SOURCE: Porsche, Michael. “Journey into the Past: Tony Hillerman's A Thief of Time.” Amerikastudien 39, no. 2 (1994): 183-95.

[In the following essay, Porsche focuses on A Thief of Time, arguing that the book fulfills the reader's desire for harmony and order through the development of characters who must come to terms with the past in order to restore balance to their world.]

No contemporary American writer since William Eastlake has made the landscape of the American Southwest as dominating a factor of his work as has Tony Hillerman. His series of mysteries—so far ten Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee adventures have been published—usually take place on the homeland of the Navajo Nation and adjacent tribal reservations in northern New Mexico. This area, which is almost as big as the New England states taken together, is today sparsely populated by about 200,000 Navajos. The region also presents a jurisdictional puzzle because a part of this reservation is the so-called checkerboard area, in which lots belonging to reservations of different nations—Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo, and Apache—alternate with areas subject to white American administration and jurisdiction, thus forming a strange mosaic or checkerboard pattern on the map. The Navajo Tribal Police shares responsibility and authority with county, state, and federal agencies. Its officers have to deal with the discouraging facts that constitute the Native Americans' dilemma in the contemporary industrial society dominated by white culture. As an additional obstacle, they face the resentment and distrust of their own people, who view them with natural suspicion as agents of the white power structure—although the Navajo are, of course, suspicious of any power structure. Some Navajo policemen cannot even speak the Navajo language and are thus further alienated from their people's culture through a white middle-class education.

All this constitutes a fundamental and existential tension within individuals, and between those who still cling to the old way and those who have turned their backs upon it. Certainly Tony Hillerman found that one could make good use of these tensions in a detective novel's protagonist who is a Navajo with two college degrees in anthropology, an agnostic who is married to a devout believer in the Navajo Way and who, in later novels, works with a younger colleague who is learning to become a shaman. By now it is well known that Hillerman had not planned anything like that originally, when he sent the first draft of his novel The Blessing Way (1970) on its round to the publishers, but had to be persuaded by editor Joan Kahn of Harper & Row to make the minor figure of an Indian detective into the central character.¹

Tony Hillerman's mystery novels featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police have been highly successful over the past two decades. Although terms like “literary sensation” or “cult author,” which invariably appear in the blurbs of the paperback editions, are getting ever more short-lived on the literary scene, Hillerman has by now firmly established himself as one of the masters (and bestsellers) on the growing market of mystery novels.² The reason for this extraordinary success lies in Hillerman's considerable abilities as a writer. But it is also certain that Hillerman and his publishers have cashed in on the increasing movement in crime literature which points away from the endless repetition of the classic hardboiled formula of the masters. This development, which has in a long process sought ways to emancipate the whodunit from the towering influence of masters like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, at the same time seems to have pushed the genre to its limits. Nevertheless, there are still some excellent practitioners of hardboiled detective fiction, who write in the vein of the old school, and the announcement on a paperback blurb that here at last is the true heir to Chandler's throne obviously still helps to sell a great number of books. But even as original an author as Loren Estleman—the main contender to the hardboiled title—seems to have written his lonely private eye Amos Walker, walking down the mean streets of Detroit, into a dead end.

The private eyes and the detectives of old have gradually stepped aside for a new breed of ultra-cynical crime solvers—not necessarily law enforces—who operate in realms of utmost horror and degeneration and who obey no rules but their warped personal codes of honor, like Andrew Vachss's hero Burke, who moves in the underworld of New York. Contemporary readers of crime fiction, like contemporary viewers of crime movies, seem to have developed a constant craving for more spectacular action and more exotic places, for more blood and wilder chase scenes. Plots have grown to be hardly more than fig-leaves for the accumulation of monstrous crimes and ultraviolent encounters between—well, the good guys and the bad guys, although these days one cannot always tell for sure where the line is to be drawn.

This, in drastic simplification, was the state of American crime fiction, when Tony Hillerman, professor of journalism at Albuquerque, New Mexico, arrived on the scene in 1970 with his first Navajo Tribal Police novel featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. His remarkable achievement lies in his catering to a steadily growing audience of readers who get tired ever more quickly of the newest variations on a limited formulaic genre; he does so, however, without offering an abundancy of blood and corpses.³

As will be pointed out in the following discussion of Hillerman's recent novel A Thief of Time, the opposite seems to be the case. Hillerman, for all his mastery of the unfamiliar, if not exotic, background of his Navajo Reservation mysteries, clearly satisfies a fundamental desire that underlies the motivation of anyone opening a crime novel. Apart from the intellectual pleasure gained from an intricately woven plot or the tension of a dramatic action, crime fiction temporarily fulfills the readers' fundamental desire for harmony and order:

[The detective story] presents and presupposes not only a rational and therefore intelligible order but also an essentially stable and just social order in which the law is ultimately vindicated and sporadic outbreaks of violence subdued and punished. … The purpose and meaning of the closed and limited world on which the process of detection casts its search light is restored and reaffirmed.⁴

