieties, Leaphorn and Chee reveal their personalities. Leaphorn, a middle-aged married man, has served as a Navajo policeman for two decades. He is a steady, motivated detective and shows his warm-heartedness in his sympathies toward his wife who he thinks may be suffering from mental loss. Chee, equally ambitious and insightful, is newer to the police work and worries that his girlfriend, now in the Midwest, may not return. Interestingly, neither couple has children.
In their search for answers to the mysterious murders and murderers, Leaphorn and Chee face interesting Navajo cultural questions. Are these terrible happenings evidences of “skinwalkers,” or witches, among the tribe? Both detectives seem unbelievers in these strange spiritual systems, but they realize that other Navajos believe witches do poison tribal members and sometimes are themselves guilty of such terrible crimes. Side by side, the two Navajo policemen, follow usual courses in seeking out criminals, but also accept that other members of the tribe may be skinwalkers, driven by their weird social and psychological impulses.
A clear, major draw to Hillerman’s novel is his ability to keep an enticing mystery — or, in this case, a set of mysteries — before his readers, leading them to nonstop reading. Actions, ideas, scenic descriptions, and sociocultural explanations are dovetailed into a top-ranked mystery novel about a well-known Indian tribe.
Skinwalkers quickly became a bestseller, the bestselling Hillerman novel up to this point. Readers and reviewers saluted the author’s abilities to tell a story. Many readers seemed also to have become story-catchers, seeing, accepting, and enjoying what Hillerman had intended and achieved in Skinwalkers. Realizing how much readers enjoyed his depictions of Leaphorn and Chee, Hillerman placed them at the center of most of his subsequent novels.
Hillerman continued publishing volumes in his Navajo series. And the novels attracted more and more attention. So successful were the sales of his novels that Hillerman was, later in his career, ranked as the 22nd richest person in New Mexico. In subsequent years, Hillerman wrote a memoir, books about the Southwest, and other kinds of volumes.
Tony Hillerman deserved — and still deserves — the attention and accolades he received as a writer. He was a first-rate storyteller who knew how to make use of the popular genre of mysteries and how to present them with interesting characters and revealing — and memorable — information about Native American culture. Hillerman richly merits being named among the most important New Mexican writers.