Jim Chee has character traits you don't usually find in a policeman. He doesn’t understand greed, and he has trouble comprehending the idea of revenge.
Jim Chee is a member of the Navajo Tribal Police, patrolling the immense spread of arid reservation land overlapping the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, the conjunction of the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. The reservation land reaches over 25,000 square miles, larger than the size of New England.
Chee’s desire to live his life the “Navajo Way” – seeking harmony in all around him – brings him into direct and frequent conflict crime and other forms of “white man’s business.”
Like Any Detective
Chee has other traits that any policeman or detective would recognize. He has indefatigable curiosity. He doesn’t believe in coincidences, only cause and effect. He has a strong bent for acting on his own and disregarding the directives of his superiors.
So much so, that he will take time off to look into a case where he has been officially warned off because of jurisdictional conflicts – with other police departments, with the FBI, with the DEA (the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration). Or he will carefully but purposefully tread the fine line of insubordination in his pickup truck or his well-worn boots. (Not moccasins; Chee doesn’t wear them, doesn’t know of any other Navajos who wear them, and doesn’t understand why anyone would wear them).
Chee is the leathery, self-directed cop at the center of The Jim Chee Mysteries: Three Classic Hillerman Mysteries Featuring Officer Jim Chee (HarperCollins, New York; 1990). The Hillerman of the subtitle is the late Tony Hillerman (1925-2008), longstanding grand master of the unique mystery genre he carved so eloquently out of the mountains, the deserts and the harsh natural beauty of the Southwest and its native peoples.
Mystery Interwoven with Navajo Culture
Chee has the seasoned outdoorsman’s keen sense of weather signs and patterns. Hillerman, via Chee, describes a rare incidence of fog in The Ghostway: “In the high, dry mountains of the Colorado Plateau, fog is out of its element. It forms as a part of a climatic accident, produced when a cold front crosses a mountain range and collides with warmer air on the opposite slope. By dawn. . .the fog had already lost its character as a solid, blinding cloud. Now it survived only in pockets, as patches and fragments.”
The mysteries are as solid as any set in mainstream surroundings with conventional detectives or cops. Their distinction is in the interweaving of conventional crimes with intriguing aspects of Navajo culture.
In People of Darkness, Chee investigates fatal car bombing that he finds is linked to an oil well disaster decades earlier. His path to a solution leads through an Indian peyote cult.
The Dark Wind finds Chee involved with a plane crash and a missing cache of cocaine; with drug smugglers and federal drug agents. How are they all connected with a vandalized windmill and a ritual ceremony in a Hopi village?
Ambition to be a Shaman
Chee’s ambition to become a hataali, or Navajo shaman, plays in integral role in The Ghostway. A deadly shootout in a parking lot; a missing young Navajo woman; a man in hiding under the Federal Witness Relocation Program, and a corpse buried according to Navajo rites – but with its hair unwashed: How can Chee connect them all?
And how can he solve the conundrum of his love for a white schoolteacher at a reservation school? She wants to go back to Wisconsin, and wants Chee to apply for an FBI job and come with her; Chee feels equally compelled to follow the Navajo Way and remain in Dinetah – the land of The People.
Hillerman lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for 45 years, and won every major award for mystery fiction. He also won a special commendation from the Navajo Tribal Council. Among his 29 books are 17 featuring Chee and “the legendary lieutenant” of the Navajo Tribal Police, Joe Leaphorn. Later in the series, the two work as partners – but that’s another story.
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
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