The hero of this ‘classical’ type of crime fiction will in the end restore law and order, help the weak, and preferably attractive, female clients, and the unjustly suspected. He will right wrongs and thus triumph, albeit temporarily, over the mean and evil elements, in both low and high places, of society. Increasingly, though, writers of contemporary American crime fiction find themselves up against a reality that makes it very hard for an author to offer such wishful thinking, even if it is entirely fictional. Even Chandler's tough and romantic PI Philip Marlowe back in the Los Angeles of the 1940s had little illusion in that particular respect, but the dramatic increase of everyday crime in the chaotic mega-cities of today's America calls the concept of law and order—any order—itself into question.

Exactly this seems to be the point where Hillerman comes in to close the gap between a romantic yearning for an ordered society and fresh coordinates for contemporary crime literature, because it seems that he has found such a “closed and limited world.” His series of crime novels take place on the Navajo Reservation—Dinetah—which forms an island in the midst of white American civilization, “an island of 180,000 Navajos … in a white ocean” (227).⁵ In this area, which centers on the cornerpoints of the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, and which in itself is defined by the cornerpoints formed by the four holy mountains of Navajo mythology, the concept of hozro is still an important factor in the life of the Dineh (“The People” or “Earth People,” as the Navajos call themselves).⁶ This concept can perhaps best be translated with ‘living in harmony with oneself and one's environment,’⁷ and it keeps a fragile balance between the Navajo Way and all the questionable blessings of the dominating industrialism and consumerism of the Euro-Americans. For Tony Hillerman, the most fascinating aspect of Navajo culture is the Navajos' ability “to bring themselves back into harmony with their universe.”⁸ It is the depiction of Dinetah with its rural and potentially pastoral landscape and its ruling metaphysical concept—the possibility of a life in harmony with nature and the threatening of this harmony by crime and violence—through which Hillerman builds up dramatic tension.

This is also the case in A Thief of Time, the plot of which centers on the disappearance of a young woman and on several murders connected with the looting of ancient burial sites in violation of the Antiquities Preservation Protection Act (15). A Thief of Time—like The Blessing Way (1970) and The Dark Wind (1982)—features anthropologists and their work, who are connected with a crime. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn from the Navajo Tribal Police at Window Rock, Arizona, is on pre-retirement leave. The death of his wife Emma from brain tumor has left him stricken with grief and feeling useless and tired. But he decides to spend the remaining two weeks of his pre-retirement leave trying to find Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. This is due to the fact that Leaphorn thinks his late wife would have wanted him to do so: “Emma would have liked her” (42).

An important characteristic of both Chee and Leaphorn is their incorruptible integrity. Their deep roots in the culture of their people, with its disparaging view of material things and prosperity, makes the two Navajo policemen anachronistic figures in a world that is dominated by the idea of progress. Ambition, the prominent motive for the crimes committed in A Thief of Time, and an underlying factor of the white characters' world, is a thing unknown to these detectives—at least, that is, ambition in the white man's sense. So they are not like the many ‘broken’ characters that people contemporary crime fiction, policemen that work both sides of the law and take personal advantage of their position. Chee and Leaphorn, the reader is certain, will always do the right thing and, if not—there are a few exceptions⁹—their motivation will be noble and thus serve a higher law and ultimate justice. Old-fashioned integrity as well as unconventionality in method and thinking are of course well-known ingredients for the classic detective-protagonist, and Hillerman admits that his Joe Leaphorn could be called “my Sherlock Holmes.”¹⁰ Just like Chandler's hero Philip Marlowe, the two Navajo detectives resist the material temptations of contemporary society. They are not, however, modern knights-errant; they are motivated by their desire to keep a certain harmonious balance intact, a balance that includes white norms and values only insofar as they seem absolutely necessary. The scales are thus quite different, because the white world—the ‘other’ world—is the intruder bringing discord and threatening the Navajo world and its fundamental concept of hozro. The dualistic world view that is transported in most of the average crime novels here refers to different opponents than the usual, universal dichotomy of good versus bad; because the dichotomy found in Hillerman's novels is the good (of Dinetah) struggling against the bad (of the encroaching white world). Needless to say that this image conjures up immediately the well-known cliché of Rousseau's noble savage struggling against unscrupulous and neurotic Calvinists. But accusing Tony Hillerman of a shallow liberalism would not only constitute a complete misreading of his novels, but also discount his sturdy conservatism.¹¹

A Thief of Time is in many respects a turning point in the Leaphorn/Chee series. Both protagonists reach a certain maturity in their development that signals their respective attitudes in forthcoming sequels. While Joe Leaphorn had not undergone a considerable change in the course of eight novels, the younger Chee had matured as a personality in each sequel of the series. Chee was first introduced in People of Darkness (1980). By that time Hillerman had realized that

