A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman

First published: 1988

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of work: 1980’s

Locale: New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah

Principal Characters:

• Joe Leaphorn, a member of the Navajo Tribal Police who is attempting to find a missing woman anthropologist
• Jim Chee, a younger member of the Navajo Tribal Police who investigates mysterious and violent incidents involving pot hunters
• Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, an anthropologist tracing Anasazi pots who has mysteriously vanished
• Randall Elliot, an aristocratic anthropologist who violates protected sites and resorts to murder to protect his reputation
• Janet Pete, a lawyer with the Navajo Tribal legal services and friend of Jim Chee
• Slick Nakai, a likeable Navajo fundamentalist Christian evangelist involved in selling Anasazi pots
• Harrison Houk, a prominent Utah rancher who sells Anasazi pots
• Brigham Houk, Harrison’s son, an insane recluse who lives in a remote canyon

The Novel

Set amid the Anasazi ruins of the American Southwest, A Thief of Time is an anthropological mystery in which Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, two members of the Navajo Tribal Police, work together to locate a missing anthropologist and to solve the murders of two pot hunters, “thieves of time” who ransack Anasazi graves to steal artifacts, thereby damaging the sites for researchers trying to understand the past. Narrated from the omniscient third-person point of view, most of the novel’s chapters alternate between Leaphorn and Chee as they conduct parallel investigations, using their intimate familiarity with Navajo culture and the Southwestern landscape. Although solving the mystery provides the major physical action, both characters also deal with personal problems that add significant emotional tension to their investigations.

The novel opens with Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal’s nighttime arrival at an unexplored Anasazi ruin in southern Utah. Friedman-Bernal is looking for potsherds bearing the pattern of Kokopelli, the humpbacked fertility god of Indian myth. The pots are apparently the work of a single artist whose pottery was first unearthed at the Chaco Canyon site in New Mexico. Friedman-Bernal believes that this potter’s work may help to explain the migratory patterns and mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi people seven centuries ago. Injured in a fall, the anthropologist discovers someone has already ransacked the graves, and the only episode featuring this character ends shrouded in mystery and suspense.

Leaphorn, depressed and grieving over the death of his wife Emma, agrees to help find the anthropologist, whose disappearance has puzzled and alarmed her coworkers at the Chaco Canyon site. On terminal leave and initially apathetic, Leaphorn finds his curiosity returning as he pieces together the puzzle of Friedman-Bernal’s disappearance, beginning his search with clues from her appointment calendar. Learning of her research on the Anasazi pots with the Kokopelli design, he starts his hunt for the missing woman at a fundamentalist Christian revival conducted by the Navajo evangelist Slick Nakai, who tells Leaphorn he has an arrangement with Friedman-Bernal to show her and verify the origins of Anasazi pots with the peculiar pattern.

In trouble with Captain Largo for failing to guard a backhoe (stolen from a tribal storage yard while Chee helped a drunken relative), Chee links a suspect to Slick Nakai’s revival, where he meets Leaphorn. Chee eventually discovers that the backhoe was stolen by Joe Nails, a white man, and Jimmy Etcitty, another Navajo who follows the “Jesus Way.” Chee tracks the backhoe to a remote Anasazi ruin, where he finds that both men have been murdered while vandalizing graves. Since both pot hunters have ties to Nakai, Friedman-Bernal, and the Chaco Canyon anthropologists, Leaphorn and Chee agree to work together.

Harrison Houk, a Utah rancher, tells Leaphorn about an Anasazi pot with the Kokopelli design that he had sold to an art dealer in New York City. After tracing Friedman-Bernal’s visit to the dealer and the collector in New York, Leaphorn returns to find Houk murdered, and he trails Friedman-Bernal to the Anasazi site near Houk’s ranch. Meanwhile, Janet Pete, Chee’s Navajo lawyer friend, helps him to discover Friedman-Bernal and Randall Elliot’s mutual interest in the unexplored site in Utah.

