Bill's recent post on his acquisition of Brian Garfield's
RELENTLESS reminded me that I wanted to do a follow-up on my
post about cops stories featuring American Indian
protagonists created prior to Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn/Chee
series.
The best of the post-Hillerman Indian cop characters is Sam
Watchman, the hero of RELENTLESS, who is a full-blood Navajo
working as a trooper in the Arizona Highway Patrol.
RELENTLESS is a particularly good example of a type of cop
story that is fairly prevalent in procedurals with rural
Southwestern settings, the "wilderness pursuit" story. One of
the most famous examples of this type of cop yarn is Steve
Frazee's award-winning short story "My Brother Down There,"
which he expanded into the novel RUNNING TARGET. In
RELENTLESS, Watchman, his partner, and an FBI agent are on
the trail of a gang of military-trained bank robbers who have
killed two cops
(including Sam's uncle) and taken a hostage. They have fled
into the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains along the
Arizona/Nevada border. Excellent use of setting. Excellent
story-telling. Compelling characters.
RELENTLESS was made into a TV-movie some 20 or 30 years ago.
Watchman was played by Will Sampson, the Indian actor who'd
made a splash in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. When the
recent PBS films based on Hillerman's novels were broadcast,
a great deal was made about the fact that they featured
Indian actors playing Indian roles. However, years earlier,
the film version of RELENTLESS was the very first Hollywood
feature-length production to feature an Indian lead character
who was portrayed by an Indian actor.
Unfortunately Garfield wrote only one more book about
Watchman. THE THREEPERSONS HUNT, not quite as good, but still
very enjoyable, had more of a traditional
"whodunit" plot than RELENTLESS.
After Watchman, the best of the Indian cop characters is Kirk
Mitchell's Emmett Parker, a Commanche who is a criminal
investigator with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs Police. A
descendant of the legendary war chief Quanah Parker, Emmett
is often partnered with FBI Agent Anna Turnipseed, a
three-quarters Modoc, one-quarter Japanese rookie. There are
hints of romance, but they haven't yet come to fruition. The
first Parker novel, CRY DANCE, moves around between Indian
reservations in Arizona, Nevada, and the desert region of
Southern California. The second, SPIRIT SONG, is set in the
same Navajo Reservation that Hillerman uses as his setting.
Since Parker and Turnipseed are federal cops, they are not
tied to the Southwest, and the third and fourth novels are
set, respectively, in the Pacific Northwest and New York
State.
Though not Indian himself, Mitchell, a former Inyo County,
CA, deputy sheriff, is one of the few mystery writers with
experience in policing Indian reservations, having supervised
a detail of deputies assigned to patrol the various Indian
properties in that county.
NAKIA was a short-lived TV series starring Robert Forster,
who only slightly more Indian than Julia Roberts, as Nakia
Parker, a full-blooded (!?!) Navajo deputy sheriff working
under Arthur Kennedy. Produced by TV copmeister David Gerber
(POLICE STORY, EISCHIED, TODAY'S F.B.I.), it only lasted a
half-season.
Jean Hager's Mitch Bushyhead is a small-town police chief in
Oklahoma. Half-Cherokee, he's a widower raising a daughter by
himself, unfamilir with his Indian heritage but learning
about it little by little from some of his full-blood
colleagues. Hager's series, rather gentle as cop stories go
(almost approaching cozy), have won local awards in
Oklahoma.
James Doss's Charlie Moon is the police chief of the Ute
Reservation Police in Colorado. His best friend is a white
chief of a small town police force adjacent to the
reservation. He's often helped in his investigations by his
aunt, who's a tribal shaman. Haven't read these but have
heard very good things about them.
Aimee and David Thurlo have created two Indian cop series.
The first features Ella Clah, a Navajo FBI agent who, in her
first appearance, is assigned to a case on the Big
Reservation, and decides to quit the Bureau and join the
Tribal Police in subsequent books.
Haven't read these, but, reportedly, Tony Hillerman
thinks highly of them.
The second series, at least I think it's planned as a series,
but thus far there's only been one book, features a New
Mexico State Trooper named Lee Nez, who's also a full-blood
Navajo. The first (and so far only) novel, SECOND SUNRISE, is
a cross-genre piece in which Trooper Nez, infected by a Nazi
spy who's also a vampire in the closing days of WW2, must use
his tribe's religious rituals to keep his vampirism at bay. A
half-century later, Nez, now known as "Leonard Hawk," has
again joined the New Mexico State Police and is on the trail
of his old nemesis, the Nazi vampire. Haven't read it, and
I'm not a horror fan
(though neither do I dislike it).
One pre-Hillerman Indian cop character I nbeglected to
mention was the comic book sleuth "Pow-Wow" Smith, a
non-descript Indian who was the sheriff of a rural community
somewhere in the Southwest. It wasn't always evident whether
this was the contemporary west or the Old West, but since the
stories were back-ups in DETECTIVE COMICS, a contemporary
setting can be inferred. In an anniversary issue of DETECTIVE
COMICS, Smith, along with other back-up features from the
magazine's sixty-year history (PI Slam Bradley, TV detective
Roy Raymond, the "Human Target," etc.) teamed up with Batman
to solve a mystery. In recent, more politically correct,
years, Smith has been given a more authentic sounding Indian
name to make up for the condescension implied by the nickname
"Pow-Wow."
Beause of this month's them, and my own inclinations, I've
concentrated specifically on Indian cops, specifically
operating in in the Southwestern United States, but there are
Indian detective characters who aren't cops (William F.
Nolan's Nick Challis is a half-Indian PI and Bill Ballinger's
Joaquin Hawks is a spy), and there are Indian cops who
operate in settings other than the Southwest (The TV series
HAWK was about a Mohawk NYPD lieutenant who worked in the
Manhattan DA's Office; Scott Young writes about an Inuit
Mountie in novels set in Canada; and Suzanne Blanc about a
half-Aztec Mexican Federal Police Inspector who, of course,
work south of the border).
JIM DOHERTY
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