I heard a piece on NPR's "Morning Edition" today about poverty among the Navajo nation and their hopes for using "stimulus" infrastructure money to improve roads, provide clean, in-door water, and construction jobs to reduce the 50% unemployment rate which is sure to rise in this recession.

It made me think of Tony Hillerman, whose mysteries remain for me my most vivid portrait of the landscape and culture of the indigenous Southwest. Like many mystery writers, Hillerman had a devoted following but no bestselling success until many books into his series. When SKINWALKER got a New Yorker review (at the time a rare place to praise genre fiction), I was working for a university press, exclusively on non-fiction, and mysteries had become the fiction I read for pleasure.

I was delighted to discover a contemporary writer whose books were set in the rural West, as opposed to post-industrial inner-cities or evil-sheriff controlled small southern towns. I worked with a woman who knew a lot about Native American cultures, and she gave me an enthusiastic endorsement for the way Hillerman's books describe ancient Navajo and Hopi rituals and every day 20th-Century reality.

I was hooked. When the pollution from uranium mines became headline news, I already knew about its devastating affect on Navajo miners. When I met an artist and filmmaker who made remarkable discoveries about astroarcheology at Chaco Canyon, I knew why the original theories about what destroy had Anazasi civilization were being turned on their heads. I learned the public health lesson -- listen to your elders -- from how the Navajo told doctors that the Hantavirus became epidemic any winter after a bumper crop of acorns. I heard about code talkers well before Hollywood honored them in a movie.

Most of all I came to respect the enormous diversity and continuity of the many Southwestern tribes, the Hopi, Apache, Pueblo, and Dene (as the Navajo call themselves). While Sergeant Jim Chee learned the "Blessing Way," I learned about a culture of herders who survived without warfare and whose poeple understood why one had to keep trying to keep nature and humans "in balance" before "Earth Day."

When Tony Hillerman died in 2008, I was sad there would be no more books, but I know of few writers who have left behind a legacy which documented so well a way of life through such enjoyable storytelling.

I believe his stories will last well into the the 2100s as a history of this part of America during the last few decades of the 1900s. His mysteries will have more to tell us about our past than Agatha Christie does about rural English villages or Dashiell Hammet about corrupt Hollywood police.