Finding Moon

her hair, of her smooth skin beneath the silk, that when he tilted up her chin she was returning his kiss.

“It shouldn’t take me more than eight or ten days,” he said. “Where will you be in eight or ten days?”

“You’re going to fly back with Lila? You’ll try to take care of her on the plane?”

“Why not?” Moon said. “I can change diapers. Feed her. She can say ‘Moon’ now. I’m learning.”

“Not very fast. I watched you on the aircraft carrier. You weren’t designed to be a nanny. And that Baby in Space game you play with her is dreadful. You will break her neck. It scares her.”

“It just scares people who’re watching it. She likes it. Makes her giggle. She knows I won’t drop her.”

Osa was shaking her head. “And feeding her. Keeping her clean and comfortable. Getting her to sleep.”

He hugged her to him. “Can you think of an alternative?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So can I,” Moon said. “With a Dutch passport you don’t need a visa. So I postponed my flight a day and made reservations for Osa van Winjgaarden.”

“No Mrs.?”

“No Mrs.,” Moon said. “Until we can make it legal.”

Leaphorn, Chee, and the Navajo Way

I thought you might like to know the roots of my two favorite characters – Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (now retired) and Sgt. Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police.

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green “crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers – my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.

When I needed such a cop for what I intended to be a very minor character in The Blessing Way (1970), this sheriff came to mind. I added on Navajo cultural and religious characteristics, and he became Leaphorn in fledgling form. Luckily for me and Leaphorn and all of us, the late Joan Kahn, then mystery editor of what was then Harper amp; Row, required some substantial rewriting of that manuscript to bring it up to standards and I – having begun to see the possibilities of Leaphorn – gave him a much better role in the rewrite and made him more Navajo.

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of People of Darkness (1980) make sense – and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheevy’s “days of old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in a universe of consumerism.

I’ll confess here that Leaphorn is the fellow I’d prefer to have living next door and that we share an awful lot of ideas and attitudes. I’ll admit that Chee would sometimes test my patience, as did those students upon whom I modeled him. But both of them in their ways, represent the aspects of the Navajo Way, which I respect and admire. And I will also confess that I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood.

– Tony Hillerman

About the Author

TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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