Tony Hillerman Books In Order

Leaphorn & Chee Books In Publication Order

  1. The Blessing Way (1970)
  2. Dance Hall of the Dead (1973)
  3. Listening Woman (1978)
  4. People of Darkness (1980)
  5. The Dark Wind (1982)
  6. The Ghostway (1984)
  7. Skinwalkers (1986)
  8. A Thief of Time (1988)
  9. Talking God (1989)
  10. Coyote Waits (1990)
  11. Sacred Clowns (1992)
  12. The Fallen Man (1996)
  13. The First Eagle (1998)
  14. Hunting Badger (1999)
  15. The Wailing Wind (2002)
  16. The Sinister Pig (2003)
  17. Skeleton Man (2004)
  18. The Shape Shifter (2006)
  19. Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013)
  20. Rock with Wings (2015)
  21. Song of the Lion (2017)
  22. Cave of Bones (2018)
  23. The Tale Teller (2019)
  24. Stargazer (2021)
  25. The Sacred Bridge (2022)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Fly on the Wall (1971)
  2. Finding Moon (1995)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Best of the West (1991)
  2. The Mysterious West (1994)

Children’s Books In Publication Order

  1. The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (1972)
  2. Buster Mesquite’s Cowboy Band (2001)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs (1973)
  2. New Mexico, Rio Grande, and Other Essays (1975)
  3. The Spell of New Mexico (1976)
  4. Tony Hillerman’s Indian Country Map and Guide (1987)
  5. Indian Country (1987)
  6. Talking Mysteries: A Conversation With Tony Hillerman (With: ) (1991)
  7. Hillerman Country (With: Barney Hillerman) (1991)
  8. Seldom Disappointed (2001)
  9. Kilroy Was There (2004)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Perfect Murder (1991)
  2. 2nd Culprit (1993)
  3. The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories (1996)
  4. A Century of Great Suspense Stories (2001)
  5. A New Omnibus of Crime (2005)

Leaphorn & Chee Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Children’s Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Tony Hillerman Books Overview

The Blessing Way

Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high lonely place a corpse with a mouth full of sand, abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues. Though it goes against his better judgment, Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn cannot help but suspect the hand of a supernatural killer. There is palpable evil in the air, and Leaphorn’s pursuit of a Wolf Witch is leading him where even the bravest men fear…
on a chilling trail that winds perilously between mysticism and murder.

Enhanced CD: CD features an interactive program which can be viewed on your computer, including: a photo galary, an author Q&A and a 35 years of excellence timeline.

Dance Hall of the Dead

Two Native American boys have vanished into thin air, leaving a pool of blood behind them. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police has no choice but to suspect the very worst, since the blood that stains the parched New Mexican ground once flowed through the veins of one of the missing, a young Zu i. But his investigation into a terrible crime is being complicated by an important archaeological dig…
and a steel hypodermic needle. And the unique laws and sacred religious rites of the Zu i people are throwing impassable roadblocks in Leaphorn’s already twisted path, enabling a craven murderer to elude justice or, worse still, to kill again.

Listening Woman

The blind shaman called Listening Woman speaks of witches and restless spirits, of supernatural evil unleashed. But Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police is sure the monster who savagely slaughtered an old man and a teenage girl was human. The solution to a horrific crime is buried somewhere in a dead man’s secrets and in the shocking events of a hundred years past. To ignore the warnings of a venerable seer, however, might be reckless foolishness when Leaphorn’s investigation leads him farther away from the comprehensible…
and closer to the most brutally violent confrontation of his career. Performed by George Guidall

People of Darkness

A dying man is murdered. A rich man’s wife agrees to pay three thousand dollars for the return of a stolen box of rocks. A series of odd, inexplicable events is haunting Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police and drawing him alone into the Bad Country of the merciless Southwest, where nothing good can survive…
including Chee. Because an assassin waits for him there, protecting a thirty year old vision that greed has sired and blood has nourished. And only one man will walk away.

