New Mexican mystery novelist Tony Hillerman has been the unofficial cultural ambassador of the Navajo Nation for more than 30 years. His Indian detectives, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, have introduced thousands of white readers to the rich culture of the tribes of the American Southwest in bestsellers like A Thief of Time and Skinwalkers. Hillerman turns 78 this month, just in time for the release of his 16th Leaphorn & Chee novel, The Sinister Pig, which revolves around an evil billionaire, a murdered CIA agent and the oil pipelines on the U.S.-Mexico border. He’s hard at work on the 17th, with no plans to retire anytime soon.
THE RAKE: So, just what the heck is a sinister pig?
HILLERMAN: You’re giving away my plot. (laughs) In the world of pipelines a pig is a device that is used to clean out pipelines. They’re hollow, and they used to look like a torpedo and they covered them with pigskin, with the bristles out, in the old days. Now they’re very modern and they have computer chips in them and they do all sorts of things. But one thing they could do is smuggle cocaine or diamonds or money you want laundered or whatever, across state lines or national lines. Another sinister pig is the boss pig in a sty full of pigs who doesn’t want any other pig to share in the food. … You’re always looking for a title, and the book kind of reflects my attitude. I think it was Enron and all these major, important companies going bankrupt and screwing their employees out of their retirement and their perks and everything while the CEOs sail off to their summer homes in the Antibes or whatever. That inspired me to get rough on ’em. Apparently nobody else is.
THE RAKE: How did you become a writer?
HILLERMAN: I was raised daydreaming, and my mother always said she wanted to be a poet but didn’t spell well. I don’t spell very well either.
THE RAKE: Do you think of yourself more as a mystery writer, or a writer about Indian culture?
HILLERMAN: I just consider myself a writer. You know how the youngest son—the big brother does the fixing and important stuff, and you go get the hammer and the screwdriver and all that. I grew up in a family that had an older brother and a younger brother, and so you go out into the world and there’s not many things you’re very good at except running after the hammer. I found out very early on that the only thing I could be happy doing was writing. So I just think of myself as a writer. But the problem is if you don’t develop other hobbies you can’t quit.
THE RAKE: You’ve had other careers before becoming a novelist, though.
HILLERMAN: No, I started out as a police reporter in a little town in Texas. Then I worked on four major newspapers in various roles. In the interim I worked for United Press. So I spent about 20 years as a—is the term ink-stained wretch still used? It applies to guys that want to do something interesting and aren’t all that tied into making a lot of money. Which we sure as hell didn’t. I don’t think pay scales have increased too much since then, but you really had to sort of take a vow of poverty to be a journalist in the old days.
THE RAKE: How important is it for a writer to have had other occupations in order to have the experience to write about?
HILLERMAN: I really think working at a newspaper as a reporter has two huge advantages for writers. One, you’re writing every day. You learn how to use the language, you learn how to get a paragraph to make sense if you’re doing it every day. And also it puts you where the action is, where you’re seeing the guy sitting in the defendant’s box sweating out the jury. You’re at the scene of the crime, you’re at the scene of the train wreck, you’re dealing with people that are under tension, and I just think you can get a whole head full of memories of people and things. I wonder sometimes how normal people come up with their good books.
THE RAKE: You’ve said before that you don’t usually have trouble coming up with ideas because you’ve seen so many things in real life.
HILLERMAN: Yeah. You’re trying to come up with a character, and you suddenly remember a fellow that was kind of like what you want. Or a situation that caused a guy to be the way he is. I rely on that, but I think a lot of writers do. They have a whole head full of stuff that would go well in a book or in a plot, and they can’t remember what they did with their glasses but they remember those things. Accumulate ’em.
THE RAKE: What do you want people to take from your novels?
