![]() In Hillerman’s detective novels, crimes resonate with history and tradition. As Nicolas Witschi claims, “Hillerman renders the landscape as a palimpsest of information drawn not only from multiple cultural sources but also from the ineffable understanding that comes from having a direct experience of the region” (390). ![]() ![]() ![]() The simple question of “Whodunit?” is never answered simply in Hillerman’s novels. In so doing, Hillerman dramatizes how any knowledge of the southwest must be deeply historical. Hillerman takes the major concerns of the detective story and adapts them to the unique landscape of the American southwest. ![]() Most notably, The Blessing Way marks Hillerman’s momentous contribution to the detective story, a genre that emerges in the nineteenth century with early masters such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and is developed by Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Patricia Highsmith, among others, in the early to mid twentieth century. Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way established the set of themes, concerns, and characters on which Hillerman would elaborate during his accomplished career as an author of fiction and nonfiction. ![]()
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