Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

by Tony Hillerman

  Oh well. Agentless again. But not for long. I went to the University of California at La Jolla to lecture at a writers’ seminar and met Perry Knowlton. At a lunch a California boat owner and Knowlton discussed the joys of sailing. I learn that Knowlton’s sailboat is twenty-eight feet long. Even a landlubber knows that’s a lot of boat. And writers who have yet to write that breakout book want to have agents who can afford such luxuries. Besides, he has already told me he likes the way I write. He asks me if I have an agent. I ask him if he’ll represent me. I’ve been with his Curtis Brown Ltd. ever since.

  Satisfaction of the Knowlton/Ashmead desire that I produce the breakout book remained far in the future. First I had to create Jim Chee, a second Navajo police officer, and then be inspired to work him in tandem with Leaphorn—as sort of an uneasy team. I have been known to claim that Chee was the product of an artistic need, and that is partly true. But since I have promised nothing but the truth in these recollections I will admit to you my fondness for Joe Leaphorn was undermined by the knowledge that I only owned part of him, having signed away TV rights. This new book, The People of Darkness, would be set on the so-called Checkerboard Reservation on the eastern margin of the Big Reservation. It appealed to me story-wise because there the nineteenth-century railroad moguls had been given blocks of reservation land as a reward for laying transcontinental track, and more of the Navajo country had been divided off into alternate square miles of public land ownership. Not surprisingly, this had odd sociological effects—a mixture of Navajo with every type of unhyphenated American and a dazzling variety of religious missions—from the two versions of the Native American Church, through Catholic, Mormon, Presbyterian, Mennonite, Southern Baptist, and a galaxy of fundamentalist Evangelical churches.

  I had started this book with Leaphorn as the central character, but by now my vision of him was firm and fixed. Leaphorn, with his master’s degree in anthropology, was much too sophisticated to show the interest I wanted him to show in all this. The idea wasn’t working. This is the artistic motive. Behind that was disgruntlement. If any of my books ever did make it into the movies, why share the loot needlessly? Add greed to art and the motivation is complete.

  Thus I produce Jim Chee, younger, much less assimilated, more traditional, just the man I needed. I modeled him after nobody in particular—a sort of composite of ten or twelve of those idealistic students of the late l960s.

  Chee was easy but the book wasn’t. The two key ideas that melded to form the center of the plot came from (1) visiting Barney while he was logging an oil well in Texas, and (2) writing a biography of a banker who had been blinded by a premature explosion of the nitroglycerine used to “shoot” such a well. My villain would be a geologist logging a wildcat well near Ambrosia Lake. Checking a very shallow section of core he notices the bit has drilled through a thick deposit of uranium-rich pitchblende. He doesn’t log this treasure, sabotages the well, picks up the lease when it expires, and when the book opens has become immensely wealthy through the Ambrosia Lake uranium boom.

  Happily, this book led Barney and me into our first joint venture since the pasture-fencing and creek-taming projects of our late teen years. While he analyzed core samples under the floor of a drilling rig in Texas and I watched, looking for plot ideas, we had the conversation that led to Hillerman Country. Barney, an Army Reserve map reproduction officer, had had his career as geologist interrupted by a summons to serve in the Korean War, and was still a bachelor. He was thinking of making his photography hobby a career and thus switching from a nomadic life of chasing wildcat oil wells to a permanent residence. Mama was well into her seventies by then and the memory loss that took the fun out of her final years was beginning to show. He decided he’d build a house for them both, with studio-darkroom attached. If he did, we would try to capture the Four Corners country we both loved in words and pictures.

  Barney built a house/studio in Oklahoma City. Years later, after he had met and married Irene and they had adopted two sons and a daughter, we found time for the book. The experience taught me that, published author or not, one’s role as Little Brother lasts as long as life. Hillerman Country was published by HarperCollins in 1991. Before he had a chance to notice that the reviewers were more impressed with his landscapes than with my text, he had a sudden and fatal heart attack while shooting another assignment.