The Dark Wind

‘Now our daughter will walk again in the male rain falling. Now our daughter will walk with dark mist around her. Now our daughter will go with beauty above her. Now our daughter…
‘Navajos, Mary Landon had reminded him in the Crownpoint Cafe’, marry into the wife’s clan. The husband joined the wife’f family. ‘How about that, Jim Chee?’ she’d asked. And Police Sergeant Jim Chee had found nothing to say to her. Either he stayed with the Navajo Tribal Police or he took a job off the reservation. Either he stayed Navajo or he turned white. Halfway was worse than either way. There was no compromise solution…
To the Jim Chee who was an alumnus of the University of New Mexico, a subscriber to Esquire and Newsweek, an officer of the Navajo Tribal Police, lover of Mary Landon, holder of a Farmington Public Library card, student of anthropology and sociology, ‘with distinction’ graduate of the FBI academy, holder of Social Security card 441 28 7272, it was a logical step to take…
But ‘Jim Chee’ was only what his uncle would call his ‘white man name.’ His real name, his secret name, his war name, was Long Thinker, given him by Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the eldest brother of his mother and one of the most respected singers among Four Corners Navajos. Since he had gone to Albuquerque to study at the University of New Mexico, he did not think of himself as Long Thinker. But he did now…
‘ from The Ghostway ‘A first rate story of suspense and mystery…
wholly and inseparably intertwined with the culture of the Navajo nation.’ New Yorker ‘Copyright 1984 by Tony Hillerman. P 1990 by Recorded Books, Ins. Unabridged 5 audio cassettes, 7. 25 hours. Narrated by George Guidall. By arrangement with Curtis Brown, Ltd. Illustration by David Shannon copyright 1990.’ from case

The Ghostway

‘Now our daughter will walk again in the male rain falling. Now our daughter will walk with dark mist around her. Now our daughter will go with beauty above her. Now our daughter…
‘Navajos, Mary Landon had reminded him in the Crownpoint Cafe’, marry into the wife’s clan. The husband joined the wife’f family. ‘How about that, Jim Chee?’ she’d asked. And Police Sergeant Jim Chee had found nothing to say to her. Either he stayed with the Navajo Tribal Police or he took a job off the reservation. Either he stayed Navajo or he turned white. Halfway was worse than either way. There was no compromise solution…
To the Jim Chee who was an alumnus of the University of New Mexico, a subscriber to Esquire and Newsweek, an officer of the Navajo Tribal Police, lover of Mary Landon, holder of a Farmington Public Library card, student of anthropology and sociology, ‘with distinction’ graduate of the FBI academy, holder of Social Security card 441 28 7272, it was a logical step to take…
But ‘Jim Chee’ was only what his uncle would call his ‘white man name.’ His real name, his secret name, his war name, was Long Thinker, given him by Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the eldest brother of his mother and one of the most respected singers among Four Corners Navajos. Since he had gone to Albuquerque to study at the University of New Mexico, he did not think of himself as Long Thinker. But he did now…
‘ from The Ghostway ‘A first rate story of suspense and mystery…
wholly and inseparably intertwined with the culture of the Navajo nation.’ New Yorker ‘Copyright 1984 by Tony Hillerman. P 1990 by Recorded Books, Ins. Unabridged 5 audio cassettes, 7. 25 hours. Narrated by George Guidall. By arrangement with Curtis Brown, Ltd. Illustration by David Shannon copyright 1990.’ from case

Skinwalkers

Three shotgun blasts rip through the side of Officer Jim Chee’s trailer as the Navajo Tribal Police Officer sleeps. He survives but the inexplicable attack has raised disturbing questions about a lawman once beyond reproach. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn wonders why Chee was a target, and what connection the assault has to a series of gruesome murders that has been plaguing the reservation. But the investigation is leading them both into a nightmare of ritual, witchcraft, and blood and into the dark and mystical domain of evil beings of Navajo legend, the ‘Skinwalkers.’

