The Blessing Way and Dance Hall of the Dead - Tony Hillerman

Over Memorial Day weekend, my friends and I went camping, and I finally had some time to relax and read. Inspired by dad, I decided to give Tony Hillerman a try, and I'm glad I did! I read the first two of his Navajo country murder mysteries, The Blessing Way (1970) and Dance Hall of the Dead (1973).

I really enjoyed these novels, particularly the worldview conveyed by the protagonist, Navajo sheriff Joe Leaphorn:

"Leaphorn never counted on luck. Instead he expected order—the natural sequence of behavior, the cause producing the natural effect, the human behaving in the way it was natural for him to behave. He counted on that and upon his own ability to sort out the chaos of observed facts and find in them this natural order. Leaphorn knew from experience that he was unusually adept at this. As a policeman, he found it to be a talent which saved him a great deal of labor. It was a talent which, when it worked unusually well, caused him a faint subconscious uneasiness, grating on his ingrained Navajo conviction that any emergence from the human norm was unnatural and—therefore—unhealthy. And it was a talent which caused him, when the facts refused to fall into the pattern demanded by nature and the Navajo Way, acute mental discomfort."

When I read this passage, I was strongly reminded of a quote by Hercules Poirot in the film version of the Murder on the Orient Express -

"I can only see the world as it should be. And when it is not, the imperfection stands out like the nose in the middle of a face. It makes most of life unbearable. But it is useful in the detection of crime."

I'm not sure if this characterization reflects a shared reality among talented detectives, or whether it is a purely literary conceit, but I thought this parallel was interesting.

The books also treat fairly extensively on Navajo culture and religion, its beliefs, and its rituals. My experience with Native American culture, and Navajo culture in particular, is fairly limited, so I was very interested in the insights from these works. (Although Hillerman is White, it seems he was was considered a true friend of the Navajo people and an excellent student of their culture, and his books, although works of fiction, are evidently praised for their accuracy in this regard.)

Finally, I really enjoyed the depictions of nature, and especially the scenes where Leaphorn applies his skilled tracking abilities to locate missing persons. The books are very successful in conveying a sense of the rich beauty and detail of nature, which I appreciated.

I will definitely be reading more Hillerman!