IN JUNE 2007 , I had the pleasure of accompanying Tony Hillerman to two events. Dad was 82 at the time.
First, we went to a reunion of a group he fondly referred to as “ink stained wretches,” men with whom he had worked when he was editor of The [Santa Fe] New Mexican in the 1950s. (I’d been a reporter and editor at the same newspaper myself for 13 years.) As I negotiated the traffic between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, past casinos and new housing developments, Dad talked. In addition to spontaneous critiques of my driving, he reminisced about how the road and the sights along it had changed. He and Mom had been driving this highway for more than fifty years, beginning before engineers smoothed the curves, eased the steepness, and ultimately transformed it into part of Interstate 25 that runs from the landscape of Sinister Pig near Las Cruces to the Colorado border.
Tony Hillerman loved the red rock landscape near Gallup, New Mexico.
“Back then, we could drive for miles without seeing a car. Some of the cars we did see were off on the shoulder. Steaming. Overheated from climbing La Bajada [a steep incline about twenty miles south of Santa Fe].” He studied the view out the window, Santo Domingo Pueblo land passing by at eighty miles per hour and the blue ridge of mountains far west on the horizon. “I always loved this stretch of highway,” he told me. “Look at the Jemez [Mountains] over there.” He paused, ever the storyteller. “Of course, in those days, we couldn’t drive so fast.”
Our second outing came the following week. The Association for Communication Excellence brought its annual conference to Albuquerque and honored Dad with an award. A few intrepid souls brought copies of his books to the session, and, not surprisingly, Dad signed and chatted instead of eating the lunch I’d gathered for him at the buffet tables. Pleasant conversation always nourished him.
When plates had been cleared, the conference organizer invited him to join her onstage to talk about his life and career. Dad mentioned his newest projects: a pending Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn novel with mercury poisoning as a subplot, and a nonfiction book, Confessions of an Ink Stained Wretch. That book would answer fans’ frequently asked questions: Questions such as his schedule for writing and where he found ideas.
“Sitting at a computer is the place for taking a clunky sentence and smoothing it out, making it read better,” he told the moderator. “I do some of my best writing in my head before I fall asleep for my afternoon nap. I recommend that!” The audience chuckled. “In the book I’ll talk about the way I write, think things through, say, when I’m driving on a familiar road.”
He explained how, in days past, he would head out to the Navajo reservation, park in a shady spot, and sit, thinking his thoughts surrounded by the gift of natural beauty, away from the pesky telephone. (Dad never had a cell phone and strongly disagreed with the notion that a person should be reachable at any time, anywhere on the planet.) His inspiration came when he found quiet, a rare commodity for many years in the house where he and Mom raised a family of active kids while Dad kept a journalist’s grueling schedule. Later, he juggled the demands of working simultaneously as a teacher, department head, and college newspaper advisor with his publisher’s requests for revisions and new manuscripts.
The search for quiet often led him to the vast empty country that I’ve nicknamed “Hillerman’s Landscape.”
This book grew from my desire to immerse myself in my father’s world, part real, part imagined. I wanted to stand where he stood and see what he saw. Many of Dad’s descriptions in the eighteen books featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal police ring with such elegance that they made me wonder: How much was his writerly skill and how much, in fact, was the geography itself. When a fine writer meets a fine landscape, who could accuse him of exaggeration?
I’d visited some of the sites before, the familiar stars of Indian country: Painted Desert, Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, Grand Canyon. I’d been to Gallup, Farmington, Zuni. I had seen Ship Rock and Mount Taylor. Other sites were new to me. This project provided a wonderful opportunity to see these places as my husband, photographer Don Strel, took countless photos. The book connected me to the two most important men in my life.
When we set out, I expected to be impressed by the landscape, but I didn’t expect to find so many people whom Dad’s words had touched. After his death, the overwhelming kindness of people who felt connected to me because of their love of Dad’s stories often moved me to tears.
