Tony Hillerman, RIP

Another of the great ones is gone.

Tony Hillerman, beloved for elegant western mysteries, has passed away.

Like many gifted writers, he was a mentor and teacher of the craft.  HERE’s a lovely tribute to Hillerman by one of his students.  A passage that struck me:

At the time, he was just beginning his Joe Leaphorn novels. I was struck by how humbled he seemed at the large task he had set out for himself. He had planned an entire series, he said to his students. He didn’t know if he could do it, he told us. He wasn’t even sure he knew how to write a book. But there was a lot he wanted to say about Navajo culture, and he thought he might put it all together in a way that combined his reporting skills with his great love of the land. The first book in the series was The Blessing Way and sometimes he read parts of it to our class. We were charmed by his descriptions of the beautiful scapes that lay just beyond the classroom, and he was kind of shy when he read, boyish in fact, and we were all rooting for him.

Gone, but leaving behind a body of work which will not be forgotten.

Kathleen Bolton

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.

She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.

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