  Since People of Darkness needed a crime worse than cheating I have our villain fear that his Navajo friends on the drilling crew might know what he’d done. I’d heard of a Brazilian musician who’d stolen a radioactive device pipeline crews use to check welds. He’d left it in a coat pocket in the family closet, causing him and several siblings to die of bone cancer. This took me to the University Cancer Research Center, which maintains a “tumor registry.” There I dreamed up a way (approved by the cancer specialists) to do mass murder slowly but surely with radioactive fetishes. Sounds good, but Chee had to track down all these victims. It proved terribly tough to keep this from being as boring to read as it was to write.

  This crazy plot gave me the opportunity to try my hand at what the bona fide masters of suspense were doing. First I had to have a professional hit man—a species I have never believed in. Then, to make the book work, I had to make him a sympathetic human. Here my memory of the death row interview of Smallwood came to the rescue. I gave my asocial killer a modified version of the story Smallwood had told me of coming from school to find Mom had abandoned him and, thereupon, spending his life hunting her. Smallwood’s terrible fate proved to be good fortune for me. Getting a publishable book written requires a lot of luck.

  Luck, for example, caused me to put Chee and Leaphorn in the same book. I was on a book tour promoting the third of the books in which Jim works alone. A lady I’m signing a book for thanks me and says:

  “Why did you change Leaphorn’s name to Chee?”

  It took a split second for the significance to sink in. A dagger to the heart. I stutter. Search around for an answer, and finally just say they’re totally different characters. “Oh,” says she, “I can’t tell them apart.”

  I am sure there are writers self-confident enough to forget this. What does this old babe know? But that was not to be for me. Like what St. Paul called his “thorn in the flesh,” it wouldn’t go away. I decided to put both characters in the same book to settle the issue for myself. I tried it in Skinwalkers. It worked so well I tried it again in A Thief of Time. Hurrah! It was the breakout book!

  I learned about it on a book tour in California. I was with Gabe Barillas, Harper & Row’s sales representative in Southern California. I had been signing TOT at bookstore A and we were en route to bookstore B. As usual on tours, no time for lunch. We stopped at a grocery and went in to buy a loaf of bread and baloney while Gabe checked in with New York. It was the day when publishers’ spies get their advance tips on which books have made the New York Times bestseller list. Gabe calls me over to the telephone, hands it to me. I say, “Hello,” and hear shouts, yells, a horn blowing. Someone congratulates me. TOT is on the list.

  Back in the car, inching our way through Los Angeles traffic, Gabe is almost too ecstatic to eat his baloney sandwich. I ask why is this such a big deal. The books have been creeping up the sales charts, making bestseller lists in Boston, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, etc. Why the excitement now?

  Gabe explains it. All bookstore managers check that Times list to make sure they have copies of the bestsellers in stock. My efforts to date had been in a small minority of such stores. Soon they would be in almost all of them. And they’ll be up front on the shelves reserved for best-sellers. Plus, in a day or two they’ll be in thousands of airport bookstores—key purchasing places for those seeking to stave off the boredom of flying.

  Sales of my books had been moving up, slowly but steadily, in a puzzling pattern. Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah bought some, as I’d expected since they’re the scene of the action. Except for Florida, the Confederate
States of America were a virtual blank and so was Oklahoma. But sales were heavy (by my standards) around San Francisco and Oakland, in Southern California, and along the Northeastern seaboard—most notably Boston and New York. I saw no sense in that pattern until I began doing book signing tours.

  For some reason a lot of the people who read me wanted to explain why. They’d tell me they once lived in Window Rock, or had visited friends in Burnt Water, or had taught school at Teec Nez Pos, etc., or loved to vacation in the high dry empty part of the world, and my books reminded them of good times. That didn’t surprise me. However, a lot more people began the autographing chat with a disclaimer. They’d assure me they were not mystery readers. They read my books because of the tribal cultural material intermixed with the plot line. They wanted to learn a bit about American Indians. It occurred to me that I had tapped into a mass of American readers who suffer from the same workaholic problem that besets me. Reading for idle amusement left them feeling guilty. My books, like a sausage sandwich spiced with antiacid tables, give absolution along with the sin.