Several months after Dad died I received an e-mail from a woman who shines shoes at the Albuquerque Airport. When Dad flew for various book events, he’d stop by for a shine and conversation. She hadn’t been a reader, but over the years became a fan. She put a paperback in her purse for him to sign. Time went by and the novel grew dog-eared, so she took the book home. The next week Dad showed up, and as she polished his shoes she told him about the book. When she was done, he went to the closest magazine stand, bought his collection of short stories, The Great Taos Bank Robbery, and signed it for her with his usual flair. “I am still in awe of that most generous gesture,” she wrote. “To me, that spoke volumes as to the kind of person he was, a true gentleman!”
For most of Tony Hillerman’s favorite landscape, highway travel is the only way to get there. After some research, Don and I start our series of road trips. We head out through the shallow brown valley of the Rio Puerco, country populated by rattlesnakes, roadrunners, hardy desert plants, and people who commute into Albuquerque or Grants. The highway rises through cliffs of Jurassic sandstone formed some 200 million or so years ago, dramatic scenery that serves as the platform for one of Dad’s favorite anecdotes. I recall it from hearing him tell the story many times:
Traveling on a train to Los Angeles, I walked to the observation car to take in the full expanse of the same landscape. The tracks parallel the highway for much of the route from Albuquerque to Gallup. Towering cumulus clouds cast deep shadows that moved across the plain and canyons. A thunderstorm growing over Mount Taylor looked ominous and powerful and the low angle of the late afternoon sun made the desert glow red.
I shared the car with two men from elsewhere wearing suits and ties. The businessmen stood silently for a moment, looking at the sight. Then one said to the other, “My God, why would anyone want to live here?” From the tone of voice, I knew that he couldn’t imagine it. But I was thinking, “Why would anyone want to live anywhere else?”
The encounter raised a recurring question, a subtle refrain that reappears throughout the thirty-six years of the series: Those who don’t respond to the scenery in the Navajo mystery are always the bad guys.
Encompassing parts of Utah and Arizona as well as New Mexico, the Navajo Nation—the setting for at least part of each Chee/Leaphorn novel—sprawls over 27,000 square miles, larger than ten of the fifty United States. According to a 2000 estimate the population of Diné Bikéyah, Land of the People, included about 200,000 Navajo residents. This is a good place to live if you like your own company. And a good place to set your stories if, like Dad, you create characters who enjoy the drama of sudden thunderstorms and the freedom of views that can stretch more than a hundred miles.
They were driving past the Bisti Badlands now, looking into the edge of a wilderness where eons of time had uncovered alternating layers of gray shale, pink sandstone, yellow caliche and black streaks of coal. Wind and water had played with these varied levels of hardness and carved out a weird tableau of gigantic shapes—toadstools and barrels, gargoyle heads, rows of fat babies, the raw materials of the most frantic imaginations.
“Wow,” Janet [Pete] said. “This country is always ready to surprise you.”
Although Mom, Dad, and baby me moved to New Mexico in 1952, Dad had first encountered the landscape that captured his imagination a few years earlier. After his service in the infantry during World War II, he found a job driving a truck from Oklahoma to the Navajo reservation oil fields. South of Borrego Pass, in the isolated Chaco Canyon country of the Navajo reservation, he saw a dozen Navajo men and women on horseback, dressed for a ceremony. He discovered that he had happened upon a delegation bringing necessary elements for an Enemy Way for a couple of Navajo marines just back from the war with Japan. The rituals designed to cure them of the evil effects of involvement with so much death would restore the men to harmony with their people. Outsiders were welcome to attend as long as they behaved.
A Navajo girl at Monument Valley, Arizona. About a dozen Navajo families live inside the park.
What he observed not only became a scene in his first novel, The Blessing Way, but the seed of Dad’s lifelong affinity for the Navajo culture.
