Tony Hillerman, Novelist, Dies at 83
Tony Hillerman, a former newspaperman whose evocative mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest took the American detective story in new directions and made him a best-selling author, died Sunday in Albuquerque, where he lived. He was 83.
The cause was pulmonary failure, his family said. A daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father had survived two heart attacks and operations for prostate and bladder cancer, The Associated Press reported.
In the world of mystery fiction, Mr. Hillerman was that rare figure: a best-selling author who was adored by fans, admired by fellow authors and respected by critics. Though the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with an avowed purpose: to instill in his readers a respect for Native American culture.
His stories, while steeped in contemporary crime, often describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world. The books are instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals to incest taboos.
"It's always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures," Mr. Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. "I think it's important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways."
Mr. Hillerman was not the first mystery writer to set a story on Indian land or to introduce a Native American detective to crime literature. (Manly Wade Wellman, for one, had done so.) But beginning with "The Blessing Way" in 1970, the 18 novels that Mr. Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations, featuring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, gave the traditional genre hero a new dimension.
Joe Leaphorn, grizzled and a bit cynical, has a logical mind and a passion for order that reflects his upbringing in the Navajo Way. His code of behavior is dictated by a belief in the harmonious patterns of life that link man to the natural world. But he is not a religious fundamentalist; he is a skeptic who holds a master's degree in anthropology.
Jim Chee, younger and more idealistic than Leaphorn, seeks a more spiritual connection to Navajo tradition. Over several books he studies to become a hataalii, or singing medicine man. This ambition creates friction between the religious faith he professes and the secular rules of criminal justice he is sworn to uphold. Chee first appears in "People of Darkness" (1980), Mr. Hillerman's fourth novel in the series.
Leaphorn and Chee appear in separate novels in Mr. Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police series. Each story challenges one or the other officer with a crime that seems to be entangled in the spirit world but that is also rooted in the reservation life that Mr. Hillerman knew so well.
When murder is the crime, Native Americans find it easier to attribute the killing to witches, a superstition that horrifies the rational Leaphorn but one that makes sense to Chee. Chee sees witchcraft metaphorically, "in people who had turned deliberately and with malice from the beauty of the Navajo Way" - "in those who sold whisky to children, in those who bought videocassette recorders while their relatives were hungry, in the knife fights in a Gallup alley, in beaten wives and abandoned children."
Mr. Hillerman first brought Leaphorn and Chee together on the same case in "Skinwalkers" (1986), a novel that allows for illuminating interplay between these two different representatives of Navajo culture.
After attending Oklahoma A&M College, Mr. Hillerman enlisted in the Army in World War II. During two years of combat in Europe, he said, his company of 212 riflemen shrank to 8 as its members fought their way through France. In 1945, in a raid behind German lines, he stepped on a mine. His left leg was shattered, and he was severely burned. He never regained full vision in his left eye.
He returned from Europe in 1945 with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, where he met and married Marie Unzner, a Phi Beta Kappa student in bacteriology, and took up journalism. He went on to find jobs as a crime reporter for The Borger News-Herald in the Texas Panhandle; city editor of The Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Okla.; a political reporter in Oklahoma City; bureau manager in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for United Press International; and executive editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican.
By the mid-1960s Mr. Hillerman and his wife had one child and had adopted five more. He was almost 40 and had put in 17 years as a newspaperman. But he was becoming restless.
"The yen builds to work in something more malleable than hard fact, an urge grows to try to deal with the meaning of all this," he wrote.
So with his wife's support he quit The New Mexican and took his family to Albuquerque, where he enrolled at the University of New Mexico. He earned his master's degree in 1966, joined the journalism faculty and later became chairman of the department. Fascinated with Native American culture, he also became something of an authority on the Southwest.
In the late 1960s, he said, he began to "practice" writing by working on a mystery, drawing on an earlier encounter he had had with a group of Navajos on horseback and in face paint and feathers in Crownpoint, N.M. They had been holding a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony for a soldier, a curing ritual that exorcises all traces of the enemy from those returning from battle. Mr. Hillerman had himself just returned from the war after a long convalescence.
He was so moved by the ceremony and so stirred by the rugged landscape that he resolved to live there. The experience became the basis for "The Blessing Way" (1970).
He spent three years writing the novel and sent the manuscript to Joan Kahn, a respected mystery editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins. She published it after he complied with her suggestion - that he increase the role of a secondary character, the Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn.