A Thief of Time

At a moonlit Indian ruin where ‘thieves of time’ ravage sacred ground in the name of profit a noted anthropologist vanishes while on the verge of making a startling, history altering discovery. At an ancient burial site, amid stolen goods and desecrated bones, two corpses are discovered, shot by bullets fitting the gun of the missing scientist. There are modern mysteries buried in despoiled ancient places. And as blood flows all too freely, Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee must plunge into the past to unearth an astonishing truth and a cold hearted killer.

Talking God

Reunited by a grave robber and a corpse, Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is trying to determine the identity of a murder victim, while Officer Jim Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancestors.

But with each peeled back layer, it becomes shockingly clear that these two cases are mysteriously connected and that others are pusuing Highhawk, with lethal intentions. And the search for answers to a deadly puzzle is pulling Leaphorn and Chee into the perilous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods.

Coyote Waits

First there was the trouble at Saint Boneventure boarding school. A teacher is dead, a boy is missing, and a council woman has put a lot of pressure on Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee to find her grandson. Sitting on a rooftop watching sacred clowns perform their antics in a Pueblo ceremony, Chee spots the boy. Then, suddenly, the crowd is in commotion. One of the clowns has been savagely murdered. Without a single clue, Chee and Leaphorn must follow a serpentine trail through the Indian clans and nations, seeking the thread that links two brutal murders, a missing teenager, a band of lobbyists trying to put a toxic dump site on Pueblo land, and an invaluable memento given to the tribes by Abraham Lincoln in a fast paced, flawless mystery that is Hillerman at his lyrical, evocative, spellbinding best. Performed by Gil Silverbird

Sacred Clowns

First there was the trouble at Saint Boneventure boarding school. A teacher is dead, a boy is missing, and a council woman has put a lot of pressure on Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee to find her grandson. Sitting on a rooftop watching Sacred Clowns perform their antics in a Pueblo ceremony, Chee spots the boy. Then, suddenly, the crowd is in commotion. One of the clowns has been savagely murdered. Without a single clue, Chee and Leaphorn must follow a serpentine trail through the Indian clans and nations, seeking the thread that links two brutal murders, a missing teenager, a band of lobbyists trying to put a toxic dump site on Pueblo land, and an invaluable memento given to the tribes by Abraham Lincoln in a fast paced, flawless mystery that is Hillerman at his lyrical, evocative, spellbinding best. Performed by Gil Silverbird

The Fallen Man

On Halloween, a skeleton is found wedged near the apex of 1,700 foot high Shiprock, one of the holiest places in Navajo religion. Baffled in his attempts to determine the skeleton’s identity, Jim Chee is relieved when his old mentor, the newly retired Joe Leaphorn, shows up with a solid lead. Ten years before, Leaphorn had worked on a missing person case that involved a man who had disappeared while vacationing with his wife near the monolith. He had never been able to find the body until now. His missing person, Hal Breedlove, and Chee’s mysterious skeleton are one and the same. Before they can celebrate closing their respective cases, however, the plot takes a twist. An old Navajo guide, the last man who saw Breedlove alive is seriously wounded by a sniper in the desert, and Chee and Leaphorn begin to suspect that Breedlove’s death was murder. Renewing their uneasy partnership, they begin an investigation that takes them through a tangled web of intrigue and deceit and culminates in a spectacular snowbound climax when a colossal blizzard hits the reservation just as they’re about to close in on the killer. With its ingenious plot, impeccable pacing, gripping evocations of the Southwest’s harsh beauty and unique insights into Navajo culture, ‘The Fallen Man‘ is Hillerman at his best.

The First Eagle

‘One of our best and most innovative modern mystery writers.’ The New York Times

The very plague that decimated Europe in the 14th century lurks today in the high, dry land of the Southwest. But Navajo Tribal policeman Jim Chee and his mentor, Joe Leaphorn, discover an even deadlier killer stalking the Reservation in this, the most chilling and beautifully crafted story yet from the beloved and bestselling master of Southwestern suspense.

When Acting Lt. Chee catches a Hopi eagle poacher literally red handed’huddled over the bloody body of a young Navajo Tribal police officer, he has an open and shut case. Even the Feds usually at odds with Chee agree, and it seems the Hopi is headed for the gas chamber. Until Joe Leaphorn shows up to blow Chee’s case wide open.