At the site, Leaphorn finds the injured anthropologist in the care of Brigham Houk, Harrison’s deranged son. Elliot also arrives, and Leaphorn learns the motives that drove the anthropologist to violence. Elliot has been digging up gravesites in search of genetically marked lower jawbones, documenting his finds until he could later get permits to explore the sites officially. Nails and Etcitty, his helpers, had been selling pots from the gravesites, thus attracting Friedman-Bernal’s attention. To prevent her from destroying his reputation, Elliot killed his helpers and Harrison Houk and intends to murder Friedman-Bernal, but he is himself killed by Brigham. Chee, who had followed Elliot to the site, helps Leaphorn to rescue the anthropologist, while Brigham disappears into the canyon. The mystery solved and order restored, Leaphorn decides not to retire, and he asks Chee to sing a healing ceremony.

The Characters

Although A Thief of Time is built on the framework of the detective story, it is essentially a novel of characterization, a portrayal of the values and complex development of two Navajo tribal policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The remaining cast of characters is subordinate to the portrayal of the two major characters, underscoring the fact that the novel’s action derives from character.

Joe Leaphorn is a modern Navajo who functions as a mediator between cultures—comfortable with the ways of the dominant white culture, pragmatic, a bit skeptical and cynical about taboos (he does not believe in witches or evil ghosts), yet steeped in tribal traditions and at home in the Southwestern landscape. He accepts the basic metaphysical thrust of Navajo culture: hozho, the Beautyway, which implies harmony, cosmic orderliness, and the interdependency of nature and the Navajo people. Crime, therefore, is disharmony, disorder, a social and spiritual aberration. Keenly analytical, Leaphorn seeks the underlying pattern of events. His quest to solve the mystery of Friedman-Bernal’s disappearance by connecting intricate links becomes a complex metaphor for his need to restore social and spiritual order, not only to his jurisdiction but also to himself as he recovers from his grief over his wife Emma’s death. Leaphorn’s movement from despondent apathy to a reawakened curiosity and an appetite for life forms part of a pattern that includes his own healing and acceptance of Emma’s death and the reaffirmation of his self-identity and Navajo roots. The ethnographic material that gives the novel its rich density of texture and emotional power is revealed through characterization, and Leaphorn emerges as a complex, fully developed, and heroic person.

Jim Chee is effectively juxtaposed to Leaphorn. A younger, more traditional Navajo (he is a hatathali, a singer of the Blessed Way), Chee initially does not particularly like the legendary Leaphorn, but he respects him, wants his approval, and finds himself quoting Leaphorn. Leaphorn regards Chee as smart and alert, but “bent,” a romantic and a dreamer, yet he comes to admire Chee’s detective skills and spiritual calling. Thus the two complement each other well; Chee is an intuitive, somewhat impulsive foil to Leaphorn’s rational distrust of hunches and coincidences. Chee’s adherence to traditional values serves to emphasize Leaphorn’s skepticism. For example, when Chee discovers two murdered pot hunters, one a Navajo, he is deeply affected by his belief in chindi, the ghost representing all that was evil in the dead Navajo’s being, and Chee must restore inner harmony through the cleansing ritual of a sweat bath. With the help of Janet Pete, his lawyer friend who is also recovering from a romantic entanglement with a white, Chee comes to terms with his loss of Mary Langdon, a white woman for whom he had once contemplated forsaking his Navajo culture. Chee’s Navajo beliefs permeate his thoughts and actions, allowing Hillerman subtly to introduce tribal lore and anthropological material through characterization rather than through authorial comment.

Critical Context

A Thief of Time, the eighth novel in Hillerman’s series of eleven mysteries set on the vast Navajo Reservation, represents a significant artistic achievement in the depth and complexity of the author’s portrayal of Navajo culture. Always a masterful storyteller, Hillerman has uniquely infused the classic novel of detection, which emphasizes the linear thrust of action, with the psychological and spiritual complexity of holistic Navajo beliefs, creating through the consciousnesses of Leaphorn and Chee a rich texture of interlinking details and events. The structure becomes almost nonlinear (like the Native American oral tale), as apparently disparate threads from past and present and from remote distances are woven together into a single, unified pattern of meaning, discoverable only through the Navajo perspective of Leaphorn and Chee.