He departed from Indian themes for his second novel, "The Fly on the Wall" (1971), a political story of big-city corruption. But he was already yearning to get back to the country where all his other novels are set, the vast tribal lands that straddle northeast Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.
There he would "collect" sensory impressions - "the way the wind sounds down there," he wrote, "the nature of echoes, the smell of sage and wet sand, how the sky looks atop a tunnel of stone, the booming of thunder bouncing from one cliff to another."
In a Hillerman mystery violent crime disrupts the harmonious Navajo world. "Everything is connected," Jim Chee reflects in "The Ghostway" (1984). "The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him."
In the late 1960s, he said, he began to "practice" writing by working on a mystery, drawing on an earlier encounter he had had with a group of Navajos on horseback and in face paint and feathers in Crownpoint, N.M. They had been holding a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony for a soldier, a curing ritual that exorcises all traces of the enemy from those returning from battle. Mr. Hillerman had himself just returned from the war after a long convalescence.
He was so moved by the ceremony and so stirred by the rugged landscape that he resolved to live there. The experience became the basis for "The Blessing Way" (1970).
He spent three years writing the novel and sent the manuscript to Joan Kahn, a respected mystery editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins. She published it after he complied with her suggestion - that he increase the role of a secondary character, the Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn.
He departed from Indian themes for his second novel, "The Fly on the Wall" (1971), a political story of big-city corruption. But he was already yearning to get back to the country where all his other novels are set, the vast tribal lands that straddle northeast Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.
There he would "collect" sensory impressions - "the way the wind sounds down there," he wrote, "the nature of echoes, the smell of sage and wet sand, how the sky looks atop a tunnel of stone, the booming of thunder bouncing from one cliff to another."
In a Hillerman mystery violent crime disrupts the harmonious Navajo world. "Everything is connected," Jim Chee reflects in "The Ghostway" (1984). "The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him."
E. Roger Muir, 89, Executive Producer of ‘The Howdy Doody Show,’ Dies
E. Roger Muir, who helped create and was executive producer of "The Howdy Doody Show," the puppet-and-people program that first hooked millions of kids on television in its early days, died Thursday of a stroke near his home in Wolfeboro, N.H. Mr. Muir, who went on to produce other successful shows, including "Concentration," was 89.
At a time when big, bulky wood-encased television sets were first coming out of their crates in homes across the country, "The Howdy Doody Show" was perhaps the primary attraction that brought baby-boom children in from their after-school play in time to settle down before dinner and maybe even homework.
Mr. Muir produced the show throughout its 13-year run on NBC, from 1947 to 1960, and was co-producer with Nick Nicholson of its syndicated version, "The New Howdy Doody Show," in 1976 and 1977. Mr. Muir "was a sculptor of the show," said Ron Simon, the radio and television curator at the Paley Center for Media, in New York.
"Say, kids, what time is it?" Buffalo Bob Smith would call out to the children in the Peanut Gallery. "It's Howdy Doody time," they would roar back. Buffalo Bob, a human, and Howdy, a freckle-faced puppet, would prance with the likes of Clarabell the Clown, a horn-honking human, and other puppets, like the always-grumpy Phineas T. Bluster. In 1961 Mr. Muir and Mr. Nicholson started their own production company. Together, according to The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows, they produced, among other programs, "The Newlywed Game," which was later taken over by Chuck Barris; "Pay Cards!," a game show based on poker; and "Concentration."
Ernest Roger Muir was born in Alberta, Canada, on Dec. 16, 1918, the son of Ernest and Helen Rogers Muir. The family moved to Minneapolis in 1930, and Mr. Muir graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1941.
Besides his son, Mr. Muir is survived by his second wife, Barbara Horn-Muir; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson. His first wife, Phyllis Stirn, died in 1976.
While in college, Mr. Muir studied photography. In 1941 he was drafted into the United States Army and assigned to a film production unit. Another soldier in that unit was Warner Wade, who had already worked for NBC. After the war, with a referral from Mr. Wade, Mr. Muir was hired by NBC and was soon producing or directing programs, including "Who Said That?," a quiz show featuring journalists and celebrities who tried to name the source of quotations plucked from recent news. Among other programs that he worked on were "The NBC Opera," "Your Hit Parade" and "The Wide, Wide World."
Mr. Muir had the idea of having Howdy Doody run for president of the boys and girls in the election year of 1948 and received thousands of requests for campaign buttons. Mr. Simon, the curator at the Paley Center, said the show taught children about politics, "and the very American idea that anyone can grow up to be president, even a marionette."