  I must admit that these chats at the book-tour tables have affected the attitude of Leaphorn—and particularly Chee—toward the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency. My goal was to make my policemen as real I could—based on cops I’d known covering law enforcement and the courts. At signings, I routinely asked policemen who were buying a book of mine if I was being too critical of federal cops. That provoked so many time-consuming anecdotal accounts of FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency blunders and ineptitude that if the line was long, I stopped asking. If the U.S. Attorney General happens to read this, and wants to share wisdom derived from anecdotes collected from a remarkable number and variety of state, city, and county police, I will here summarize the conclusions. Perhaps they will counterbalance the half-century of abject hero worship for G-men that the movies (and now TV) have piled upon the taxpayers.

  On the good side, the real street cops report that FBI agents tend to be honest, intelligent, and diligent. They rate the Bureau as usually efficient in the technical areas—tracing credit cards, telephone usage, forensic evidence, etc. On the bad side, they find them (with some exceptions) clueless when it comes to the sorts of crimes real cops deal with daily. Cops find the agents they work with are handicapped by a huge, overstaffed and mindless “by the books” bureaucracy that injects Washington politics into law enforcement. This shows up in cases that attract television coverage, causing the Bureau to take over and bungle investigations not out of bad intentions but due to ignorance of both the territory, the community, reliability of tipsters, etc. Still on the bad side, handicapping their work is what one veteran detective captain told me is “federal arrogance.” He said that when he was studying at the FBI Academy his fellow students out of non-federal police agencies called it “Arrogance 231.” Add to the downside complaints a feeling that the Bureau is so overstaffed that some of this troublesome interference is the product of boredom. (The last official figures I’ve seen showed some eleven thousand people on the Bureau’s payroll. Since they police only federal laws, how many federal laws does it take to keep that many agents at work? Couple this with their background as lawyers, accountants, and technicians, and it’s no surprise they fumble when injected into the sorts of crimes state/county/city cops deal with every day.)

  We had an example of this in New Mexico recently when a fellow picked up a woman in Albuquerque’s seamy section, drove her down to a lake resort area, and, according to her complaint, tortured her and made porno videos. She escaped and complained to the sheriff. An investigation began. TV was attracted by the sordid sex angle. TV attracts the FBI, which decided this was a kidnapping and therefore federal. Reporters who covered the resulting circus reported from twenty-one to thirty federal agents swarmed to the scene looking for buried bodies and other evidence. They dug up numerous chicken bones and barbecued ribs buried by tidy picnickers but no bodies. The accused perp was finally charged with improper conduct far short of murder and the jury couldn’t agree. It required a retrial to get a conviction.

  In writing Hunting Badger I took advantage of this FBI tendency to charge in and take over where it knows not what it’s doing. While I based it on an imaginary robbery of the Ute Mountain gambling casino and the subsequent search of the Four Corners canyon country for the bandits I had my fictional Navajo police remembering, with a mixture of amusement and dread, a real manhunt of the previous year. They recall how the federals had swarmed in literally by the hundreds when three local tough guys stole a water truck, murdered Dale Claxton, the local officer who tried to arrest them, and then disappeared into the Four Corners emptiness. The federals set up a hunt headquarters into which information from citizens and local cops was funneled—but from which information was slow to escape out to the crews searching the mesas and canyons. Thus Search Team A would find itself following Search Team B, etc., tracks found in the dust would be fanned away by federal helicopters coming in to take a look, and so forth. One of the old pros in the Navajo tribal police told me that his search team was informed early that the FBI has taken command, that this pretty well eliminated any hope of an early capture, but since the FBI would need a scapegoat for the failure, they should be careful not to make any mistakes.