The first three of Hillerman’s mysteries, The Blessing Way (1970), Dance Hall of the Dead (1973), and Listening Woman (1978), feature Leaphorn, the modern, older, cynical detective. Jim Chee, a younger, more traditional detective who reconciles his vocation as a tribal policeman with his avocation as a yataali, a Navajo singer, is the main character of the next three novels, The People of Darkness (1980), The Dark Wind (1982), and The Ghostway (1984). Leaphorn and Chee are finally brought together in Skinwalkers (1986) and are reunited in A Thief of Time (1988). Hillerman continued to pair the two in Talking God (1989), Coyote Waits (1990), and Sacred Clowns (1993), but it is in A Thief of Time that he most effectively provides a balanced portrayal of characters whose own personal growth and interaction are central to the conflict and its resolution.

Although Hillerman disclaims writing “mainstream” novels and calls his work “category fiction,” he successfully engages the reader in a compelling anthropological mystery with social and moral significance. It is a tribute to Hillerman’s mastery of his craft that the reader never bumps into the author with his arms full of ethnographic materials; Hillerman’s substantial anthropological knowledge is conveyed artfully through the interaction of setting, plot, and characterization.

Bibliography

Bakerman, Jane S. “Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.” In Cops and Constables: American and British Fictional Policemen, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier and George N. Dove. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986. Shows how Hillerman’s novels address the realistic complications peculiar to fictional law-enforcement officers in a vast setting where jurisdictions overlap. Considers how Leaphorn and Chee maintain independence, resourcefulness, and a sense of justice in a cynical milieu of crime and violence. Focuses on the way ethnicity informs characterization.

Engel, Leonard. “Landscape and Place in Tony Hillerman’s Mysteries.” Western American Literature 28 (Summer, 1993): 111-122. Insightful analysis of Leaphorn’s search for pattern in crime as a way of reestablishing his relationship to the Earth. Landscape imagery and sense of place are seen as at the core of Hillerman’s narrative method.

Erisman, Fred. Tony Hillerman. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1989. Extensive treatment of Hillerman’s work. Useful consideration of the theme of time— personal, professional, and cultural—in A Thief of Time, the “most regionally and humanly evocative of all the Navajo police stories.”

Greenberg, Martin, ed. The Tony Hillerman Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to His Life and Work. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. A well-researched guide to Hillerman’s life and works. Presents a chronology highlighting events in Hillerman’s life, a never-before-published interview with Hillerman, critical essays, a short essay on Navajo culture, and excerpts from Hillerman’s most popular fiction and non-fiction work.

Laughlin, Rosemary. “Hillerman’s Harmony.” English Journal 82 (February, 1993): 63-65. Laughlin discusses the use of Hillerman’s novel as reading material in a college English course. She demonstrates that students learned that the Navajo way of walking in beauty could be used to assess their own behavior and attitudes.

Reilly, John M. Tony Hillerman: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Provides a brief biography of Hillerman, along with an overview of his fiction. Discusses themes, plot, and characterization of many of Hillerman’s novels, and offers a critical perspective on several books. Includes a comprehensive bibliography and index.

Roush, Jan. “The Developing Art of Tony Hillerman.” Western American Literature 28 (Summer, 1993): 99-110. Argues convincingly that Hillerman has created a new genre; the anthropological mystery. Shows how Hillerman’s fiction has shifted from romance to the novel.

Schneider, Jack W. “Crime and Navajo Punishment: Tony Hillerman’s Novels of Detection.” Southwest Review 67 (Spring, 1982): 151-160. An analysis of how Hillerman adapts the classical detective novel to the vast Southwestern landscape. Schneider sees the books’ setting as not a passive background but as playing “an active role in the novels.”