Click for Frontpage

Hillerman revisits Four Corners manhunt in novel

Nov. 21, 1999

Tony Hillerman
Author Tony Hillerman poses in his Albuquerque home in 1995.

By David Staats
Herald Managing Editor

Fans of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee who wondered how the fictional Navajo cops would handle the Four Corners manhunt now have their answer.

Tony Hillerman’s Hunting Badger is on bookstore shelves, and hungry readers nationwide are devouring it.

Cortez Police Chief Roy Lane isn’t one of them, though. Lane said Hillerman’s disparaging account of the manhunt in an author’s note at the front of the book is inaccurate and a disservice to law enforcement.

"I’m not even going to read the book," Lane said Friday.

Early sales of Hillerman’s mystery are the strongest of any Hillerman book yet, the author said.

The novel is an outgrowth of the May 1998 slaying of Cortez Police Officer Dale Claxton. Hunting Badger will reintroduce Hillerman fans to the slaying, which triggered the biggest manhunt in Southwest history.

The book’s release the week before last came just one week after the Oct. 31 discovery on a Southeast Utah bluff of the remains of Alan Pilon, the second of the three alleged killers.

"Pretty good timing, wasn’t it?" Hillerman, 74, said last week in a telephone interview from his Albuquerque home. "My editor said, ‘How’d you manage that?’"

He said HarperCollins Publishers printed 300,000 copies in the first printing, the largest ever for one of his books. The book is already in its fourth printing, he said.

The book’s dedication says, "For Officer Dale Claxton – who died doing his duty, bravely and alone."

The story is fiction. Hillerman makes up a new crime for retired Navajo Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn and young Navajo Police Sgt. Jim Chee to solve, and solve it they do.

But while no policeman dies, the story’s details evoke parts of the real-life manhunt, and references to it are sprinkled through the story.

In the author’s note at the start of the book, Hillerman recounts facts of the manhunt: the theft of a water truck in Ignacio, the rapid-fire shooting of Claxton, the assembly of more than 500 officers to comb the canyon country west of Cortez for the killers.

He then portrays an unflattering picture of the manhunt degenerating into what Navajo Tribal Police Chief Leonard Butler called "a
circus."

Hillerman writes: "Sighting reports sent to the coordinator were not reaching search teams. Search parties found themselves tracking one another, unable to communicate on mismatched radio frequencies. Local police who knew the country sat at roadblocks while teams brought in from the cities were floundering in canyons strange to them. The town of Bluff was evacuated, a brush fire was set in the San Juan bottoms to smoke out the fugitives, and the hunt dragged on into the summer.

"The word spread in July that the FBI believed the fugitives dead (possibly of laughter, one of my cop friends said). By August, only the Navajo Police still had scouts out looking for signs."

Lane, the Cortez police chief, said the FBI never took over the manhunt. It was always coordinated by sheriff’s departments, he said.

Lane also said the manhunt never became "a circus," and said local police were not relegated to roadblocks. But search parties were hampered by mismatched radio frequencies, he said.

"I understand he’s a good novelist and a great writer," Lane said.

"He wants to run law enforcement down, it seems to me. He could have done better research before he wrote the book."

The book spins a yarn about three men who hold up the Ute Mountain Ute Casino in Towaoc, killing an employee and wounding a security guard who happens to be an off-duty police officer.

Leaphorn and Chee then circumvent the FBI to find the killers in a remote canyon.

Hillerman said he visited the reservation and Bluff soon after the manhunt subsided, talking to police and townspeople, "just to get a feel for it."

"I knew right away I didn’t want to write about the manhunt itself," he said. "I really don’t like to fictionalize that stuff."

Hillerman, who began his career as a police reporter for a West Texas newspaper, said FBI agents are well-trained for white-collar crime, but frequently lack the street wisdom of beat cops – and showed their shortcomings in the real manhunt.

"FBI people are mostly high-tech people," he said. "A lot of them are accountants. You can’t expect them to come down from St. Louis to the canyon country in Utah and know what the hell they’re doing."

An FBI spokesman in Denver could not be reached for comment Friday on the book.

Hillerman said his primary goal is entertainment.

"I’m in love with our part of the world. You live up in Durango, you know what I’m talking about," he said.

"There’s a tendency in the East for everybody to think we’re a bunch of wild-eyed, right-wing extremists. We’re not.

"I try to let them see a little bit of the Navajo culture as I see it."

Hillerman said he has been told that Hunting Badger will make its debut at No. 9 on next Sunday’s New York Times bestseller list. "The New York Times list is the one that gets you into airports," he said.

He is already at work on his next book: a memoir, requested by his publisher. "Me and two or three other guys win World War II," he said.

But fans of Leaphorn and Chee won’t be neglected for long. Hillerman said the memoir is part of a contract he just signed that commits him to write two more Navajo police mysteries.

A former editor of The New Mexican in Santa Fe, Hillerman is past president of the Mystery Writers of America.

The Navajo Nation has awarded him its Special Friend Award.

 

Hunting Badger is his 22nd book. Hillerman said he made much of it up as he was writing.

"The book didn’t come out exactly what I had in mind," he said.

"They never do. I never was able to outline anything."

Contents copyright © 1999, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.
Write the Editor
Home News Sports Business Entertainment Technology Police Obituaries Health Religion
Opinion Columnists Weather Classified Ads Subscriptions Products Links Sponsors About Us