In Spring 2007 I popped into my favourite independent bookstore to discuss an event with the owner, David Torrans. No Alibis, as the name suggests, specialises in crime fiction (but stocks a great deal more), and David has an encyclopaedic knowledge of his genre which he makes available to all customers, along with the store's uniquely quirky ambience, a cup of coffee and an armchair.
I took the opportunity, as always, to ask about recent or forthcoming titles from the prolific crime writer Tony Hillerman. My mother was getting through crime novels at the rate of two or three a week, and she had a particular taste for Hillerman's atmospheric stories - contemporary police procedurals set among the butts and mesas of the majestic Four Corners area of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado. John Ford country, to my generation.
The main protagonists in most of Hillerman's novels were Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal police, and his plots were invariably interwoven with the beliefs and customs of this ancient people.His writing style was direct, fluent and full - if it doesn't sound strange - of warmth. I've read and enjoyed several, my favourite being Skinwalkers. Hillerman himself was an Anglo - he lived in Albuquerque - but he knew the desert of the Four Corners intimately and his frequent research trips into Navajo country made him a familiar and much-loved figure there: he was honoured with the Navajo Tribe's Special Friends of The Dineh Award ('Dineh' means simply 'the people').
Tony Hillerman
Anyway, calling on said encycloaedic knowledge, David told me that the author was unwell, and that further output was uncertain. Sadly, Hillerman in fact died in autumn of the following year, from heart failure, at the age of 83.
Several of Hillerman's books became movies, indeed Skinwalkers, directed by Chris Eyre and starring Adam Beach and Wes Studi as Leaphorn and Chee, was released in 2002 by CBS.