“When I returned from France, I was treated like nobody special,” Dad told me a few years ago. He and I sat in his kitchen, where many of our best conversations took place. “These men were my age, had been through probably much the same thing. They were welcomed with a special ceremony to bring them back in rhythm with their people. I thought that was a fine idea, and that it said a lot about what was important to the Navajo.”
He glanced out the window, calling my attention to a fat roadrunner that had hopped onto the patio wall to survey the greenery below. I watched the bird as Dad collected his thoughts.
“I didn’t have any complaints about what had happened to me. But I was impressed with their culture, which teaches Navajos to set aside anger, regret, bad memories and focus on the good.” The image of the mounted ceremonial delegation stayed with him, percolating in his imagination as he wrote news stories as a reporter and editor. He returned to the reservation many times as a respectful visitor, made Navajo friends, and learned more.
East of Winslow, Arizona, summer 2008
Calling the landscape of the Southwest’s Indian Country “sacred” is more than metaphor. This geography of red mesas, volcanic outcroppings, and empty spaces, formed in the age of the dinosaurs, reverberates with stories of spirit beings and human emergence. While working on his Chee/Leaphorn mysteries, Dad heard Navajo and other Native American legends that dignify these arid places, linking them to holy people, divine clowns, and supernatural troublemakers. Outsiders might describe this startling scenery as barren, “barren” translating to “no trees to block the view.” The barren and sacred exist together here. Dad believed that this ruggedly beautiful environment encouraged humankind to simplify life’s complications and focus on our connections to each other and to the divine.
In the years since Dad wrote the inaugural Joe Leaphorn novel, The Blessing Way, traffic heading west from Albuquerque on Interstate 40 has increased dramatically. Back then, a person could cruise along for miles without seeing a big rig. Now, as Don and I head toward Gallup on I-40, it’s harder to enjoy the scenery. Trucks the size of houses block us in on both sides. We have to pay more attention to the road than Dad did when he first drove it more than sixty years ago. We find fewer opportunities to study the red mesas, to admire Mount Taylor on the horizon, to appreciate the surprise of a hawk floating over the sagebrush.
But, despite the busyness and the new casinos, this landscape can still take our breath away.
We get off the interstate for gasoline and lunch at the Acoma Sky City Casino. Enchanted Mesa, the traditional home of Acoma Pueblo, rises majestically a few miles south of the highway, accessible to visitors by guided tour. But there’s nothing enchanted here, just slot machines creating an unharmonious chorus, flashing to entice the quarters out of our pockets. The restaurant, strategically placed behind the slots and blackjack tables, offers a hot buffet, salad bar, and a table of pies and cakes covered with plastic wrap. TVs tuned to sports stations blare out from nearly every wall, as if to preclude any possible chance of silence.
Nothing inside is as stunning as what’s outside. Between here and Grants, the road runs along a broad black river of hardened lava. Mount Taylor, an ancient volcano, towers above us at 11,389 feet. The traditional Navajo know it as Tsoodzil, or Turquoise Mountain, the sacred mountain of the south. Dad mentions it in eleven of his mysteries. In Coyote Waits, an old Navajo recounts its origins to officer Jim Chee:
“They teach us that everything has two forms,” Hosteen Pinto said, starting even further back than Chee had expected. “There is the mountain we see there beside Grants, the mountain the biligaana [white people] call Mount Taylor. That is the outer form. And then they say there is the inner form, the sacred Turquoise Mountain that was there with the Holy People in the First World, the Dark World at the very beginning. And First Man brought it up from the Third World and built it on his magic robe and decorated it with turquoise.”
Bunkers at Fort Wingate from the north with the Zuni Mountains in the background
It’s February, and we drive toward the edge of a weak storm. Halfhearted snowflakes melt when they hit the windshield. New Mexico is in a record drought; any snow is welcome. We pass Grants, a town built by the railroad and reinvigorated in the 1950s by uranium mining, and watch for the turnoff to Fort Wingate. We’re looking for the bunkers Dad described in The Wailing Wind. We drive to the village of Fort Wingate instead, past the campus of Fort Wingate High School and see bunkers in the distance, but no roads toward them. We continue to the end of the pavement. Don goes into the post office and the postmistress points us in the right direction.
