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Acclaimed author Tony Hillerman dies at 83
Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels and creator of two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes - Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee - died of pulmonary failure. He was 83.
Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels and creator of two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes - Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee - died of pulmonary failure. He was 83.
Hillerman's daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father's health had been declining in the last couple years and that he was at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque when he died at about 3 pm on Sunday.
Hillerman lived through two heart attacks and surgeries for prostate and bladder cancer. He kept tapping at his keyboard even as his eyes began to dim, as his hearing faded, as rheumatoid arthritis turned his hands into claws.
"I'm getting old," he declared in 2002, "but I still like to write."
Anne Hillerman said on Sunday that her father was a born storyteller.
"He had such a wonderful, wonderful curiosity about the world," she said. "He could take little details and bring them to life, not just in his books, but in conversation, too."
Lt Joe Leaphorn, introduced in "The Blessing Way" in 1970, was an experienced police officer who understood, but did not share, his people's traditional belief in a rich spirit world. Officer Jim Chee, introduced in "People of Darkness" in 1978, was a younger officer studying to become a "hathaali" - Navajo for "shaman."
Together, they struggled daily to bridge the cultural divide between the dominant Anglo society and the impoverished people who call themselves the Dineh.
Hillerman's commercial breakthrough was "Skinwalkers," published in 1987 - the first time he put both characters and their divergent world views in the same book.