Leaphorn, now retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, has been hired to find Cathy Pollard, a hotheaded biologist who disappeared from the same remote area on the same day the Navajo cop was murdered. Is she a suspect? A victim? And what are Chee and Leaphorn to make of the report that a skinwalker’a Navajo witch’was seen in the same area at the same time?

To answer these questions, Leaphorn and Chee must immerse themselves in the enigmatic web of scientists hunting the key to the most virulent form of bubonic plague since the Middle Ages.

In addition to its finely wrought plot, The First Eagle offers a wealth of Tony Hillerman’s signature gifts glorious evocations of the high desert, delicately drawn characters, and eloquent insights into the foibles and wisdom of the Southwest’s native peoples.

Hillerman’s writing is like the landscape he describes: unadorned yet profound, sparse yet beautiful. Houston Chronicle

Also available unabridged 0694520519 $34. 95 six cassettes.

Hunting Badger

‘One of our best and most innovative modern mystery writers.’ The New York Times

The very plague that decimated Europe in the 14th century lurks today in the high, dry land of the Southwest. But Navajo Tribal policeman Jim Chee and his mentor, Joe Leaphorn, discover an even deadlier killer stalking the Reservation in this, the most chilling and beautifully crafted story yet from the beloved and bestselling master of Southwestern suspense.

When Acting Lt. Chee catches a Hopi eagle poacher literally red handed’huddled over the bloody body of a young Navajo Tribal police officer, he has an open and shut case. Even the Feds usually at odds with Chee agree, and it seems the Hopi is headed for the gas chamber. Until Joe Leaphorn shows up to blow Chee’s case wide open.

Leaphorn, now retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, has been hired to find Cathy Pollard, a hotheaded biologist who disappeared from the same remote area on the same day the Navajo cop was murdered. Is she a suspect? A victim? And what are Chee and Leaphorn to make of the report that a skinwalker’a Navajo witch’was seen in the same area at the same time?

To answer these questions, Leaphorn and Chee must immerse themselves in the enigmatic web of scientists hunting the key to the most virulent form of bubonic plague since the Middle Ages.

In addition to its finely wrought plot, The First Eagle offers a wealth of Tony Hillerman’s signature gifts glorious evocations of the high desert, delicately drawn characters, and eloquent insights into the foibles and wisdom of the Southwest’s native peoples.

Hillerman’s writing is like the landscape he describes: unadorned yet profound, sparse yet beautiful. Houston Chronicle

Also available unabridged 0694520519 $34. 95 six cassettes.

The Wailing Wind

To Officer Bernadette Manuelito, the man curled up on the truck seat was just another drunk which got Bernie in trouble for mishandling a crime scene which got Sergeant Jim Chee in trouble with the FBI which drew Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn out of retirement and back into the old ‘Golden Calf’ homicide, a case he had hoped to forget. Nothing had seemed complicated about that earlier one. A con game had gone sour. A swindler had tried to sell wealthy old Wiley Denton the location of one of the West’s multitude of legendary lost gold mines. Denton had shot the swindler, called the police, confessed the homicide, and done his short prison time. No mystery there. Except why did the rich man’s bride vanish? The cynics said she was part of the swindle plot. She’d fled when it failed. But, alas, old Joe Leaphorn was a romantic. He believed in love, and thus the Golden Calf case still troubled him. Now, papers found in this new homicide case connect the victim to Denton and to the mythical Golden Calf Mine. The first Golden Calf victim had been there just hours before Denton killed him. And while Denton was killing him, four children trespassing among the rows of empty bunkers in the long abandoned Wingate Ordnance Depot called in an odd report to the police. They had heard, in the wind wailing around the old buildings, what sounded like music and the cries of a woman. Bernie Manuelito uses her knowledge of Navajo country, its tribal traditions, and her friendship with a famous old medicine man to unravel the first knot of this puzzle, with Jim Chee putting aside his distaste of the FBI to help her. But the questions raised by this second Golden Calf murder aren’t answered until Leaphorn solves the puzzle left by the first one and discovers what the young trespassers heard in The Wailing Wind.

