Tony Hillerman RIP
So I’ll digress this week from my usual talk of writing and publishing and SEO to note with sadness the death this month of novelist Tony Hillerman, who has provided me (and countless other readers) with hours of wonderful entertainment, along with opening up a world that I might otherwise never have known about.
A colleague remarked that it’s not just Hillerman who died, it’s also his characters, people we’ve come to know and love, in particular Joe Leaphorn, the “Legendary Lieutenant” of the Navajo reservation, and Jim Chee, torn always between his career as a Navajo Tribal Police officer and his inclinations toward becoming a shaman. I nodded when I first read my colleague’s words, feeling sadness that there won’t be any new adventures involving these two men; but now I’m not so sure.
I’m not sure, in fact, that any well-written fictional character ever dies. We may have already read a particular book, but if the character has come to life for us once, he or she will do so again: that’s the promise of good writing. Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee (along with myriad other names like Antigone and Madame Bovary and Ivanhoe and Philip Marlowe and … well, you get my drift) won’t die until people stop reading the books in which they appear — a very slim chance, given Hillerman’s terrific storytelling ability.
Perhaps that’s part of the magic of books, their ability to touch the eternal, to keep a time and a place and a group of characters in our minds and our hearts long after their creator is gone. And if that’s true, Tony Hillerman was a magician par excellence.
If you haven’t read Hillerman, you have a world of pleasure ahead of you. Get to a bookshop or a library as quickly as possible and do so. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in About Writing, Books, Creativity, Fiction, Words on November 19th, 2008