Anne Hillerman was almost 64 years old when she decided to attempt to continue her father Tony's Chee/Leaphorn mystery series. After her father's death in 2008, "I was talking about his stories, his places, and then asking if people had questions. Inevitably, the second or third question would be if there was another book at the publisher, is there another book in the works, is there going to be another Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn novel. Dad did not have any unpublished or unfinished books, and I’d have to say that.
"People told me they felt like these characters were part of their families and I could really read their disappointment. After a while, it dawned on me that I was just like those people, that besides missing my dad, I really was missing those stories, too. That was part of it, thinking that if I were to write a story, there might be an audience for it besides me and my mom.
“The second part was, as I said, thinking about Bernie Manuelito and thinking it’s a shame for series to end with her forever pigeon-holed as the one who brings the coffee, the sweet young thing who has to be rescued by her boyfriend, the gal who drives Jim Chee around when he has a broken foot, all those things. This isn’t true for women in law enforcement, and it particularly isn’t true for Navajo women. It isn’t in the whole spirit of Navajo culture, which celebrates strong women. So, it was a combination of those things, sensing Dad’s readers’ desire for the series to continue and my own itch to have the series not end with Bernie as the young woman who has to be rescued.”
She began to draft a Chee/Leaphorn novel, eventually sent it to Tony's publisher, and in 2013 Spider Woman's Daughter was published. She has now published eleven more mysteries in the series.
In addition to giving Bernie—and other Navaho women—agency, Hillerman says she begins with a setting and a topic—anything from medical marijuana to paleontology to Navajo astronomy. “After I choose the setting, which really is like a character in my stories, then I think, what crime would be appropriate in this setting?” Once she has the crime and the setting, Hillerman skips the common practice of outlining her plot and chapters. “Usually I write a letter to myself, and I say, what is the point of this book? Why are you going to spend a year doing this? What do you want to accomplish?” she says. “And usually in that letter, I deal with what happened in the last book that I was not exactly satisfied with, that I could do better in this book. And then I just kind of start writing.”
Shadow of the Solstice (2025) is the tenth in the series. It incorporates two true events on the Navaho Nation in Arizona and New Mexico: A major Medicare fraud in which criminals signed up needy Navaho and kept the government's therapy payments and the damage extractive industries—coal, oil, uranium—have done to the Nation's land. Hillerman does not editorialize. She demonstrates ways the unscrupulous exploit the poor and desperate. An interesting evocation of contemporary Navaho life with sympathetic characters..
No comments:
Post a Comment