HILLERMAN: Above all I would like them to be aware that the cultures of the people I like to write about, the Navajos and Hopis and so forth, are extremely complicated and extremely interesting—and in the case of the Navajos especially, are extremely valuable. You can learn a heck of a lot from Hopi and Navajo ways of life. For example, the negative value they put on greed, of having more than you need. In their mythology, that’s how you identify a witch, the ultimate of evil. They have more than one kind of what we call a witch, they don’t use that word. And the fellow who’s got money and stuff, and kinfolks who are hungry, it’s an almost certain sign the guy’s evil. We’ve sort of left that behind us. We think the homeless person is probably a crook, or dangerous.
THE RAKE: Although you’re not an Indian yourself, your affinity for Indian culture goes all the way back to your childhood.
HILLERMAN: I grew up in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma—population, oh, about 40. It was right in the middle of the allotment given to the Citizen Band Potawatomi tribe. In addition to the Potawatomi, we were surrounded by Seminoles and other Indian tribes. It was a really grungy part of Oklahoma. In fact they’re having a literary festival right now down there in my part of the world, and they call it the Red Dirt Festival. Anyway, to answer your question, growing up my friends were mostly Potawatomi Indians, and I went to an Indian school. When I went to high school, we were kind of scared of Seminoles, us Potawatomis. They had a warlike reputation. They were more athletic than we were. Our best football players were Potawatomis. And so you grow up, you know they’re just people like everybody else. The good ones and the bad ones, the ones you really like and the ones you cross the street when you see them coming. Then, when I got out to New Mexico—the Potawatomis and the Seminoles were pretty well assimilated. They’d been moved around so much that most of the kids I knew didn’t know their language anymore, or much about their culture. I got to New Mexico and I saw the Navajos and the Pueblo tribes, and these were cultures that were alive and well and vigorous. I was interested, and the more I saw the better I liked what I was seeing.
THE RAKE: What’s your writing process like?
HILLERMAN: I gave up outlining books in the middle of the third one [Listening Woman]. It dawned on me that it was a horrible waste of time. And it screws up the process for me. In Sinister Pig, there’s a very minor character in it, a guy named Budge, who’s a chauffeur and pilot for this mogul.
THE RAKE: And who also does his dirty work.
HILLERMAN: Yeah. And so as I was writing the book, early on I was thinking more and more about him and how did he get that way. And gradually he took over a big chunk of the book. I had no intention of that, but I think it made a better book. … A lot of things about this book I like. I kind of wondered if my editor was going to let me get away with that runaway Budge, coming from nowhere and becoming such a major character. But I liked it, and I sometimes thought I would start the book all over again and make it all about him.
THE RAKE: What kind of research do you do for the books?
HILLERMAN: Sinister Pig was a monster for research. I grew up near the oil patch and I knew something about pipelining, and people who worked on pipelines and everything, but I didn’t know nearly as much about them as I needed to know, an
d then I moved my Navajo policeman down into the Border Patrol, and I had to accumulate a mountain of stuff about the Border Patrol, their rules and regulations. And then I didn’t know that landscape as well. It’s right down on the border of Sonora. And I’ve been down there a time or two, but I couldn’t close my eyes and reconstruct which mountains you see from where. And that was a lot of work. Luckily my wife is one of these ladies who made Phi Beta Kappa and have straight A grades in college, and her field was actually bacteriology, but she’s very much into botany, so she joins me on what botany I’m involved with. But it was a lot of work and I think I’m an idiot to do it. … I don’t know if you get this way, You start a column, and it’s gonna be a dandy. And then you’re finished, and you’re glad you’re done but it didn’t come out as good as you’d wanted it and you feel bad about it, sort of. I’m that way about every book I’ve ever written.
THE RAKE: Have you ever had a plot become so complicated,
or require so many pages to get through, that you had trouble finishing it?
HILLERMAN: Most of my books I’ve had trouble finishing them. Making all the threads come together and making it all seem sensible. It’s not uncommon for me to have trouble finishing them. I also have trouble in the middle of them.
THE RAKE: Do you have a favorite among your novels?
