COYOTE WAITS
Tony Hillerman
New York: Harper and Row, 1990
292 pp., $ 19.95
The whodunit is, in its way, as stringent a form as the sonnet. But in the right hands, its unyielding conventions can become a framework for expression, a showcase for artistry, an accessible - because utterly familiar - structure for commentary on the human condition. In recent years, no detective novelist has exploited these possibilities more ably and consistently than Tony Hillerman.
That puts him in the distinguished company of crime scribes searching for clues to the larger mysteries of life. Literati may disdain the detective novel as not-quite-literature (even while peddling their own under assumed names), but it has served generations of ambitious social critics as a secret passage to a vast readership they might not otherwise have reached. Raymond Chandler, in his sordid nighttown Los Angeles, chronicled a metropolis built on illusion, deceit, and unattainable dreams. Dashiell Hammett observed honorable men moving through moral landscapes devoid of ties, of trust, of remorse, and almost of expectations. Georges Simenon plumbed the murky psyche of mid-century Paris as deeply as Sartre. In the present generation, P.D. James reports from a Britain whose only remnant of glory is the bitter legacy of class. And a blazing new talent, Scott Turow, scouts, just ahead of the baby boomers, the frontiers of midlife in America's suburbs and professional suites.
Hillerman, too, has found his own world in a grain of sand, or, more accurately, in the many-colored grains of a Navajo sand painting. In ten distinguished books set on the reservations of New Mexico and Arizona, he has created an entire universe, a social cosmos that is whole, bounded, consistent, and complete. Coyote Waits brings his following the latest dispatch from that world, and from the professional and personal lives of Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Off. Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal police.
Though Hillerman's characters may sometimes roam to New York, Washington, Los Angeles, or, as in Coyote Waits, to Albuquerque, his stories are rooted, like so many craggy cacti, in the beauty, misery, and mystery of a barren, impoverished, spectacular, unforgiving land. The two heroes and their hundred or so colleagues keep the peace across twenty thousand square miles of desert, mesa, and arroyo, and among the often uneasy mixture of Navajos, Hopis, Hispanos, and Anglos who people them. This force polices the border between a civilization dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and a people seeking harmony with the spirits that surround them. The cops' job usually begins when someone wittingly or unwittingly ventures across that frontier, bringing confusion, pain and, ultimately, violent death.
Lieutenant Leaphorn, the older of the two, is a canny, cerebral, sometimes cynical veteran, an almost-burnt-out case who toys with retirement. In the line of duty, he often encounters a quixotic, headstrong, young officer, Jim Chee. Between them, they embody the Navajo virtues that Hillerman admires. Leaphorn, for all his skepticism, retains his people's traditional reverence for order. He believes in, indeed, demands, a comprehensible universe where every cause has an effect and every evil a cause. As a college student newly stuffed with white
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