[Leaphorn] was too old; he was too sophisticated; he'd been to FBI academy; he knew the ways of the white man, and they didn't intrigue him, particularly. So by the time I was writing the third book, Listening Woman, I was thinking this guy's not what I need. I need somebody younger, more traditional, more into his religion, more amazed by white ways. About the same time, I became aware that I had signed a very bad movie-television option, and the people who had optioned the book had kept renewing it, and they had renewed it enough to buy television rights, not movie rights, but TV rights to Leaphorn. So I didn't own TV rights to the guy anymore. So I had art and the motive of greed working together which overcame my lethargy and I created Chee, younger and more Navajo.¹²

Jim Chee is the nephew of one of the most famous Navajo shamans, Frank Sam Nakai, and like his uncle he studies to become “a hathathali. A singer” (64). Although firmly rooted in the Navajo Way, Chee has taken the first tentative steps towards a white middle-class career, but he is still reluctant to go all the way. Thus he is constantly trying to live up to a very fragile compromise: “[Chee] can feel as much at home on the University of New Mexico campus as at an ancient ceremonial on the reservation but is still trying to decide which culture he values more.”¹³ As an apprentice of the traditional healing ceremonies, some of which can last for as long as eight days and nights, Chee has to learn the words of the complicated chants or ‘ways’ by heart. He does so while driving in his patrol car and listening to recordings of specific chants on his tape recorder. So far he has more or less mastered the Blessing Way, a ceremony supposed to cure great sorrow or distress. Chee carries some calling cards advertising his art:

JIM CHEE
Hathathali
Singer of The Blessing Way
Available for other ceremonials
For consultation call _______
(P.O. Box 112, Shiprock, N.M.),

[136]

The phone number is left out because Chee lives on the edge of town, in an aluminum trailer on the banks of the San Juan River (75). The trailer is probably the dwelling that comes closest to a traditional Navajo hogan, and this underlines his reluctance to fully embrace white culture. Leaphorn characterizes his young colleague as follows:

An odd young man, Chee. Smart, apparently. Alert. But slightly … slightly what? Bent? Not exactly. It wasn't just the business of trying to be a medicine man—a following utterly incongruous with police work. He was a romantic, Leaphorn decided. That was it. A man who followed dreams. … Chee seemed to think an island of 180,000 Navajos could live the old way in a white ocean. Perhaps 20,000 of them could, if they were happy, on mutton, cactus, and pinon nuts. Not practical. Navajos had to compete in the real world. The Navajo Way didn't teach competition. Far from it.

(147)

But Leaphorn's dilemma resembles that of Chee in more ways than he at first realizes. While Chee struggles to maintain his ties to the Navajo Way, the older Leaphorn has lived, too, according to the rules of Western rationality to be able to return to the metaphysical concepts of his people. Hillerman had treated this predicament in The Blessing Way, his first novel featuring Leaphorn, who investigates the murder of a young Navajo named Luis Horseman, who is described as “[j]ust another poor soul who didn't quite know how to be a Navajo and couldn't learn to act like a white. No good for anything.”¹⁴

It is this predicament that Chee and, most of all, Leaphorn, have to face in A Thief of Time. In order to come to terms with their individual situation they have to come to terms with the past. Therefore time is the central metaphor in the novel, whose title is a verbatim quote from an official poster issued by the National Park Service: “A THIEF OF TIME … POT HUNTERS DESTROY AMERICA'S PAST” (18). But more importantly, as Fred Erisman states, “… time itself—personal time, professional time, and cultural time—is an essential element of the story, and how Hillerman's characters react to time's passing gives the book much of its [regional and] emotional richness.”¹⁵ The central meaning of time in the novel is experienced by the protagonists as their own past, which inevitably holds unpleasant and painful memories. Almost every character in the novel is haunted by their personal history:

* Chee still has not overcome his abortive love affair with the Anglo schoolteacher Mary Landon, and he is trying to figure out the reason for his failure in cross-cultural relationship. The young Navajo lawyer Janet Pete is facing a situation that mirrors Chee's dilemma, because she is suffering from her ambivalent feelings for a white career lawyer.

* Eleanor Friedman-Bernal has divorced her husband and former colleague, Eduardo Bernal, who apparently left her for another woman, and she is still haunted by the memory of his unfaithfulness: “Eddie Bernal. Tough little Ed. Fun while it lasted. But not much fun for long. Soon surely before Christmas, she would drop the hyphen. Ed would hardly notice. A sigh of relief, perhaps. End of that brief phase when he'd thought one woman would be enough” (11). Eleanor, the intellectual, tries to overcompensate her personal unhappiness with professional brilliance. Like Randall Elliot, she is trying to prove a scientific theory that would revolutionize anthropology and solve one of its biggest mysteries: the disappearance of the Anasazi. For that she is willing to violate laws that protect certain burial sites—she becomes a thief of time.

