Word: hillerman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That grisly episode (from Tony Hillerman's novel Talking God) is fictional, but it epitomizes the tensions in a dilemma that confronts curators, anthropologists and those Native Americans who angrily oppose them. To many scholars, and to much of the museum-going public, the Indian bones and burial artifacts are valuable clues to humanity's past. But to many Indians, these relics are sacred and the archaeologists who have appropriated them no better than grave robbers...
...Tony Hillerman's thrillers are usually painstaking, almost anthropological efforts to plunge into the folkways and mind-sets of Native Americans, primarily Navajos. The crimes and solutions nearly always center on the clash of cultures, indeed of metaphysics, in the sparsely populated badlands of the Southwest. But Hillerman's latest is something of a departure. Much of Talking God takes place in official Washington; its characters include a quirky contract killer seemingly borrowed from Elmore Leonard; and the underlying politics focuses as much on Pinochet's Chile as on the grievances of tribes whose ancestral graves are plundered for museum...
...Tony Hillerman...
Some people read Tony Hillerman for the murders. He is, after all, president of the Mystery Writers of America. Others read him for his human interest: in A Thief of Time, his detective, Joe Leaphorn, is coping with his wife's death and his impending retirement. But Hillerman's most striking virtue is his evocation of the Southwest: the barren, craggy land and the complex social interactions between whites and Native Americans and among mutually mistrustful Navajo, Hopi and Apache. Here the plot centers on traditionalists who want to preserve ancient burial places, anthropologists and archaeologists who seek to study...
Most satisfying, the new mystery is often about some specific time or place or profession, whether it is Loren D. Estleman's seedy Detroit or William Marshall's nightmare vision of Hong Kong, Tony Hillerman's half-mystical, half-modern Navajo reservation or Jonathan Gash's crooked fringe of the international antiques business. When these books succeed in evoking an environment or ethos, the reader can more readily forgive any lack of suspense or ingenuity in the plot. Sometimes the writer depends on heavy research or personal knowledge: Tennis Star Ilie Nastase and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Writer Frank Deford both published...