According to the Associated Press, bestselling author Tony Hillerman died Sunday, age 83, of pulmonary failure.  According to his daughter, Anne Hillerman, Hillerman’s health had declined over the last few years, including his having suffered 2 heart attacks along with surgeries for prostate and bladder cancers.

However, an avid storyteller, Tony Hillerman was still punching out his beloved and bestselling books of acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police Officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes, even though his vision had dimmed, his hearing was going and his hands turned into virtual claws from rheumatoid arthritis.

“I’m getting old,” he declared in 2002, “but I still like to write.”

Introduced in THE BLESSING WAY in 1970, Lt. Joe Leaphorn was an experienced police officer who understood, but did not share, his people’s traditional belief in a rich spirit world.  First appearing in PEOPLE OF DARKNESS in 1978, Lt. Joe Leaphorn was a younger officer studying to become a “hathaali” — Navajo for “shaman.”  The two characters wouldn’t appear together, thoughth, until SKINWALKERS, published in 1987.  It wasn’t until A THIEF OF TIME, however, before they hit the big-time:  the New York Times Bestseller List, selling almost 1/2 million copies.  In all, 18 books make up the Navajo series, with the latest being THE SHAPE SHIFTER.

Although probably best-known for the Navajo series, Hillerman also wrote a novel for young people; his memoir, SELDOM DISAPPOINTED; and books on the history and natural beauty of the Southwest, one of his favorite places on Earth, including the gorgeous and haunting photo book HILLERMAN COUNTRY (with photographs by his brother, Barney).

“Those places that stir me are empty and lonely,” he wrote in “The Spell of New Mexico,” a collection of his essays. “They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness, and all have about them a sort of fierce inhospitality.”

Hillerman also edited or contributed to other books, including crime and history anthologies and books on the craft of writing.

Born May 27, 1925, in the tiny rural town of Sacred Heart, OK (population 50), Tony Hillerman was the son of August and Lucy Grove Hillerman. They were farmers who also ran a small store. While growing up there, an impressionable Tony listened spellbound to the locals tell their stories.

Because the teacher at the local schoolhouse was rumored to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan,  Tony and his brother were sent to St. Mary’s Academy, a school for Potawatomie Indian girls near Asher, OK. It was at St. Mary’s that he developed a lifelong respect for Indian culture—and an appreciation of what it means to be an outsider in your own land.

In 1943, he joined the Army. He, along with a mortar he had to lug around, participated in D-Day with the 103rd Infantry Division, with Hillerman being severely wounded in battle at Alsace, France. He returned from Europe with a Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, temporary blindness and two shattered legs that never stopped giving him pain.

He returned to the university after coming home and finished his degree, and, in 1948, married Marie Unzer. Together, they raised six children, five of them adopted, all of whom, along with his wife, survive him.

As a young man, he was a farmer, a truck drive, an oil field roughneck and a reporter and editor for the Borger News-Herald in Borger, Texas; the Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Okla.; United Press International in Oklahoma City; and the Santa Fe New Mexican, where he became executive editor. In 1962, he left the Santa Fe New Mexican to earn his master’s degree from the University of New Mexico, where he later taught journalism and eventually became chairman of the journalism department. In 1993, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

While Hillerman wrote his first novel, BLESSING WAY, he was still teaching. A anecdote that always made him chuckle: His first agent advised him that if he wanted to make it into print, he would have to “get rid of that Indian stuff.”  (Just goes to show, eh?)

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