* Maxie Davis cannot overcome the memory of the hardships she had to suffer growing up in bitter poverty. Although she has finally mastered all those difficulties and is on her way to a promising career as an anthropologist, her personal history has hardened Maxie emotionally. As a way of revenge on all those who have had it easier than herself Maxie, who calls herself “white trash” (111), makes Randall Elliot suffer for his privileged background: “… this man from old money, Exeter Academy, where the tuition would have fed her family for two years. … Anyway, nothing Elliot can do impresses Maxie. It was all given to him” (172). This strategy of spitefulness and revenge on Maxie's side, who tries to overcompensate her former underprivileged status, indirectly leads to the crimes committed in this novel. Leaphorn has figured this out at the end of the novel, when he faces the killer, Randall Elliot: “I guess Maxie. … You want her. But she's a self-made, class-conscious woman with a lot of bad memories of being put down by the upper class. On top of that, she's a tough one, a little mean. She resents you, and everybody like you, because it's all handed to you. So I think you're going to do something that has nothing to do with being born to the upper, upper, upper class. Something that neither Maxie nor anyone else can ignore” (314). Hillerman, of course, needs to present a believable motivation for someone who kills three persons, but in Maxie Davis he also shows someone who cannot escape her past and is therefore unable to form a normal relationship with anyone who does not come “out of the cotton patch” (110). The “game she plays” (171) is not only self-defeating—most people are embarrassed by Maxie's behavior and feel rather sorry for her—it is ultimately destructive.

* Randall Elliot is presented as someone who is driven to commit crimes, because he is desperately trying to impress the woman he loves but finds that the burden of his privileged past stands between them. Most of the characterization of Elliot comes from Mr. and Mrs. Luna, who describe him as “one of those one-woman men” who had left his job in Washington just to be near Maxie Davis, and as “a macho guy” who is “downright obsessive” (170). Elliot's dilemma is clearly that he has to create himself anew in the eyes of Maxie Davis. His achievements so far are impressive—“Played football at Princeton. Flew a Navy helicopter in Vietnam. Won a Navy Cross and some other decorations. And he's made himself a good name in physical anthropology for a man his age” (171). His aim to convince Maxie of his worth, he thinks, can perhaps be reached by some outstanding achievement in the field of anthropological research. But even in that respect he is frustrated by Maxie's contempt, because Elliot's striving for excellence in his field is immediately connected by her to some aristocratic family tradition: “… Randall here … is revolutionizing physical anthropology. … Elliots do not spend time on small things. In the navy they are admirals. In universities they are presidents. In politics they are senators. When you start at the top you have to aim high. Or everybody is disappointed” (111).

The three young anthropologists as a group seem to stand as representatives of a ‘lost’ generation of college students, of which a considerable segment had once dreamed of rebelling against the establishment and creating a counterculture. Could it be that Hillerman, who in his long career as a teacher had ample opportunity to witness the changing ideological attitudes among students, wants to point out that the generation of the sixties has sold out and joined the rat race for jobs and fame, firmly embedded in the greedy me-generation of Reagan's 1980s? Nostalgic reminiscences of the sixties appear in the muted and distant sounds of pop stars Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Such a reading would certainly complement Hillerman's general strategy to contrast the malaise of contemporary Anglo-American culture with an indigenous culture that is still basically intact.

* Finally, there is Harrison Houk. He lives with a Navajo housemaid in a big ranch house which was “built to defy time” but is now “surrounded by decay” (134). Houk's parlor is like a museum, “its walls a gallery of photographs” (136). Time seems to have stopped in this house, since a tragedy wiped out Houk's family. This event is brought back by Leaphorn's visit. Leaphorn's role in this tragic affair—although twenty years have passed—has not been forgotten by Houk, and this fact creates a kind of intimacy between the two men that will prove important in the course of the novel. Houk is a controversial and ambivalent figure. In fact, compared to Maxie Davis, Randall Elliot, and the Lunas, one could call him the single white character in the novel who is more than a cardboard figure. Houk's personal history shows him as a tough, shrewd, and sometimes ruthless local politician and businessman. As a descendant of Mormon pioneers he seems to be closer to the land and also to the Native Americans than other Anglos. But most of all it is his perseverance and his ability to endure that seem to create a kind of spiritual kinship to Navajo values. Of central importance is Houk's sense of family, which is also a concept that Navajos hold sacred. Leaphorn, who is of course all the more sensitive to this fact, notices that this white man, who is allegedly involved in more than dubious dealings with antique pottery, has been living in constant mourning for the past twenty years. His detective's eye notices at once, for example, that “everything was dusty except the piano” (141), namely, the piano that Brigham Houk used to love to play on (144). There are both implicit and explicit connections between Houk's value system and that of the Navajo. Houk explains that one of little Brigham's problems had been that he was “shy as a Navajo.” Another thing is that a Navajo does not believe in capital punishment, that even a murderer is to be considered as a person who is desperately in need of help and should not be locked up in some institution. So Leaphorn can certainly relate to the fact that Houk hides his mentally disturbed son up the San Juan River and that sustaining his only surviving family member has become the old man's sole purpose in life.