LISA
The Associated Press contributed to this article
Tony Hillerman, a former newspaperman whose evocative mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest took the American detective story in new directions and made him a best-selling author, died Sunday in Albuquerque, where he lived. He was 83.The cause was pulmonary failure, his family said. A daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father had survived two heart attacks and operations for prostate and bladder cancer, The Associated Press reported.
In the world of mystery fiction, Mr. Hillerman was that rare figure: a best-selling author who was adored by fans, admired by fellow authors and respected by critics. Though the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with an avowed purpose: to instill in his readers a respect for Native American culture.
His stories, while steeped in contemporary crime, often describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world. The books are instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals to incest taboos.
"It's always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures," Mr. Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. "I think it's important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways."
Mr. Hillerman was not the first mystery writer to set a story on Indian land or to introduce a Native American detective to crime literature. (Manly Wade Wellman, for one, had done so.) But beginning with "The Blessing Way" in 1970, the 18 novels that Mr. Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations, featuring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, gave the traditional genre hero a new dimension.
Joe Leaphorn, grizzled and a bit cynical, has a logical mind and a passion for order that reflects his upbringing in the Navajo Way. His code of behavior is dictated by a belief in the harmonious patterns of life that link man to the natural world. But he is not a religious fundamentalist; he is a skeptic who holds a master's degree in anthropology.
Jim Chee, younger and more idealistic than Leaphorn, seeks a more spiritual connection to Navajo tradition. Over several books he studies to become a hataalii, or singing medicine man. This ambition creates friction between the religious faith he professes and the secular rules of criminal justice he is sworn to uphold. Chee first appears in "People of Darkness" (1980), Mr. Hillerman's fourth novel in the series.
Leaphorn and Chee appear in separate novels in Mr. Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police series. Each story challenges one or the other officer with a crime that seems to be entangled in the spirit world but that is also rooted in the reservation life that Mr. Hillerman knew so well.
When murder is the crime, Native Americans find it easier to attribute the killing to witches, a superstition that horrifies the rational Leaphorn but one that makes sense to Chee. Chee sees witchcraft metaphorically, "in people who had turned deliberately and with malice from the beauty of the Navajo Way" - "in those who sold whisky to children, in those who bought videocassette recorders while their relatives were hungry, in the knife fights in a Gallup alley, in beaten wives and abandoned children."
Mr. Hillerman first brought Leaphorn and Chee together on the same case in "Skinwalkers" (1986), a novel that allows for illuminating interplay between these two different representatives of Navajo culture.
After attending Oklahoma A&M College, Mr. Hillerman enlisted in the Army in World War II. During two years of combat in Europe, he said, his company of 212 riflemen shrank to 8 as its members fought their way through France. In 1945, in a raid behind German lines, he stepped on a mine. His left leg was shattered, and he was severely burned. He never regained full vision in his left eye.
He returned from Europe in 1945 with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, where he met and married Marie Unzner, a Phi Beta Kappa student in bacteriology, and took up journalism. He went on to find jobs as a crime reporter for The Borger News-Herald in the Texas Panhandle; city editor of The Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Okla.; a political reporter in Oklahoma City; bureau manager in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for United Press International; and executive editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican.
By the mid-1960s Mr. Hillerman and his wife had one child and had adopted five more. He was almost 40 and had put in 17 years as a newspaperman. But he was becoming restless.
"The yen builds to work in something more malleable than hard fact, an urge grows to try to deal with the meaning of all this," he wrote.
So with his wife's support he quit The New Mexican and took his family to Albuquerque, where he enrolled at the University of New Mexico. He earned his master's degree in 1966, joined the journalism faculty and later became chairman of the department. Fascinated with Native American culture, he also became something of an authority on the Southwest.
In the late 1960s, he said, he began to "practice" writing by working on a mystery, drawing on an earlier encounter he had had with a group of Navajos on horseback and in face paint and feathers in Crownpoint, N.M. They had been holding a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony for a soldier, a curing ritual that exorcises all traces of the enemy from those returning from battle. Mr. Hillerman had himself just returned from the war after a long convalescence.
He was so moved by the ceremony and so stirred by the rugged landscape that he resolved to live there. The experience became the basis for "The Blessing Way" (1970).
He spent three years writing the novel and sent the manuscript to Joan Kahn, a respected mystery editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins. She published it after he complied with her suggestion - that he increase the role of a secondary character, the Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn.
He departed from Indian themes for his second novel, "The Fly on the Wall" (1971), a political story of big-city corruption. But he was already yearning to get back to the country where all his other novels are set, the vast tribal lands that straddle northeast Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.