The entrance to Fort Wingate lies a few miles down the road at the next freeway exit, beneath a metal arch, past an abandoned guardhouse. At the end of the road a crew of young men shovels frigid mud, fixing a broken water pipe. The short, round-faced leader looks like he could be an American Indian but tells us he was born in Guam. I’ll call him Paul. He’s delighted to take a break from his job to act as our tour guide.
From its establishment by the Army in the 1860s until its closure in 1993, Fort Wingate stored many tons of ammunition. Why here? Paul tells us the Army used the railroad to ship what it needed, and Gallup, about ten miles away, was one of the Southwest’s major rail centers. TPL, Inc., a private technology development company, managed 1,000 acres, 200 storage bunkers, and some buildings here until April 2007. Operating a state-of-the-art demilitarization facility, TPL recycled the old bombs and ammunition under contract with the U.S. government.
I drive on slick clay with Paul in the front seat. Over the next rise, we see hundreds of bunkers. They remind me of huge inverted canoes. From the dirt piled on top, stalks of dead grass stand as straight as a buzz haircut. We stop. Don climbs out to photograph—pleased that no power lines mar the view. A quartet of graceful ravens make black circles against the pewter sky. I stand in the quiet of the afternoon and feel the wind blow cold. I think of the woman in The Wailing Wind, trapped in the bunker’s darkness, alone and starving. This would be a lonely and miserable place to die. I imagine Dad standing in this very place and thinking the same thing many years before.
Back on the interstate, we head west to Gallup, a sprawling railroad town distinguished by the red cliffs surrounding it. We drive on to Window Rock, Arizona, capital of the Navajo Nation. As we continue through the suntanned country, I notice the maze of dirt roads angling off the broad four-lane highway, roads like those Chee and Leaphorn bounce along in search of evidence or suspects. According to the Navajo Department of Transportation, there are more than 9,000 miles of public roads on the reservation, and 78 percent of them are dirt or graveled. It’s Friday afternoon and traffic is heavy. The speed limit drops to fifty-five miles per hour and Navajo police cars mix with the flow of vehicles.
The Navajo Tribal Police headquarters occupies a large, plain, pinkish building with a generic institutional look. Nothing romantically Southwestern about the place where Leaphorn worked until he retired to become a private investigator.
We enter through a side door. The building consists of small offices with flat low ceilings and ready-made wood veneer doors. The receptionist, a Navajo woman in her thirties with wavy brown hair, gives us a welcoming smile even though it’s near the end of the day on Friday. She directs us to the chief.
Navajo Chief of Police Jim Benally is a slim man in a black jacket. His car keys and sunglasses are in his hand but he invites us to sit down. We explain our project and Don takes a picture of the chief with a map that shows the vast law enforcement districts of the Navajo Nation. It’s marked with pushpins, just like the map Leaphorn so often consults when he’s investigating a crime. The chief introduces us to the chief of detectives, a large man with the last name of Cowboy.
As we leave, the receptionist smiles again and tells us she had her picture taken with Dad on one of his visits here a few years ago. “I wish I had it with me,” she says. “I’d like to show it to you.”
At our motel the next morning, we strike up a conversation with Rose, the Navajo woman in charge of the breakfast room. She’s a Hillerman fan, she tells us, but she thought Skinwalkers, Dad’s novel about Navajo witchcraft, was far too scary.
Before we leave, Rose gives us a sack with treats for the road—a banana, an apple, a cereal bar, and a bottle of water. Her kindness reminds me of my childhood.