For Joe Leaphorn, the feeling of a time that is unretrievably lost is most painful when he grieves for his wife Emma, who has died of brain tumor. The suffering caused by Emma's death has traumatized Leaphorn, and only through a continuous effort can he fight off a feeling of apathy and emptiness: “What will I do tonight, when I am back in Window Rock? What will I do tomorrow? What will I do when this winter has come? And when it has gone? What will I ever do again?” (15) All he has got left are memories of Emma and things that they used to do together, like their visit to New York City and its Museum of Modern Art. As Leaphorn returns to New York to gather information concerning Eleanor's connections to antique dealers and collectors, this journey becomes a trip into his own past in more than one sense. At first, it seems ironical that a Native American, who is supposed to live in harmony with his native surroundings, should draw new strength from a visit to Manhattan. But Hillerman is once again playing with the ambivalence that a Native American is bound to face in contemporary America. Sometimes, Hillerman seems to imply, it takes a flight from Albuquerque to New York for a Navajo to rediscover and reclaim his roots and his cultural heritage. His use of fertility symbols—life-giving rain and the goat—together with the motif of the journey is a convincing means of making the reader aware of the slow and painful healing process that Joe Leaphorn has to undergo throughout the novel. Of course, these symbols can only work with somebody who can relate to them, and so the meaning of rain is certainly not lost on Leaphorn as he sits inside the Museum of Modern Art:

Like all dry-country people, Leaphorn enjoyed rain—that rare, longed-for, refreshing blessing that made the desert bloom and life possible. He sat with his head full of thoughts and watched the water run down the bricks, drip from the leaves, form its cold pools on the flagstones, and give a slick shine to Picasso's goat.

(192)

For Emma, Picasso's sculpture of a goat in the patio of the museum had represented the toughness and perseverance of the Navajo Nation: “‘Look. The mascot of the Navajo Nation.’ … ‘Perfect for us Dineh,’ she'd said. ‘It's starved, gaunt, bony, ugly. But look! It's tough. It endures’” (193). In a déjà vu-like flashback, Leaphorn is reminded of how he and Emma had patted Picasso's goat, and he now hurries out into the rain to renew this gesture: “He got up and hurried out of the museum into the rain, leaving the umbrella hanging forgotten on the chair” (193). “And of course, it was true. That gaunt goat would have been the perfect symbol. … Miserable and starved, true enough. But it was also pregnant and defiant …” (193). The importance of the goat as a symbol for defiant endurance is taken up by Hillerman in one of his essays, where a contemporary Navajo relates to Hillerman the moving scene from the time of the Navajos' captivity at Bosque Redondo. According to which, in 1864, Chief Barboncita asked General Sherman to let the Navajos return to their homeland: “‘If we are taken back to our own country,’ Barboncita told Sherman, ‘we will call you our father and mother. If there was only a single goat there, we would all live off of it.’”¹⁶

In what one may call an epiphany scene, Hillerman, by convincingly employing symbols of fertility and life-giving forces, depicts the rebirth of Joe Leaphorn. At the moment that Leaphorn touches the fertility symbol of the goat, which furthermore symbolizes the most important characteristic of his people, i.e., the ability ‘to endure,’ he reestablishes his ties to the Navajo tradition and thus returns to his roots. That the Navajo Joe Leaphorn has to cross the American continent, to one of the temples of white culture in the artificial glass-and-concrete-canyons of New York City, to regain the awareness of his people's cultural ancestry and thereby renew the contact with the central symbolical power source for survival, seems to be an ironic comment by Hillerman. Leaphorn, the intellectual, who on his flight browses through the New Yorker, who holds two academic titles and who has given up his “intentions of becoming Dr. Leaphorn” (107) only because of his marriage to Emma, is resurrected to his own ‘primitive culture’ in the Mekka of the intellectuals. Hillerman clearly employs here his own deeply felt and, in much of his work, often used, town-country dichotomy. His use of symbols, especially of rain as a life-giving element, is almost too obvious. Leaphorn, the man from the arid desert country, who suffers from a kind of burn-out himself, acquires and later rejects the artificial shelter from life-giving rain:

Leaphorn had bought [an umbrella], the first he'd ever owned, and continued his journey under it—tremendously self-conscious—thinking he would own the only umbrella in Window Rock, and perhaps the only umbrella on the reservation, if not in all of Arizona.

(184)

The umbrella, here clearly symbolizing his temporary withdrawal from life, is significantly left behind at the moment of Leaphorn's epiphany, the realization of the symbolic meaning of Picasso's goat: “He got up and hurried out of the museum into the rain, leaving the umbrella hanging forgotten on the chair” (193).

