The Steam Pig, winner of the 1971 CWA Gold Dagger, continues its contentious life. It remains an exhilarating read, despite an ending that verges on farce. And, despite the bad language, it will always be the cornerstone of South African crime fiction.
Mike Nicol is an author, journalist, editor, and online creative writing teacher. His writing life started with the publication of a slim volume of poems, Among the Souvenirs, in 1979. He has written a number of novels and nonfiction works, including a short biography of Nelson Mandela. In recent years he has turned to crime fiction with the publication of his Revenge Trilogy: Payback, Killer Country, and Black Heart. His latest book is Monkey Business: The Murder of Anni Dewani: The Facts, The Fiction, the Spin. Visit him online at mikenicol.bookslive.co.za.
Dance Hall of the Dead
by Tony Hillerman (1973)
WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER
* * *
Tony Hillerman (1925–2008) was one of the most admired mystery writers of his generation. A decorated combat veteran of WWII, he worked as a journalist, and subsequently taught the subject at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. It was there that he began writing novels, including the series that would make his reputation, the Navajo mysteries featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. Dance Hall of the Dead won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1974.
* * *
In any literary genre, the great writer is one who has been the first to open a gate through which others pass. For me, that would be Tony Hillerman.
I write about the state in which I live, Minnesota, and about the Anishinaabeg—or Ojibwe, as they’re also known—a culture that had made its home around the Great Lakes since long before white men ever set foot on the North American continent. In large measure, I do this because of Hillerman, because he bucked early criticism of his significant use of the Navajo culture in his first manuscript and, in his three decades as a writer, proceeded to introduce millions of readers to a world about which they knew almost nothing.
Who was Tony Hillerman? A journalist, a university professor, an amateur anthropologist, archaeologist, and ethnologist, and, by the time he passed away in 2008, an author with more than thirty books to his credit. Although some of his work was nonfiction, what Hillerman is best known for are the eighteen novels in the Navajo Tribal Police mystery series, set in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest and featuring two Navajo cops, Joe Leaphorn and, later, Jim Chee.
Before I explain any more about Hillerman, let me explain my own connection with his work.
At the time I’m writing this essay, I’ve published eleven novels in my own mystery series featuring Cork O’Connor, a man of mixed heritage, part Irish and part Ojibwe. I began the first in this series, a book titled Iron Lake, in 1992. I was just over forty years old. And I didn’t read mysteries.
I’m the son of a high school English teacher who raised his children on literature with a capital “L.” Growing up, I cut my literary teeth on Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Jack London, and Jules Verne. I read Arthur Conan Doyle, but only because he was considered a classic writer in his way, and I read him as literature, not genre fiction. The Hardy Boys? Nancy Drew? Never touched the stuff. But when I hit forty, after years of trying unsuccessfully to write and publish the Great American Novel, I decided that it was time to get myself into print, whatever it took. When I looked at what people were reading, more often than not, it was a mystery. So I started to read in the genre in order to understand what I was going to write. My great good fortune was to begin that reading with Tony Hillerman.
My first introduction to Hillerman was Dance Hall of the Dead, the second book in which his iconic Navajo policeman, Joe Leaphorn, appears. What I discovered, first and foremost, was Hillerman as crafter of fine fiction. Here was a guy who did everything that I thought a writer of classic fiction ought to do. His characters were memorable. His language was powerful. His themes were timeless. His observations of details, physical and psychological, were precise and telling. His setting was profoundly sensual. And on top of all this, he offered readers a deep look into a culture that was exotic and, at the same time, oddly familiar and invitingly human. By the time I finished the book, I was hopelessly hooked on Hillerman and on mystery as a genre.
Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn first appeared as an adjunct character in The Blessing Way, Hillerman’s debut novel, a story that centered, more or less, on a white protagonist. When Hillerman submitted the manuscript to an agent, she told him frankly that it wasn’t very good, and famously advised him to get rid of the Indian stuff. Hillerman wasn’t sure that he agreed and sent a note to Joan Kahn, a well-known mystery editor at Harper & Row, asking if she might be willing to read the manuscript. Her one-sentence reply: send it in. She read it, liked it, and agreed to publish it, pending certain edits. The novel came out to great critical and popular acclaim, and was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
Hillerman published a second novel, The Fly on the Wall, which wasn’t set in the Southwest, didn’t deal at all with the Navajo, and didn’t sell nearly as well as The Blessing Way. Even as he was working on this manuscript, Hillerman later admitted, he “was yearning to get back to the Navajo Reservation and to the Navajo Tribal Policeman Joe Leaphorn.”
In Dance Hall of the Dead, Leaphorn steps fully into the spotlight and becomes the character around which the story pivots. To any reader unfamiliar with Hillerman’s series, or to any collector looking for one novel by Hillerman to include in his or her collection, this is the book that I would recommend. Why? Although it’s not the first novel to feature Leaphorn, it’s the first in which the quintessential characteristics of a Hillerman novel come together, in which all the elements that would propel the series to national prominence and to a place in the rarefied air of genre masterpieces fall into place.