The Sinister Pig

The victim, well dressed but stripped of identification, is found at the edge of the vast Jicarilla Apache natural gas field just inside the jurisdiction of the Navajo Tribal Police, facing Sergeant Jim Chee with a complex puzzle.

Why did the Washington office of the FBI snatch custody of this case from its local agents, cover it with secrecy, and call it a hunting accident? What was the victim seeking among the maze of pipelines and pumping stations in America’s largest gas field? Was he investigating the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the Indian Tribal royalty trust in the Department of the Interior?

On a level nearer to Chee’s heart, did the photographs Bernie Manuelito took on an exotic game ranch near the Mexican border reveal something connected with this crime? Did Bernie, once a member of Chee’s squad but now a rookie Border Patrol Officer, put herself in terrible danger?

Tony Hillerman leads his readers through another of his intricate plots to the solution of this crime, with a cast of vivid characters: a Washington political mogul and his more or less renegade pilot; a customs official who bends the rules; a Mexican smuggler with a conscience; and, finally, ‘Legendary Lieutenant’ Joe Leaphorn, now retired, who connects the lines on a dusty old map to find the answers and The Sinister Pig among the great scimitar horned oryx grazing on the historic Tuttle Ranch.

Skeleton Man

Hailed as ‘a wonderful storyteller’ by the New York Times, and a ‘national and literary cultural sensation’ by the Los Angeles Times, bestselling author Tony Hillerman is back with another blockbuster novel featuring the legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee. Former Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn comes out of retirement to help investigate what seems to be a trading post robbery. A simple minded kid nailed for the crime is the cousin of an old colleague of Sergeant Jim Chee. He needs help and Chee, and his fianc e Bernie Manuelito, decide to provide it. Proving the kid’s innocence requires finding the remains of one of 172 people whose bodies were scattered among the cliffs of the Grand Canyon in an epic airline disaster 50 years in the past. That passenger had handcuffed to his wrist an attach case filled with a fortune in one of which seems to have turned up in the robbery. But with Hillerman, it can’t be that simple. The daughter of the long dead diamond dealer is also seeking his body. So is a most unpleasant fellow willing to kill to make sure she doesn’t succeed. These two tense tales collide deep in the canyon at the place where an old man died trying to build a cult reviving reverence for the Hopi guardian of the Underworld. It’s a race to the finish in a thunderous monsoon storm to see who will survive, who will be brought to justice, and who will finally unearth the Skeleton Man.

The Shape Shifter

Since his retirement from the Navajo Tribal Police, Joe Leaphorn has occasionally been enticed to return to work by former colleagues who seek his help when they need to solve a particularly puzzling crime. They ask because Leaphorn, aided by officers Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito, always delivers. But this time the problem is with an old case of Joe’s his ‘last case,’ unsolved, and one that continues to haunt him. And with Chee and Bernie just back from their honeymoon, Leaphorn is pretty much on his own. The original case involved a priceless, one of a kind Navajo rug supposedly destroyed in a fire. Suddenly, what looks like the same rug turns up in a magazine spread. And the man who brings the photo to Leaphorn’s attention has gone missing. Leaphorn must pick up the threads of a crime he’d thought impossible to untangle. Not only has the passage of time obscured the details, but it also appears that there’s a murderer still on the loose.

The Fly on the Wall

John Cotton was a simple man with one desire: to write the greatest story of his life and have enough life left to read all about it. Reporter John Cotton knows what to do when he finds a great story, but he is a little afraid when a big story begins to find him. It starts when a fellow reporter is murdered and his notebook, filled with information about a tax scam, ends up in John’s hands. Not long afterwards, a body is discovered in John’s car. Then John’s car ends up in the river, a bomb is found in his apartment, and his girlfriend drops out of sight. It’s up to John to unravel the mystery of the notebook and why anyone would kill for the information it contains.