After this incident at the Museum of Modern Art, Leaphorn seems to have found a new sensibility, which becomes apparent during his visit to the art collector Richard DuMont. He is appalled by this pale old man with the “small voice,” who has as a servant another “old man, stooped and gray in a wrinkled gray suit” (194). DuMont in his wheelchair is surrounded by an aura of decay and decadence; his morbid lust for the sensational and often bloody background of his artifacts appears perverse:

One doesn't merely buy the object. … One wants what goes with it. The history. This head, for example, came out of the jungles in northern Guatemala. It had decorated the doorway to a chamber in a temple. The room where captives were held until they were sacrificed. I'm told the Olmec priests strangled them with a cord.

(196f.)

The disappearance of Eleanor interests DuMont only insofar as he senses some mysterious and spectacular incident that would add some sensational aura to the Anasazi pot he has bought. His motivation for buying Anasazi art in the first place had been for similar reasons, as he explains to Leaphorn: “This is about when my pot was made. … Right at the end. The twilight. In the dying days” (197). DuMont is, thus, indirectly a thief of time. Almost lifeless himself, he seems to intoxicate himself on the artifacts of history's doomed and vanished peoples like the Anasazi. The depiction of DuMont as an almost ghoulish figure makes the contrast to a now revitalized Leaphorn, who has just reached a new awareness of his own ancient and living culture, even greater. To the Navajo, this home of a white man, which is something between a tomb and a museum, is nauseating: “He pushed himself out of the chair. He wanted to get out of this room. Away. Out into the clean rain” (202). Again the cleansing and purifying quality of the rain is stressed, helping to reinforce the symbolic resurrection of Joe Leaphorn, as he leaves the decadent and lifeless white civilization behind to go back to his homeland and nature.

Consequently, Leaphorn's next step towards a new beginning follows on his flight back to Arizona. The western journey as a means of regeneration is a well-known and much-used motif in American literature, and Hillerman self-consciously employs this strategy. Although it may be argued that Hillerman did not spend much thought on subtlety in describing Leaphorn's transcontinental journey, he had to keep an eye on the plot—after all, this is a mystery novel. On the other hand, what may appear as a handy cliché, is perfectly believable in the context of Leaphorn's personality. His allegorical journey or quest takes on autotherapeutic elements. This healing process is aided considerably by Leaphorn's return to his homeland:

Ahead, the earth rose like a rocky island out of the ocean of humid air that blanketed the midlands. Leaphorn could see the broken mesas of eastern New Mexico. Beyond, on the Western horizon, great cloud-castle thunderheads, unusual in autumn, rose into the stratosphere. Leaphorn felt something he hadn't felt since Emma's death. He felt a kind of joy.

(227f.)

Leaphorn's healing process is on its way to completion in the novel's final chapters. Again Hillerman does not hesitate to use another obvious symbol. The river journey in literature, from the Odyssey to Mark Twain, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau to Edward Abbey, stands for some basic change of awareness, for a transcendental process, for a fundamental development towards maturity and spiritual healing. In the case of Leaphorn, the trip up the San Juan is something that he had always intended to undertake together with his wife—“Always intended to do it but there was never enough time. And now, of course, the time was all used up” (131). “Emma would have enjoyed this trip. He had always planned to take her, but there was never time, until now, when time no longer mattered” (290).

At the beginning of his trip, Leaphorn becomes aware of his loneliness and isolation. Unlike his younger colleague Chee, the agnostic Leaphorn so far cannot find solace in the age-old healing ceremonies of his people. Caught in his own rationality, Leaphorn is isolated from this essential element of Navajo culture. This Hillerman expresses with images from nature:

Egrets, [Leaphorn thought], were like snow geese and wolves and those other creatures—like Leaphorn himself—that mated only once and for life. … It was living out its loneliness in this empty place. Leaphorn's kayak slid out of the darkness under the cliff and into a moonlit eddy. His shadow streaked out from that of the kayak, making a strange, elongated shape. It reminded him of the bird, and he waved the paddle to magnify the effect.

(286)

