|
Tony Hillerman is past president of Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award, the National Media Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Public Service Award from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Nero Wolfe Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, an honorary life membership in the Western Literature Association, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére. In addition to his election to Phi Beta Kappa, Tony Hillerman has been named Doctor of Humane Letters at Arizona State University and at Oregon's Portland State University. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Welcome
When I needed such a cop for what I intended to be a very minor character in THE BLESSING WAY, this sheriff came to mind, I added on Navajo cultural and religious characteristics, and he became Leaphorn in fledgling form. Luckily for me and Leaphorn and all of us, the late Joan Kahn, then Mystery Editor of what was then Harper & Row, required some substantial rewriting of that manuscript to bring it up to standards and I--having begun to see the possibilities of Leaphorn--gave him a much better role in the rewrite and made him more Navajo.
Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of PEOPLE OF DARKNESS make sense--and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever's "Days of Old" modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in universe of consumerism.
I'll confess here that Leaphorn is the fellow I'd prefer to have living next door and that we share an awful lot of ideas and attitudes. I'll admit that Chee would sometime test my patience, as did those students upon whom I modeled him. But both of them in their ways, represent the aspects of the Navajo Way, which I respect and admire. And I will also confess that I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood.
--- Tony Hillerman
Browse Tony Hillerman's books on Amazon.com.
© Copyright 2002, HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