Briefly, Dance Hall of the Dead deals with the disappearance of two Indian boys, one Zuni and one Navajo. An incredible amount of spilled blood at the spot where the boys were last seen leads officials to suspect that a homicide may have occurred. Leaphorn represents only one of several law enforcement agencies called in to participate in the investigation. From his first appearance on the page, his unique humanity is evident. He’s an odd duck: a Navajo, born of The People, but also a man of the world. He’s been to college so he understands the larger, more sophisticated picture, but without losing a sense of the Navajo way of life, the importance of hozho (harmony), and the necessity, as the Navajo put it, to walk in beauty. He’s a man who tries to balance the world as it is with the world as the Navajo sensibility believes it should be. He achieves this balance with a sense of humor, the Navajo’s understanding of the importance of patience, and the trained mind of an investigator.
White law enforcement officials and suspects often underestimate Leaphorn, viewing him as a hick lawman, and an Indian to boot. In Dance Hall of the Dead, he’s written off time and again by the FBI special agent in charge of the homicide. This is fine with Leaphorn. It frees him to do what he does best, which is to investigate the situation with his patient understanding of the many cultures that occupy the barren, beautiful landscape of the Southwest.
Use of the landscape for multiple purposes is one of Hillerman’s strongest suits. Here’s an example, a passage in which Leaphorn, in his search for the missing Navajo boy, reflects not only on the nature of the land but also on its consequence.
He saw the beauty, the patterned cloud shadows, the red of the cliffs, and everywhere the blue, gold, and gray of dry country autumn. But soon the north wind would take the last few leaves and one cold night this landscape would change to solid white. And then George Bowlegs, if he was hiding somewhere in it, would be in trouble. He would survive easily enough until the snow came. There were dried berries and edible roots and rabbits, and a Navajo boy would know where to find them. But one day an end would come to the endless sunshine of the mountain autumn. An arctic storm front would bulge down out of wes
tern Canada, down the west slope of the Rockies. Here the altitude was almost a mile and a half above sea level and there was already hard frost in the mornings. With the first storm, the mornings would be subzero. There would be no way to find food with the snow blowing. On the first day, George Bowlegs would be hungry. Then he would be weak. And then he would freeze.
What Hillerman accomplishes here, this economy of exposition, he also manages when dealing with characters. For the reader, he often identifies a peripheral character, or one whose true identity is not yet known, through the use of some prominent feature, a kind of character shorthand. A mysterious prowler who leaves only moccasin prints is referred to as the Man Who Wore Moccasins, or sometimes simply Moccasins. The female half of a young Navajo couple who supply information is simply called Young Wife.
All this, any fine writer might do, but one of the talents that sets Hillerman apart is his ability to suffuse the plot with a sensitive examination of Native cultures and to do so without dragging the pace of the story. He generally accomplishes this remarkable feat by making the nuances of the cultures and their spirituality, whether Navajo, Zuni, Pueblo, or Ute, an integral part of the plot. So it is that as Joe Leaphorn ponders all the mysterious elements surrounding the boy’s disappearance, trying to find some pattern, he lapses into a memory of what he’d been taught by his very wise grandfather.
“When the dung beetle moves,” Hosteen Nashibitti had told him, “know that something has moved it. And know that its movement affects the flight of the sparrow, and that the raven deflects the eagle from the sky, and that the eagle’s stiff wing bends the will of the Wind People, and know that all of this affects you and me, and the flea on the prairie dog and the leaf on the cottonwood.” That had been the point of the lesson. The interdependency of nature. Every cause has its effect. Every action its reaction. A reason for everything. In all things a pattern, and in this pattern, the beauty of harmony. Thus one learned to live with evil, by understanding it, by reading its cause. And thus one learned, gradually and methodically, if one was lucky, to always “go in beauty,” to always look for the pattern, and to find it.
Hillerman’s plots are not marvels of convolution. They rise naturally, and rather simply, out of the setting and the kinds of people, Indian and white, who inhabit it. Very often, Hillerman weaves a story that suggests involvement of otherworldly forces, only to have Leaphorn discover, in the end, that the true hand behind the crime is most assuredly human. Dance Hall of the Dead is no exception, although the novel’s final resolution is an unexpected surprise, yet one very much in keeping with the secretive nature of the culture at the novel’s heart.
When I’m asked who has most influenced my writing, I point to Hillerman. Asked the same question, Hillerman pointed to an Australian writer, Arthur W. Upfield, who created Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, a part-Aborigine investigator. “Upfield,” Hillerman wrote, “had shown me—and a good many other mystery writers—how both ethnography and geography can be used in a plot and how they can enrich an old literary form.”
It may be that there is nothing new under the sun, but a great writer makes this seem absolutely untrue. Hillerman opened a gate for me and for others like me, freeing us to investigate other cultures while we investigate crime. My own belief is that the result is a story compelling in its delivery while remaining respectful of its unique cultural heritage. This is what Hillerman did so well, and what the rest of us strive for.