Finding Moon

Tony Hillerman’s bestselling Navajo mysteries have thrilled millions of readers with their taut, intricate plotting, sensitive, subtle characterizations and lyrical evocations of landscapes and cultures. Now he departs his trademark terrain and applies his talents to a story he has wanted to tell for decades about an ordinary man thrust into total chaos. Until the telephone call came for him on April 12, 1975, the world of Moon Mathias had settled into a predictable routine. He knew who he was. He was the disappointing son of Victoria Mathias, the brother of the brilliant, recently dead Ricky Mathias and a man who could be counted on to solve small problems. But the telephone caller was an airport security officer, and the news he delivered handed Moon a problem as large as Southeast Asia. His mother, who should be in her Florida apartment, is fighting for her life in a Los Angeles hospital stricken while en route to the Philippines to bring home a grandchild they hadn’t known existed. The papers in her purse send Moon into a world totally strange to him. They lure him down the back streets of Manila, to a rural cockfight, into the odd Filipino prison on Palawan Island and finally across the South China Sea to where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge is turning Cambodia into killing fields and Communist rockets are beginning to fall on the outskirts of Saigon. Finding Moon is many things: a latter day adventure epic, a deftly orchestrated romance, an arresting portrait of an exotic realm engulfed in turmoil, and a neatly turned tale of suspense. Most of all, it is a singular story of how a plain, uncertain man finds his best self.

The Best of the West

A sterling collection of classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction evoking the unique spirit of the West and its people, selected and introduced by one of today’s premier chroniclers of the Western landscape and a New York Times bestselling author.

The Mysterious West

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe’s basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America’s unique contribution to this highly popular genre. From elegant ‘locked room’ mysteries, to the hard boiled realism of the ’30s and ’40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman, a best selling crime writer himself. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life long interest not to say love of this quintessentially American genre. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

The Boy Who Made Dragonfly

As readers of Tony Hillerman’s detective novels know, he is a skilled interpreter of southwestern Indian cultures. In this book, first published in 1972 and now in paperback, he recounts a Zuni myth first recorded a century ago by the anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. Hillerman s version of the story, written to be read by children ten years old and up, will have equal appeal for adults with an interest in Native American culture. In our society, Hillerman explains, this would be called a Bible story. Like stories based on the Old Testament, this narrative is intended to teach both the history and morality of a people. It tells the consequences of a drought in which the Zuni crops were ruined and the tribe was forced to accept charity from the neighboring Hopis.

Buster Mesquite’s Cowboy Band

Buster Mesquite’s Cowboy Band give a quirky southwestern retelling of a classic children’s tale, with a much more satisfactory ending. Delightful illustrations by Navajo artist Ernest Franklin, who has been illustrating Tony Hillerman’s Navajo policemen for many years. Visual puns and hidden jokes make Franklin’s drawings a delight to revisit over and over, always with a fresh sense of discovery. Humor is a large part of Native American life and traditional culture.

The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe’s basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America’s unique contribution to this highly popular genre. From elegant ‘locked room’ mysteries, to the hard boiled realism of the ’30s and ’40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman, a best selling crime writer himself. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life long interest not to say love of this quintessentially American genre. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

The Spell of New Mexico

A rich gathering of essays that evoke the unique and mysterious appeal New Mexico has had for some of the twentieth century’s best known writers. Included are selections by Mary Austin, Oliver La Farge, Conrad Richter, D.H. Lawrence, C.G. Jung, Winfield Townley Scott, John DeWitt McKee, Ernie Pyle, Harvey Fergusson, and Lawrence Clark Powell. Hillerman s preface and introduction are choice specimens of his incisive humor and his own deep love of the state. Should be required reading for all those who call themselves New Mexican. James Arnholz

Tony Hillerman’s Indian Country Map and Guide

No other contemporary writer knows the Southwest like Tony Hillerman. Now, for the first time, the events and locations taken from his Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn mysteries can be traced in one of America’s most majestic and haunting landscapes. Whether a first time reader of a true fan, this is the perfect companion map and guide to bring to life each of Hillerman best selling mysteries. This hard cover ‘ European Style’ companion map captures events locations and quotations from all Tony Hillerman’s Best selling Indian Country mysteries. Extensive illustrations by Peter Thorpe and a highly detailed map bring one of America’s most intriguing and mysterious regions to reality.

