In keeping with this months's theme, it's worth noting that
the two things Tony Hillerman is most noted for are his very
effective use of Navajo culture and traditions in his police
procedurals, AND the extraordinarily effective use of his
rural Southwestern settings.
Hillerman, however, was not the first to use American Indian
cops in a Southwestern setting. Here are a few of the
others.
Manly Wade Wellman's David Return is a uniformed officer in
the US Indian Agency Police (what would now be called the
Bureau of Indian Affairs Police) assigned to the Tsichah
reservation where he grew up. He serves under his
grandfather, Tough Feather, who is the senior Agency
Policeman on the reservation. The
"Tsichahs" are a fictional tribe combining elements of the
Cheyenne and the Pawnee. Return is featured in two short
stories that appeared in EQMM in the late
'40's, "A Star for a Warrior" (4/46) and "A Knife Between
Brothers" (2/47). "Star" has been reprinted several times,
including THE ETHNIC DETECTIVES edited by Bill Pronzini and
Martin Goldberg.
"Knife" has been reprinted in MURDER INTERCONTINENTAL edited
by Cynthia Manson and Kathleen Halligan.
Oliver LaFarge created another Indian policeman whose name
escapes me at the moment, but he's the police chief of a
small Apache reservation who wants to be appointed as a
part-time deputy sheriff, ostensibly so he can have the
authority to arrest tribal members when they go off on a tear
off-rez, but actually because he wants the distinction of
being a policeman with two badges. He appears in one EQMM
short story,
"Woman Hunt No Good" (11/51), which I'm pretty sure was
reprinted in a compendium of EQMM stories edited by Anthony
Boucher called THE QUINTESSENCE OF QUEEN.
Years before Hillerman thought of setting a cop novel on the
Navajo's Big Reservation, former FBI agent Gordon Gordon and
his wife Mildred (who bylined their collaborative novels as
"The Gordons") used it for CAPTIVE, the third in their series
about FBI Agent John "Rip" Ripley. In that one Ripley's
leading a multi-juridictional team of police on the trail of
a gang of bank robbers who are hiding somewhere on the Rez
with a pretty young schoolteacher they've taken hostage (the
titular captive). The Navajo Tribal Police play a supporting
role to Ripley in CAPTIVE, but years later, in a similar book
called ORDEAL, the Gordons would return to the Navajo
Reservation, and, this time, would put the Navajo Police at
center stage.
At just about the same time Hillerman was introducing his
tribal cops in 1970's THE BLESSING WAY, Richard Martin Stern
created a part-Apache, part-Hispanic New Mexico cop named
Johnny Ortiz, a lieutenant in the Santo Cristo (read Santa
Fe) Police. Ortiz appeared in three novels, MURDER IN THE
WALLS, YOU DON'T NEED AND ENEMY, and DEATH IN THE SNOW in the
early '70's, then dropped out of sight, while Stern sought
blockbuster best-seller money with books like THE TOWER (one
of the books that THE TOWERING INFERNO was based on). Fifteen
years later, Stern resumed the series with TSUNAMI which was
followed by THE TANGLED MURDERS, MISSING MAN, and
INTERLOPER.
JIM DOHERTY
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