HILLERMAN: Yeah, I’ve got two. The one I think people would expect me to prefer is A Thief of Time.
THE RAKE: Because that was your big breakout book.
HILLERMAN: Yeah. And the one that my publisher was dismayed that I insisted on writing is my real favorite, when I look on myself as a writer, and that is Finding Moon. It concerns a guy who’s just gotten a dishonorable discharge from the Army for drunk driving, and looks on himself as kind of a loser. … What I’d intended to do, years ago when I was working for United Press, and everything was going to hell in the Congo basin—Stanleyville, the Paris of Africa, was in flames, and about five different tribes were fighting over the gold mines and the diamond mines and the oil fields. I thought this would be an absolutely lawless situation, I would want to put a guy like [the main character], a kind of fella who settled down to be an accountant or something and his company transfers him over there—sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress takeoff, self-discovery, right? Anyway, that’s what I wanted to do with it, but by the time I got serious about doing it everyone had forgotten about the Belgian Congo. It didn’t even exist anymore and nobody wanted me to write it, so I didn’t I started a time or two. Then I watched the news coverage of the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon and I thought, hell, here’s the thing, going on right in front of your eyes. So I gave this guy a mother who was going to the Philippines and arranged to have her more promising son, who’d been an officer in a helicopter repair company and had been killed in an accident, to have the younger guy go over and bring back the older brother’s child with a Cambodian woman, going to get him in all this chaos. That’s what I wrote, and by golly I like what I got. Which isn’t always the case.
THE RAKE: I liked that one too.
HILLERMAN: Nobody’s ever read it. (laughs) I took for granted that you hadn’t read it or I wouldn’t be giving you all the plot. … I was pretty happy with The Wailing Wind too. I’d have to add it to the list of my favorites.
THE RAKE: How is your health these days?
HILLERMAN: Well, I think it’s pretty good. I get things wrong with me but they’re always pretty trivial stuff. I get horrible-sounding stuff, I’ve had two heart attacks, neither of which was any particular note, no damage done. And then I’ve had two bouts of cancer, long in the past, I should be clean too. One of them, I was getting my hair cut, and the barber I like—I’ve got a nine-dollar-a-haircut barber I like real well. He had a new employee just out of the Navy, and he was looking a the back of my head and said “what’s this thing back here?” I said I don’t know, I’ve had it for years. “Well, it looks bad to me. Why don’t you go and ask your doctor about that?” So I went and asked my doctor about it. He sent me to a skin man. Skin man said, oh, that looks bad, and he sent me to another guy who sliced off a sample of it, and he told me I had a tumor in a sweat gland. Doesn’t that sound exciting? So I had to go in and have that taken out, and when I got there they found that the guy who sliced off the sample had sliced off the tumor. There wasn’t any nefarious stuff left for them to work on. Anyway, that’s not what you consider a life-threatening problem. But I’m in good health, I think. I’ve got arthritis, which makes me hesitate to get into an airplane.
THE RAKE: You’ve stated before that you have no plans to retire from writing, that you can’t imagine what you’d do with your time. Is that still the case?
HILLERMAN: Yeah, it sure is. When I finish a book and don’t have all that stuff going on, I’m bored out of my skull. One of my characters, Joe Leaphorn, someone once asked him if he was playing golf, and he said “I got the ball I all nine holes and I can’t see why you’d do it again.” Well, that’s exactly what I did/. I went out and played nine holes of golf and said “What the hell am I doing?” And I’m too crippled up and clumsy to do the kind of fishing I always like to do. Trudging up and down these streams, hunting the fish. I never did like to fish out of a boat. Now I’m so awkward and everything that I just don’t do it much anymore. So I’m going to keep writing as long as I can.
THE RAKE: Would you want another writer to take over the Chee and Leaphorn books after you’re no longer doing them?
HILLERMAN: Boy, I never even thought of that. I can’t imagine a writer who’s very good wanting to do that. I’d think they’d want to do their own stuff.