A true voice is silenced

Tony Hillerman, 83, died yesterday.

A journalist turned fiction writer, Tony Hillerman wrote mystery novels featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Navajo policemen, who never lost their sense of place or the vital drive for intellectual and spiritual sustenance that builds a sustainable culture. He took a genre much beset with hackery and feebleness of mind and literary sensibility and gave it a place among the finest works of American literature.

I keep prowling the bookstores looking for a new Hillerman book. That prowling is at an end, but the regard for a true and respectful voice will never die.