When I was a girl, Mom always packed snacks for our road trips. When we lived in Santa Fe, on Sundays after mass Dad often said, “Let’s go for a drive. Let’s have an adventure!” I loved the ride in our lumbering green station wagon out Agua Fria Road. We stopped at fields and waited for well-used horses to come to the fence to nuzzle up old carrots we brought for the occasion. While we kids fed the horses, Dad’s attention went to the deep blue bulk of the Jemez Mountains rising to the west beyond the Rio Grande Valley. He’d tell us how those peaks were born from ancient volcanoes. As the story unfolded, I could smell the acrid lava fumes and feel the rumbling earth.
I relished our occasional trips to the Pueblo Indian ruins at Bandelier, in those same Jemez Mountains. The site sits southeast of Los Alamos—the place where scientists created a different explosion, the first atomic bomb. After Dad pulled into the parking lot, we didn’t linger to enjoy the perfume of the pine trees or the music of the nearby stream. We rushed straight for the trail to the cliff dwellings. We scurried up ladders into caves where Indians once lived. I loved the way one path squeezed between the big rocks, so narrow grown-ups had to turn sideways. I placed my steps inside the ancient footprints as Dad invited me to consider how many trips to the river and back the Indians must have made to wear that trail into the rock.
Don and I head north toward Shiprock. We pass a store with a hay barn, horse trailers, bags of coal, and huge piles of wood for sale, a ready-made setting for a Chee/Leaphorn novel. The traffic flows fast and heavy, mostly pickup trucks. Northwestern New Mexico rises in beauty on all sides. The Chuska Mountains sprawl low to the west; volcanic plugs dot the horizon. Flocks of off-white and gray sheep melt into the landscape.
I’m navigating, looking for a turnoff. A large faded sign with an arrow points the way: Historic Two Grey Hills Trading Post. We head toward a compound of government housing set against sandstone buttes and all-encompassing sky. We spot another hand-painted directional sign and turn onto a lonely road. When the pavement ends, we go left toward the store.
The low stone building with a large front porch seems to be deserted. Not a car in sight. I’ve never seen the place before, but it looks exactly as I’d imagined from the references to it in The Ghostway. The proprietor, Les Wilson, is there along with Shirley Brown, his Navajo assistant and a weaver. The merchandise includes disposable diapers, metal pots, DVD rentals. In a display case, I discover a beautiful hand-beaded Navajo Santa Claus.
Wilson warms to us as he learns of our project and invites us to see the rug room. He has about thirty rugs here, rolled like cigars for storage, all created in the beautiful, understated Two Grey Hills geometric style named for this place. Shirley holds up a rug she wove so we can see the patterns. She used natural wool that gets its black, brown, white, beige, and gray from undyed fleece. Wilson shows me a postcard tacked on the wall. In his characteristically flowing penmanship, Dad had written: “Two Grey Hills is where the West starts.”
Les Wilson, Irma Henderson, and Shirley Brown in front of Two Grey Hills Trading Post, established in 1897
A tall, lanky, unhurried man, Wilson offers us an album of historic photos of the trading post, then leads us through the back of the store, a ramshackle storage section more than a hundred years old. Outside, four good-natured dogs of mixed heritage greet us and we meet Wilson’s Navajo wife, Irma Henderson. Irma joins us holding Margarita, a tiny Chihuahua in a red sweater, the only dog that barks at us.
Don asks Les, Irma, and Shirley to sit for a photo on an old wooden bench outside the trading post. I remember reading of the retired Joe Leaphorn sitting here, thinking over his latest dilemma, waiting for his ethnologist friend Louisa Bourbonette to finish shopping inside.
We backtrack to Shiprock, looking for lunch. The magnificently eroded volcanic core known as Ship Rock—and spelled as two words—rises 1,450 feet above the plain, its black walls of igneous rock radiating out like broken spokes on a wheel. The Navajo call it the “Rock with Wings” and, because it is sacred, usually deny mountain climbers permission to ascend, a key point in The Fallen Man.