William Kent Krueger writes the New York Times best-selling Cork O’Connor mystery series. After studying briefly at Stanford University, Kent set out to experience the real world. Over the next twenty years, he logged timber, worked construction, tried his hand at freelance journalism, and eventually ended up researching child development at the University of Minnesota. He currently makes his living as a full-time author. He lives in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves, and does all his creative writing in a lovely little coffee shop near his home. The twelfth novel in his series, Trickster’s Point, will be released in the fall of 2012. Visit him online at www.williamkentkrueger.com.
Daddy Cool
by Donald Goines (1974)
KEN BRUEN
* * *
Donald Goines (1937–74) began his writing career while incarcerated in Michigan’s Jackson Penitentiary. Influenced by the work of Iceberg Slim, Goines—who also wrote under the pseudonym Al C. Clark—produced sixteen novels in four years. In novels such as Dopefiend (1971), Whoreson (1972), Black Gangster (1972), and Daddy Cool (1974), Goines wrote about the ghetto experience of inner-city African Americans. His blend of standard English and urban African American dialect was later hailed as an influence by rap artists such as Ice-T, RZA, and Tupac Shakur.
* * *
Noir has mutated to such a degree that it has almost lost meaning. The most recent addition I’ve encountered is a form of, I kid you not
Hip-hop Noir.
Why not?
If it gets the kids reading, it gets my vote. As long as the unlikely creator of such a concept gets a mention along the noir highway.
Donald Goines.
A favorite staple of mystery is the hit man. Really hard to miss with the theme. The package comes with instant allure, a ready-made plot, and any twist you can add. But few in this category stand the ultimate test.
Time.
Daddy Cool was first published in 1974, then reissued in 2003, by the ultracool Holloway House. Their books would establish the black urban school of literature and Daddy Cool became the bible of rappers. Almost any of the major global rap hits sound like they were lifted wholesale from Goines.
The plot of the novel is straightforward. Larry Jackson is a ruthlessly efficient hit man. His trademark is a knife, to such an extent that he teaches his adored daughter the art of that weapon. He runs a pool hall as cover for his trade.
The seeds of the coming tragedy are sown early, with his stepsons ripping off a numbers racket.
In recent years, studies of black culture and the influence of rap have led academics to enter the fray where Goines is concerned.
Signal for outrageous assertions.
It’s truly a stretch to label Goines
“The black Shakespeare.”
And it gets worse.
Proving that if you bring academics to the trough, you’ll get shite and phew-oh, they’ve referenced Hamlet when discussing Daddy Cool.
Joyce would laugh anew.
While serving one of his prison terms, Goines read The Count of Monte Cristo and its influence, albeit slanted, is evident. Daddy Cool is unique in many ways, not least as one of the rare novels to be reinvented as a graphic novel.
Goines came from a relatively well-off family, yet he would only truly be at ease among the pimps, dope dealers, con artists, and bootleggers, due in no small part to his constant heroin jones. It was during his stretch in the Michigan State Pen that he began to write: firstly Westerns, like that other great master of Detroit dialogue, Elmore Leonard, but it was his discovery of the writer Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim, that led Goines to mystery fiction.
He began using a blend of basic English, suffused with the dialect of the black neighborhoods, to create his own style.
On release from prison, he and his common-law wife moved to the Watts district of Los Angeles, believing a geographical change would help alter his lifestyle.
It didn’t.
He’d write in the morning, then shoot up in the afternoon. And, in an astonishing five years, he wrote sixteen novels. The mix of ghetto slang filtered with dialectical form continued to refine his art. His pseudonym, Al C. Clark, was soon to be replaced by Donald Goines.
“He was a real storyteller, you read his books and you were . . . there.”
So said the rap star DMX, who discovered Goines while serving a term in jail himself. In a nice twist, he would play the lead in the 2004 movie of Goines’s novel Never Die Alone.
The sheer volume of books written in those four years had Goines finishing n
ovels within a month. The fevered pace of his output should detract from the pace of Daddy Cool but instead it adds a tension to the portrait of a stone-cold killer.
Daddy Cool is feared and respected for his lack of any emotion and his trademark is lighting a cigarette before he kills. His absence of haste in his killings, never in a hurry, belies the speed at which the book was composed.
The only love of Daddy Cool’s life is his daughter and he attempts to warn her about the pimp she is seeing. The fallout leads to the pimp turning her out and the scene is set for revenge.
“ . . . his eyes all aglow, wanting to see if we’d be interested in his books.”
So said Bentley Morris of the legendary Holloway House, specialist publishers in black literature.
Goines had a twofold dream: a book, then a movie.
Ernest Dickerson, Spike Lee’s cinematographer, who would later film Never Die Alone, thought initially that they were too dark, too bleak, for the screen.
Goines’s major legacy, though, lies with the rappers.
From
AZ
Through
RZA
To Tupac
And even a rapper who calls himself Donny Goines, acknowledging his influence. In his lyrics Tupac Shakur refers to Goines as
“My father figure.”
Goines, after his move to Watts, became more politicized and compared the turmoil of the ghetto to a race war.
He and his common-law wife were shot to death by two white men. Arguments continue as to the motive behind the killings. Was it a drug deal gone horribly wrong?
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