Another great one gone

The New York Times has an obituary by Marilyn Stasio about one of the best:

Tony Hillerman, a former newspaperman whose evocative mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest took the American detective story in new directions and made him a best-selling author, died Sunday in Albuquerque, where he lived. He was 83.

Rico says he's read damn near all of Hillerman's stuff, and thinks he's a great writer who revealed much of interest about our Native American brethren:

His stories, while steeped in contemporary crime, often describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world. The books are instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals to incest taboos.
Beginning with The Blessing Way in 1970, the 18 novels that Mr. Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations, featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, gave the traditional genre hero a new dimension. Leaphorn and Chee appear in separate novels in Mr. Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police series. Each story challenges one or the other officer with a crime that seems to be entangled in the spirit world but that is also rooted in the reservation life that Mr. Hillerman knew so well. Mr. Hillerman first brought Leaphorn and Chee together on the same case in Skinwalkers, a 1986 novel that has illuminating interplay between these two different representatives of Navajo culture.
Mr. Hillerman wrote with intimate knowledge of the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni tribes; he grew up with people very much like them. “I recognized kindred spirits” in the Navajo, he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1986. “Country boys. Folks among whom I felt at ease.”
For all the recognition he received, Mr. Hillerman once said, he was most gladdened by the status of Special Friend of the Dineh conferred on him in 1987 by the Navajo Nation. He was also proud that his books were taught at reservation schools and colleges.

If you haven't read one of his books yet, Rico says you should buy one next time you're flying somewhere and read it on the plane; you'll be happy you did.