Leaphorn's clinging to this case (his last, the reader is made to believe) of the missing woman develops throughout the course of the novel. At the beginning, it is something to distract his mind from the constant thought about Emma's death, but later it becomes a compensatory act. Leaphorn, who stood helpless at the slow and agonizing death of his wife, at least wants to try to save another woman. His thoughts about Eleanor become more and more intimate, as can be observed by Leaphorn's use of the anthropologist's name. It changes from the bored and even slightly hostile “Dr. What's-Her-Name['s]” (29) and “that hyphenated woman” (62), to a cool and business-like “Friedman” und “Friedman-Bernal” (98, 101), to the more personal “Eleanor” and, finally, to “Ellie” (298). Parallel to that is Leaphorn's changing rationalization of what the search for Eleanor ultimately means. At first, it is “the need for a reason to get away from their house in Window Rock and all its memories. … he would play this pointless game. He would find a woman” (63). Parallel to this reasoning, a kind of awareness creeps up on Leaphorn that a diffuse kind of soul kinship exists between Emma and Eleanor—and even their names sound almost alike. “Leaphorn couldn't explain it, but his mind made a sort of nebulous connection between Emma's character and that of a woman who was probably quite different” (62). It is, of all things, the German dish sauerbraten (40f.), which for Leaphorn serves as a connection between the two women. Leaphorn's decision to try to find Eleanor is not just “a way [to] say good-bye to Emma” (62); it almost appears as an attempt on Leaphorn's side to appease Emma's ghost. At the beginning of chapter four, when Leaphorn attends the service of Slick Nakai, he thinks about the search for Eleanor as a “pointless game” (63). But Leaphorn obviously changes his mind, because at the end of the chapter his thoughts are the following:

He felt an urgency now. The disappearance of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had been merely something curious—an oddity. Now he sensed something dangerous. He had never been sure he could find the woman. Now he wondered if she'd be alive if he did.

(82)

Although the instincts of the veteran detective seem to dominate Leaphorn's motivation, and although it is later stressed that he “didn't believe in chindi, or in anything else” (150), one should keep in mind that Leaphorn is clearly influenced by the spiritual atmosphere of the revival (!) tent and by the presence of two believers of a very different kind—the Reverend Slick Nakai and Sergeant Jim Chee.

At the beginning of his river journey up the San Juan, Leaphorn seems to undergo a veritable metamorphosis. In the shadow play of the moonlight upon the canyon wall his silhouette changes to “the stick figure of the yei Black God as Navajo shamans represented him in the dry painting of the Night Chant” (286). Then he becomes “Kokopelli, with his hunched back full of sorrows” (287). This mirrors the metamorphosis that Eleanor has undergone at the beginning of the novel: “[Eleanor] became Kokopelli himself. The backpack formed the spirit's grotesque hump, the walking stick Kokopelli himself. The backpack formed the spirit's grotesque hump, the walking stick Kokopelli's crooked flute” (1). Leaphorn's association with the Anasazi fertility god represents his transformation from the detached, burned-out cop to the active role of life-saver. Eleanor's becomes the belated gift that Leaphorn had vowed to the memory of Emma: “Well, tomorrow he would find that woman. A sort of gift, it would be” (290). With Leaphorn's mission completed he thinks of “… how proud Emma would be of him tonight if she could be home to hear about this woman brought safely to the hospital” (323).

Joe Leaphorn has thus paid his dues to his wife and her traditional background. Moreover, he is taking responsibility for another person who is now, since Harrison Houk's death, also without a family. Leaphorn's decision to take care of the mentally disturbed Brigham Houk is more than the acknowledgment of Brigham's decisive action in Many Ruins Canyon. Leaphorn's decision honors the devotion and endurance of old Harrison Houk, whose morals, despite his otherwise dubious character, appear superior to that of almost every other white character in A Thief of Time. Tony Hillerman repeatedly, and intentionally, in his novels mentions the one devastating insult possible among a people in whose language swear words do not exist, namely the accusation that one acts as if one had no relatives. In A Thief of Time, Leaphorn finds new relatives through his Wahlverwandtschaft with Eleanor and Brigham, and thereby he finds a way towards hozro and a newly found inner harmony. The decision to acknowledge once again responsibility and to solve his own as well as Brigham Houk's problems leads Leaphorn to

… postpone his plan to leave the reservation, probably a long postponement. Solving the problem about what to do about Brigham Houk would take more than one trip down the river. And if he had to stick around, he might as well withdraw that letter. As Captain Nez had said, he could always write it again.

(323f.)

A Thief of Time is the description of a healing process, much like Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, at the end of which stands the promise of health and sanity. What differs, though, from Silko's outstanding book, is Hillerman's restraint from describing the ritual of the Blessing Way. The way the novel ends is nevertheless sufficiently convincing, and it fits the subdued and skeptical outlook of Leaphorn. The Navajo Way by no means comes out as a triumphant remedy. Joe Leaphorn remains the cool, detached analytic whose sense for order makes him reject irrational and supernatural phenomena. Accordingly, his request for the Blessing Way, which he asks his young colleague to perform for him, remains skeptical and is uttered almost against better knowledge. But his tentative thought—“Why not?” (324)—contains as much hope as world-weary defeatism. After all, the ancient healing ceremony represents an intricate system of order, only of a different quality. When Leaphorn decides that he might as well give the Blessing Way a try, it is not so much the gesture of a modern agnostic wearing (just in case) a blessed amulet. It is rather a deliberate choice by which Leaphorn embraces his native culture and its constant striving for harmony and order. The mature Leaphorn seems to be able to transcend the superstitious aspects of the Navajo Way that alienated Leaphorn as a young man. The decisive aspect of Leaphorn's choice, and also of Tony Hillerman's credo, is the necessity to believe in something.¹⁷ In Coyote Waits (1990)¹⁸ Leaphorn reflects on the ceremony he had requested at the end of A Thief of Time, thereby expressing his ambivalent feelings: “… he'd hired Chee to do a Blessing Way for him … partly to give the young man a chance to try his hand as a shaman and partly as a gesture toward Emma's people” (22). But once the ceremony had gotten under way, Leaphorn “had wished desperately to call it all off. He was a hypocrite. He did not believe …” (23). Thus, A Thief of Time clearly shows elements of an Entwicklungsroman, but also presents different strategies in intercultural socialization. Joe Leaphorn reaches a maturity which, added to his personal integrity, seems to be Hillerman's recipe for Native American consciousness. Joe Leaphorn will continue to struggle with tradition and with his own almost fanatical desire to find order and harmony, but the most important statement of the novel is that he will endure.¹⁹