In town, we cross the San Juan River on a narrow bridge. The river is broad and slow here, different from the San Juan closer to Utah, that wilder river Leaphorn navigates in a kayak to find looted ruins and save a woman’s life in A Thief of Time.
Huerfano Mesa in northwestern New Mexico
We stop for lunch at a local drive-in and I order green chili stew with soft warm fry bread—a classic combination popular on the reservation, impossible to find in my hometown of Santa Fe. Dad and Mom moved our family to Albuquerque in 1963 when Dad went to work for the University of New Mexico. I moved back to Santa Fe, an hour’s drive north, fresh out of college, and have lived there ever since.
I drive as Don looks for a place to capture a photo of both Ship Rock itself and the community below. We stop at the Navajo police headquarters for advice, and an officer tells Don which dirt road to take for the best pictures. I think of Jim Chee’s trailer home, planted in the shade of a big cottonwood tree along the San Juan. I think of Bernadette Manuelito (finally Mrs. Chee, in The Shape Shifter) as a teenager, playing high school basketball in the Shiprock gym.
On our way back to Albuquerque we pass Huerfano Mesa. Known as Dzil Na’oodilii, this is the Navajo Sacred Mountain of the Center, the place where Changing Woman gave birth to the legendary Warrior Twins. In A Thief of Time, the traveling minister Slick Nakai bemoans the defacement of this revered mountain by an un-holy display of roads and radio towers. He was right—they are an ugly addition.
Unlike the interstate, U.S. 550 is quiet. I drive and Don falls asleep. In the silence, I recall other car trips, the many happy Sunday afternoons I spent as a girl riding through New Mexico with my parents. Trips to the high-country Jicarilla landscape Dad later used in The Shape Shifter, and down to Las Cruces and El Paso, scenery that became home to The Sinister Pig. Dad wrote at night in those years. I remember occasionally waking up after midnight, needing reassurance, and finding him at the rolltop desk tucked into a corner of the bedroom. Seeing him there made me feel safe.
When Dad became a university administrator in the mid-1960s, the job came with an office away from the house he could use on weekends, a temporary escape from the distractions created by six children. When I enrolled at the University of New Mexico as a freshman, he and I rode to campus together each morning. Dad kept writing what became The Blessing Way.
When I was a college junior, Dad got his big break. I was attending the University of Massachusetts on an exchange program when he came east on UNM business. He’d been in New York and had called the editor to whom he had sent that first novel. She wanted to publish it! Dad tended to be a happy guy, but I can’t remember having ever seen him happier.
The editor was Harper & Row’s legendary mystery expert, Joan Kahn. He’d sent her a letter asking her opinion after his agent had advised him to abandon thoughts of writing fiction or, at the very least, to come up with a better novel “getting rid of the Indian stuff.” I’m glad he got a second opinion. Ms. Kahn asked to see the manuscript, beginning Dad’s long association with what is now known as Harper Collins. Unlike many authors, he never changed publishers.
The greatest gift my father gave me was the time we spent together. I loved his stories and he loved to tell them, but both of us let work and life’s distractions keep us from spending as much time together as we would have liked. I envisioned this book, Tony Hillerman’s Landscape as a magnet to pull us together. I pictured Dad in the car with Don and me, the unfolding landscape prompting his memories. But Dad always declined our invitations to ride along. At eighty, he treasured his afternoon naps and knew what it would be like to travel with a photographer who has to stop and stop again for the right shot. He and his photographer brother, Barney, had worked together on Hillerman Country, published in 1991. Like Don, my soft-spoken uncle refused to rush a picture.
I was disappointed by Dad’s refusal, but not surprised. Declining health had ended his book signings and speaking engagements, both of which he loved. He’d stopped attending the First Friday Albuquerque authors’ luncheons and only showed up occasionally at the poker game he’d long enjoyed.