There he would "collect" sensory impressions - "the way the wind sounds down there," he wrote, "the nature of echoes, the smell of sage and wet sand, how the sky looks atop a tunnel of stone, the booming of thunder bouncing from one cliff to another."
In a Hillerman mystery violent crime disrupts the harmonious Navajo world. "Everything is connected," Jim Chee reflects in "The Ghostway" (1984). "The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him."
In the late 1960s, he said, he began to "practice" writing by working on a mystery, drawing on an earlier encounter he had had with a group of Navajos on horseback and in face paint and feathers in Crownpoint, N.M. They had been holding a Navajo Enemy Way ceremony for a soldier, a curing ritual that exorcises all traces of the enemy from those returning from battle. Mr. Hillerman had himself just returned from the war after a long convalescence.
He was so moved by the ceremony and so stirred by the rugged landscape that he resolved to live there. The experience became the basis for "The Blessing Way" (1970).
He spent three years writing the novel and sent the manuscript to Joan Kahn, a respected mystery editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins. She published it after he complied with her suggestion - that he increase the role of a secondary character, the Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn.
He departed from Indian themes for his second novel, "The Fly on the Wall" (1971), a political story of big-city corruption. But he was already yearning to get back to the country where all his other novels are set, the vast tribal lands that straddle northeast Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.
There he would "collect" sensory impressions - "the way the wind sounds down there," he wrote, "the nature of echoes, the smell of sage and wet sand, how the sky looks atop a tunnel of stone, the booming of thunder bouncing from one cliff to another."
In a Hillerman mystery violent crime disrupts the harmonious Navajo world. "Everything is connected," Jim Chee reflects in "The Ghostway" (1984). "The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him."
E. Roger Muir, 89, Executive Producer of ‘The Howdy Doody Show,’ Dies
E. Roger Muir, who helped create and was executive producer of "The Howdy Doody Show," the puppet-and-people program that first hooked millions of kids on television in its early days, died Thursday of a stroke near his home in Wolfeboro, N.H. Mr. Muir, who went on to produce other successful shows, including "Concentration," was 89.At a time when big, bulky wood-encased television sets were first coming out of their crates in homes across the country, "The Howdy Doody Show" was perhaps the primary attraction that brought baby-boom children in from their after-school play in time to settle down before dinner and maybe even homework.
Mr. Muir produced the show throughout its 13-year run on NBC, from 1947 to 1960, and was co-producer with Nick Nicholson of its syndicated version, "The New Howdy Doody Show," in 1976 and 1977. Mr. Muir "was a sculptor of the show," said Ron Simon, the radio and television curator at the Paley Center for Media, in New York.
"Say, kids, what time is it?" Buffalo Bob Smith would call out to the children in the Peanut Gallery. "It's Howdy Doody time," they would roar back. Buffalo Bob, a human, and Howdy, a freckle-faced puppet, would prance with the likes of Clarabell the Clown, a horn-honking human, and other puppets, like the always-grumpy Phineas T. Bluster. In 1961 Mr. Muir and Mr. Nicholson started their own production company. Together, according to The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows, they produced, among other programs, "The Newlywed Game," which was later taken over by Chuck Barris; "Pay Cards!," a game show based on poker; and "Concentration."
Ernest Roger Muir was born in Alberta, Canada, on Dec. 16, 1918, the son of Ernest and Helen Rogers Muir. The family moved to Minneapolis in 1930, and Mr. Muir graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1941.
Besides his son, Mr. Muir is survived by his second wife, Barbara Horn-Muir; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson. His first wife, Phyllis Stirn, died in 1976.
While in college, Mr. Muir studied photography. In 1941 he was drafted into the United States Army and assigned to a film production unit. Another soldier in that unit was Warner Wade, who had already worked for NBC. After the war, with a referral from Mr. Wade, Mr. Muir was hired by NBC and was soon producing or directing programs, including "Who Said That?," a quiz show featuring journalists and celebrities who tried to name the source of quotations plucked from recent news. Among other programs that he worked on were "The NBC Opera," "Your Hit Parade" and "The Wide, Wide World."
Mr. Muir had the idea of having Howdy Doody run for president of the boys and girls in the election year of 1948 and received thousands of requests for campaign buttons. Mr. Simon, the curator at the Paley Center, said the show taught children about politics, "and the very American idea that anyone can grow up to be president, even a marionette."
LISA
The Associated Press contributed to this article
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