Notes

1. Tony Hillerman, “Mystery, Country Boys, and the Big Reservation,” Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work, ed. Robin W. Winks (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986) 127-47; 137.

2. Hillerman has won several rewards from the MWA (Mystery Writers of America) among them the Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Dance Hall of the Dead as Best Mystery Novel of 1973. For an exhaustive discussion of Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee series see Peter Freese, The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes—Harry Kemelman—Tony Hillerman, Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik 10 (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1992) 168-245.

3. Other authors have reacted by introducing lesbian private eyes, gay cops, singing detectives feline sleuths—the combinations are as bizarre as they seem endless. Examples for this new diversity of crime fiction range from Carl Hiaasen's environmental thrillers to Daniel Evan Weiss's novel La Cucaracha, in which the narrator and protagonist is a cockroach (!).

4. Peter Rickman, “Quixote Rides Again: The Popularity of the Thriller,” The Hero in Transition, ed. Ray B. Browne and Marshall W. Fishwick (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983) 131-40; 135.

5. Tony Hillerman, A Thief of Time (1988; New York: Harper, 1990). All further quotations given in parentheses in the text refer to this edition.

6. Funnily enough, the word ‘Navajo’ does not exist in the ‘Navajo’ language. It came to us through the Spaniards, namely through Fray Alonso de Benavides, who in 1630 heard the Tewa-Pueblo of New Mexico speak of a neighboring tribe they described as “Apaches de Nabahu,” meaning ‘Strangers of the Cultivated Fields.’ In Spanish, this was shortened to ‘Nabajo’ and in English to ‘Navajo,’ or frequently ‘Navaho.’ See Ruth Underhill, The Navajos (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989) 4, 36.

7. In Hillerman's novel The Ghostway (New York: Harper, 1984) 136, hozro is described as a “sort of blend of being in harmony with one's environment, at peace with one's circumstances, content with the day, devoid of danger, and free from anxieties.”

8. See Hillerman, “Mystery” 128.

9. For example, in Hillerman's The Dark Wind (1982), where the reader observes none other than officer Jim Chee in a clear case of aiding and abetting: Chee provides an old Pueblo shaman with the necessary hardware and expertise to destroy an electric windmill that runs a well sitting on an ancient and holy burial site. As a compensation, Chee obtains crucial information which enables him to solve a murder case, but it becomes obvious that his bad conscience is clearly limited by his personal feelings about technology desecrating holy ground.

10. Fred Erisman, Tony Hillerman, Boise State University Western Writers Series 87 (Boise, ID: Boise State UP, 1989) 128.

11. The Luna family in A Thief of Time, strongly reminiscent of The Waltons, illustrate Hillerman's fundamentalist attitudes. Father Luna knows best, mother adds homely wisdom, and the well-behaved kids are immediately sent to their room when the grown-ups start talking about an unmarried couple (167).

12. See Dale H. Ross and Charles L. P. Silet, “Interview with Tony Hillerman,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 10.2 (Fall/Winter 1989): 119-35; 120ff.

13. Betty Parker and Riley Parker, “Hillerman Country,” Armchair Detective 20.1 (Winter 1987): 4-14; 5.

14. Tony Hillerman, The Blessing Way (1970; New York: Harper, 1990) 70.

15. See Erisman 41.

16. See Tony Hillerman, “The Very Heart of Our Country,” in his collection The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1973) 14-23; 15.

17. Hillerman states: “I like people who believe in things. … I've always been interested in cultures that are based on metaphysical positions.” See Betty and Riley Parker 10.

18. Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits (London: Sphere Books, 1991).

19. In Coyote Waits, Joe Leaphorn makes the acquaintance of (or dare one say, finds a new partner in?) the anthropologist Prof. Louisa Bourebonette, with whom he plans (and, we are invited to believe, will undertake) a trip to China.