After Dad died on October 26, 2008, my brain fogged as I sat to write about his work. He’d always told me that the cure for writer’s block was simple: Sit down and keep writing. But I knew conjuring his stories hadn’t always come easily for him.
The Navajo Nation landscape north of Window Rock, Arizona
When he was really stuck, he and Mom would drive to the scene of the crime, usually a distant spot on the sprawling Navajo reservation. The expansive scenery led to expanded thoughts. Dad told me that of all his novels, The Sinister Pig gave him the most trouble, and he blamed it on the change in location—the majority of that book is outside of Navajo country.
The first trip Don and I make after Dad’s death, returning to our project, takes us to Zuni Pueblo, the site of Dance Hall of the Dead. Tribal officials treat Don and me like honored guests. Councilor Arden Kucate escorts us to the Middle Village so we can photograph the dance plaza featured in the book. Beyond it, Corn Mountain rises against a clear blue sky. I feel a deep sense of calm joy as I stand in that quiet, ancient, and blessed space on that January afternoon.
Later, I’m looking for Dad’s description of that scenery. I open Dance Hall to find the section where Leaphorn is comforting a young woman distraught over the deaths of two young boys.
Leaphorn said, “Maybe death should only be for the very old. People who are tired and want some rest.”…Leaphorn talked about it quietly. He told her how the Navajo mythology dealt with it, how Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water took the weapons they had stolen from the Sun and how they killed the monsters that brought death to the Diné but how they decided to spare one kind of death. “We call it Sa,” Leaphorn said. “The way my Grandfather told me the story, the Hero Twins found Sa sleeping in a hole in the ground. Born of Water was going to kill him with his club but Sa woke up. He told the twins they should spare him so those who are worn out and tired with age can die to make room for others being born.”
I had the honor of being with Dad in an Albuquerque hospital during the last two weeks of his life, bringing him sips of coffee, turning his pillow so the cool side sat against his skin, sitting with him and Mom and other family members who shared the vigil. Like any child whose parent dies, I wish Dad and I had more time together. But I saw that, supported by his deep Catholic faith, he faced death as friend, with no hesitation. When Sa came that Sunday afternoon, my father welcomed him. He was ready for what he often called “the next great adventure.”
Dad loved it when strangers came up to talk to him about his writing, to shake his hand, to offer a well-read paperback for him to autograph. Until arthritis and fatigue made it impossible, he enjoyed book signings even when the lines were hours long. After his death, many other writers told me of the encouragement Dad offered them, including cover endorsements for their books. (Dad laughingly called himself “a blurb slut” because he gave commendations with notorious generosity.)
Tony Hillerman signing books at the Tony Hillerman Writers Conference: Focus on Mystery with daughters Jan Grado, illustrator of Hillerman’s The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (left), and conference organizer Anne Hillerman
My family received hundreds of messages of condolence, many from people who had never met my father, or us. At Dad’s wake, a Native American man who wore his shiny dark hair in two long braids greeted our family and asked if he could offer a song in his own language in honor of Dad. He sang “Amazing Grace,” his clear deep voice resounding throughout the church.
On the pages ahead, readers will find a tour through Dad’s landscape in his own words supplemented by Don’s remarkable photographs and my research and reminiscing. I organized this book chronologically with the exception of one chapter on books set on the Hopi reservation and another that groups the novels in which Chee and Leaphorn travel far from home. We considered adding the two non-Navajo works, Fly on the Wall and Finding Moon, but decided the project flowed better with the Chee/Leaphorn focus.
The following chapters include a photo of the cover from each book’s first edition. Beginning in 1986 with Skinwalkers, the covers took on the distinctive look created by Peter Thorpe. Using Navajo sand paintings as his guide, Thorpe designed the covers of more than forty editions of Tony Hillerman’s mysteries.
Don and I were honored when Dad asked us to do this project. Working on the book was a privilege and a deep, deep pleasure. Visiting the landscapes that provided his settings and his inspiration moved and inspired me. I hope this book will do him proud.