Talking Mysteries: A Conversation With Tony Hillerman (With: )

In Talking Mysteries, Tony Hillerman discusses his craft, including his approach to plot, characterization, and setting, and the wrinkles and twists that make his brand of fiction unique. These and other insights into how he writes emerge in an extended interview with his long time friend and fellow author Ernie Bulow. An autobiographical piece by Hillerman details his early years in Oklahoma, first encounters with Navajo culture, and his eventual life as journalist and author. Navajo artist Ernest Franklin created twelve sketches of Hillerman characters for this book. Hillerman credits Franklin with showing me what Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn look like. As an additional treat, a Jim Chee mini mystery, The Witch, Yazzie, and the Nine of Clubs, originally published in 1981 and long unavailable, is included.

Hillerman Country (With: Barney Hillerman)

This book portrays the unique landscape of the American south west in both words and pictures. Hillerman affectionately describes the land of his stories and what draws him to the land what planted the seeds of each novel. He speaks movingly about the people who inhabit the land, from the Indians Navojos, Mepis, Zunis who have lived there for centuries, to the Anglos who chose to settle in such forbidding surroundings. He explains the customs and cultures of these peoples, and how they shaped their world. In each case his vivid and entracing text is accompanied by photographs taken by his brother, Barney Hillerman.

Seldom Disappointed

When Tony Hillerman looks back at seventy six years spent getting from hardtimes farm boy to bestselling author, he sees lots of evidence that Providence was poking him along. For example, when an absentminded Army clerk left him off the hospital ship taking the wounded home from France, the mishap put him on a collision course with a curing ceremony held for two Navajo Marines, thereby providing the grist for a writing career that now sees his books published in sixteen languages around the world and often on bestseller lists. Or, for example, when his agent told him his first novel was so bad that it would hurt both of their reputations, he nonetheless sent it to an editor, and that editor happened to like the Navajo stuff. In this wry and whimsical memoir, Hillerman offers frequent backward glances at where he found ideas for plots of his books and the characters that inhabit them. He takes us with him to death row, where he interviews a man about to die in the gas chamber and details how this murderer became Colton Wolf in one of his novels. He relates how flushing a solitary heron from a sandbar caused him to convert Joe Leaphorn from husband to widower, and how his self confessed bias against the social elite solved the key plot problem in A Thief of Time. No child abuse stories here: The worst Hillerman can recall is being sent off to first grade in a boarding school for Indian girls clad in cute blue coveralls instead of the manly overalls his farm boy peers all wore. Instead we get a good natured trip through hard times in college; an infantry career in which he ‘rose twice to Private First Class’ and also won a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart; and, afterward, work as a truck driver, chain dragger, journalist, professor, and ‘doer of undignified deeds’ for two university presidents. All this is colored by a love affair now in its fifty fourth year with Marie, which involved raising six children, most of them adopted. Using the gifts of a talented novelist and reporter, seventy six year old Tony Hillerman draws a brilliant portrait not just of his life but of the world around him.

