Book review: The Fallen Man

Tony Hillerman died in the autumn of 2008 with more than a score of acclaimed mystery novels to his credit, yet the crimes (and, to a lesser extent, the plots) in his Navajo Tribal Police books are incidental to the cultural knowledge that his fictional characters bring to bear on their investigations.

Nobody wrote about the Four Corners and the "Big Rez" on the Colorado Plateau with as much affection as the Albuquerque-based Hillerman did.

Hillerman's love for wide-open spaces and the hardy people in them gave him a literary edge over contemporaries like the iconoclastic Edward Abbey and the introspective Sherman Alexie.

In The Fallen Man (1996), newly-retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is reunited with his tribal police protégé Jim Chee when climbers ascending Ship Rock with rarely-given permission from the Navajo near that sacred "rock with wings" discover a skeleton wearing climbing gear. The bones seem to be the remains of a white man who went missing 11 years before, right around the time he was to inherit a ranch whose most attractive feature was an abundance of the mineral molybdenum in its soil. Nobody knows whether the man fell to his death or was pushed.

What looks like a messy but coherent resolution to a cold missing persons case wins reconsideration from the tribal police (past and present) when sniper fire on the other side of the Big Rez wounds the Indian who had been a climbing guide for the missing man back in the day.

Apart from the main mystery, the problematic relationship between Jim Chee and his Stanford-educated fiancée lets Hillerman round out his characters in believable ways, while a secondary plot involving cattle thievery bears witness to the depth of his research.

As in the novel Coyote Waits, which I reviewed more than a decade ago, Hillerman brings a strong sense of place to The Fallen Man. If my maternal grandfather Clemente ("Papacito") had written fiction, this is the kind of story he would have told.

By the end of the book, you might be wondering who the fallen man of the title is, because you could make the argument that Hillerman is actually writing about several fallen men.

Pacing in this story could be a problem for readers who prefer more caffeinated narratives, and one aspect of the novel's denouement (a bait-and-switch) seemed less plausible to me than everything else, but Hillerman's evocative prose and his expert handling of cultural issues make for a quietly exhilarating read that transcends the mystery genre.

Here's an example of what I mean: Janet Peete (a lawyer raised off-reservation) wishes that Jim Chee (her fiancée) were more ambitious. Chee does not care for the promotion he accepted while trying to impress her, because he's always been more of a beat cop than an administrator.

No other novelist could distill the Navajo point of view into a half-page of utterly believable dialog between a traditionalist and a modernist, as Hillerman does in a passage that gently debunks racist myths about "lazy Indians" without getting at all polemical or reducing established characters to archetypes.

This is Chee, frustrated with Peete and saying more than he usually does:

"I grew up knowing it's wrong to have more than you need. It means you're not taking care of your people. Win three races in a row, you better slow down a little. Let somebody else win. Or somebody gets drunk and runs into your car and tears you all up, you don't sue him, you want to have a sing for him to cure him of alcoholism."

"That doesn't get you admitted into law school," Janet said. "Or pull you out of poverty."

"Depends on how you define poverty."

"It's defined in the law books," Janet said. "A family of x members with an annual income of under y."

"I met a middle-aged man at a Yeibichai sing a few years ago. He ran an accounting firm in Flagstaff and came out to Burnt Water because his mother had a stroke and they were doing the cure for her. I said something about it looking like he was doing very well. And he said, 'No, I will be a poor man all my life.' And I asked him what he meant, and he said 'Nobody ever taught me any songs.' "

Want to read the novel now? If your reading tastes are like mine, that's an easy question to answer.

(The gorgeous photo of Ship Rock illustrating this review was taken by Alexander MacLean)