  And so it went that long summer. The federals ordered the evacuation of Bluff. Locals found the body of one of the suspects and the feds declared him a suicide. After months of floundering around, the feds faded away and went back to whatever they do. A Navajo found the body of another suspect, with no fed available to proclaim the suicide. The third killer, as far as anyone knows, is still out there somewhere. Net result of this epic fiasco is the unavenged murder of a highly regarded policeman, the wipeout of tourist season revenues for the folks of Montezuma Creek, Bluff, Mexican Hat, etc., and the depletion of overtime budgets of every police agency in the Four Corners country.

  The only good that came of it is my plot idea and a rich deposit of anecdotes to enliven conversations for years. Marie and I drove over into the war zone because I could not bring myself to believe press reports that (1) the federals had ordered the evacuation of Bluff or that (2) the good people of Bluff would respect such a silly order. Most of them had, it seemed. The first fellow I asked described the incident thus:

  “This FBI man pounded on the door and said I had thirty minutes to pack up the family and leave. My first impulse was to grab him by his necktie, lead him back out to the road, and tell him not to come on my property without a court order. But then I thought I had kids to get through college and I’d be spending all my savings hiring lawyers. So we went.”

  A Bluff matron awaiting a chance to return home parked at a lookout point and watched the circus. “You’d see a dozen or so cars with their sirens going racing down the highway from Montezuma Creek toward Mexican Hat. Then you’d see another bunch of cars—different paint jobs—racing up from the other direction, and then after a while here’d come some more from this direction and that.”

  If that sounds remarkable, remember the FBI was choreographing the performance of at least twenty different sets of federal cops, ranging from U.S. Park Service to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Treasury Department. Other highlights of the event including setting fires that burned out the woodland along the San Juan and tales of near-misses in which one band of man-hunters would discover it was being hunted by another band of man-hunters before an interagency shootout ensued. A quarter-million-dollar reward advertised by the FBI for capture of the killers added an exotic flavor to the chaos—attracting bounty hunters carrying rifles with telescopic sights, big binoculars, and the paraphernalia collected by readers of Soldier of Fortune magazine. One of these fellows, who tried to rent a canoe from a friend of mine, explained that he would paddle down the canyon and detect the culprits by their psychic vibrations. After a week or so, the Bureau issued another directive telling the bounty hunters to go home. Some did.

  If the previous paragraphs sound
disgruntled, it’s because I watched this Keystone Copish squandering of our tax dollars aware of the poverty of the local police—too short of money to buy modern equipment, so understaffed they patrol alone and face death with no hope of backup support. That is exactly what Officer Claxton did when he stopped the stolen water truck and was riddled with bullets. Perhaps the local officers wouldn’t have nailed the killers even without the federal meddling. Those canyons are a wonderful place to hide.

  I had my first close look at the San Juan River’s draining system when I was trying to find a setting for A Thief of Time—which turned out to be that elusive breakout book. Specifically, I needed an isolated Anasazi ruin where my characters could do their illicit artifact digging unobserved and where I intended to have one of them murder the other one. I mentioned this to Dan Murphy, a naturalist with the National Park Service. Murphy knew of a place that met my needs, reachable down the San Juan River from Bluff. Better still, Murphy knew of a generous fellow with a deep interest in archaeology who had been helping finance some research on the Navajo Reservation. He was taking friends on a float trip into Anasazi country and Murphy was going along as the flora-fauna authority. If I’d tell campfire tales of mythology and culture he could get me a free ride to the places I should see.

  Journalists are not inclined to turn down freebies; such perks compensating for the poverty-line pay scales newspapers paid. And I was bogged down in the first chapter of ATOT because I couldn’t visualize the places where a lot of it would happen. I have always needed to lean back in my chair and pull up a memory of the sites I am writing about to feel comfortable with the description.