![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the old Hopi villages at Shongopovi and Second Mesa. ![]() Take the opening passage of Listening Woman (1978), for example: You know how you’re always advised as a writer to start a mystery/suspense novel fast, pull the readers right into the plot, avoid undue description of weather, landscapes, and the like? Hillerman ignored that advice all the time, because to him the weather and landscapes were integral to the plot they were living, breathing characters just as much as any of the people. These were the Navajo Tribal Police, and their stories, in eighteen novels from 1970 to 2006, spun out in the canyons and mesas and under the heartbreaking blue sky of Arizona, New Mexico, and the Four Corners territory. But the cases also often involved witchcraft, sacred desecration, ghosts, and skinwalkers, and their unraveling required an intimate knowledge of intricate clan relationships, ancient rituals and mythology, and the beliefs and practices of a people centuries old. Many of their cases were the usual-murder, assault, robbery, missing persons-and were solved through clues, logical deduction, and sudden bursts of intuition. Tony Hillerman wrote police procedurals, but these were no ordinary police and no ordinary procedures. ![]()
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