Kilroy Was There

‘In 1941 Frank Kessler, a young accountant in Canton, Ohio, was drafted, assigned to an Army Signal Corps unit, and went away to photograph the war in Europe. In 1945, home again with his wife and children, he stored hundreds of those images of blood and battle in his attic. There they stayed until after his death.’Then Lee Kessler, Frank’s estranged younger brother, sorted through boxes seeking to better know a brother he’d never known very well. A flier who had been shot down and held in a German POW camp, Lee saw Frank’s photographs as images of a different side of war, one he never experienced. He was moved by what he saw and recognized their importance, He preserved them for all of us, carefully ordering them into albums and typing the information Frank had written on the backs of the photos.’When I saw Frank Kessler’s photographs I was struck by how different they were from the movie camera views I see on television. No public relations pictures here, intended to glorify battle and rally support. These were up close snapshots of the dirty, damp, and disheveled men in the rifle companies and tank units. It was the war as they endured it, as they struggled through it from the beaches of France to the streets of Berlin until they finally won it.’With his camera Kessler was out there on the killing fields alongside the rest of us…
. Kessler had a remarkable talent for making significant the ordinary images of war. With a snapshot of a U.S. Army medic lighting a cigarette for a bloody German soldier, he tells us how opposing troops came to see one another…
. He shows us soldiers sitting on the muddy bank of a little stream trying to take a bath. He shows us Sherman tanks burning, young men dying, young men dead. Like no other photographs I’ve seen, Kessler’s capture the ugliness, wreckage, cold, and misery of war.’ from the Preface

The Perfect Murder

John Cotton was a simple man with one desire: to write the greatest story of his life and have enough life left to read all about it. Reporter John Cotton knows what to do when he finds a great story, but he is a little afraid when a big story begins to find him. It starts when a fellow reporter is murdered and his notebook, filled with information about a tax scam, ends up in John’s hands. Not long afterwards, a body is discovered in John’s car. Then John’s car ends up in the river, a bomb is found in his apartment, and his girlfriend drops out of sight. It’s up to John to unravel the mystery of the notebook and why anyone would kill for the information it contains.

2nd Culprit

A crime lover’s collection of short stories includes works by such notable authors as Robert Barnard, Antonia Fraser, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey, Sue Grafton, Ellis Peters, and Tony Hillerman. K. PW.

The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe’s basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America’s unique contribution to this highly popular genre. From elegant ‘locked room’ mysteries, to the hard boiled realism of the ’30s and ’40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman, a best selling crime writer himself. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life long interest not to say love of this quintessentially American genre. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

A Century of Great Suspense Stories

New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver’s enviable task? Choose the best mystery/horror detective stories from a century of work by the world’s most celebrated writers. The result is a triumph, featuring masterpieces of suspense by: Robert Bernard Robert Bloch Lawrence Block Anthony Boucher Frederic Brown James M. Cain Max Allan Collins Jeffery Deaver Stanley Ellin Harlan Ellison Erle Stanley Gardner Ed Gorman Anna Katharine Green Jeremiah Healy Patricia Highsmith Reginald Hill Tony Hillerman Evan Hunter Stephen King John Lutz John D. MacDonald Ross MacDonald Michael Malone Steve Martini Sharyn McCrumb Margaret Millar Marcia Muller Sara Paretsky Bill Pronzini Ellery Queen Ruth Rendell Lisa Scottoline Georges Simenon Mickey Spillane Rex Stout Janwillem van de Wetering Donald E. Westlake

A New Omnibus of Crime

This fantastic new collection picks up where Dorothy L. Sayers’ landmark 1929 anthology The Omnibus of Crime left off, bringing together monumental, important, and entertaining works of short crime fiction published over eight decades from the era of the Great Depression to the first years of the twenty first century.
In lively introductory essays, celebrated crime writer Tony Hillerman and critic Rosemary Herbert place each story in the context of the author’s work and the genre’s literary history. Their extraordinary collection is international in scope and emphasizes the most exciting styles and voices, rather than taking a typical decade by decade approach. As a result A New Omnibus of Crime is packed with page turning, engaging, and spine tingling selections. Stories in this collection include Patricia Highsmith’s ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie,’ Sue Grafton’s ‘A Poison That Leaves No Trace,’ and many more, including never before published works from Jefferey Deaver, Catherine Aird, and Alexander McCall Smith.
A New Omnibus of Crime is a marvelous achievement that brings together some of the greatest crime and mystery short fiction ever collected. Showcasing the work of such revered authors as Dashiell Hammett, P.D James, Ross Macdonald, Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell, and Elmore Leonard, it is a definitive volume that will be treasured by all fans of the genre.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment