Yup. Melty, melty
Christ on a crutch.
Next time I go to a bar, I’ll forgo the line, “I’m not really this tall, I’m sitting on my wallet.” and try, “Baby, come home with me and I’ll never let anyone beat you in the face with a rifle butt.”
Only if you say like I imagine Jim Chee sounding. Strong silent type, and all that. Charmingly doofy. Sigh.
Very sad. I know he had been in poor health recently, but I hoped he would live many more years, producing more fine stories about the Navajo nation and its police officers.
Coincidentally, I am reading Finding Moon and enjoying it. The Great Taos Bank Robbery is next.
One of my all-time favorites.
This is a great quote from the link:
I remember that Joe Leaphorn finally broke away from his Anglo girlfriend (the one who wanted him to stay fed, not go back to his roots). Did Jim Chee ever marry Bernie?
Love, Phil
Yep, Jim married Bernie. But Janet Pete was not entirely Anglo, she was half Navajo herself, but raised in New York, not on the reservation, or in the culture.
I forget which book it is, but it mentions how Leaphorn comes to Chee’s place, a trailer, after Bernie and Jim get back from their honeymoon in Hawaii. He noticed some changes. Curtains in the windows even!
I must have missed a book! I remember Lt. Leaphorn & Professor Whats-her-face becoming rather fond of each other, but I didn’t know they went on to a more easily defined relationship.
Not only has Hillerman died, but he took Chee, and Leaphorn with him.
Perhaps not. Robert Goldsborough continued Nero Wolfe.
My recollection is that Leaphorn wanted to marry the professor, but she didn’t want to change their situation, so he let well enough alone.
I like how Chee lived in a tiny, crappy trailer, but on a gorgeous piece of land. I figured he and Bernie would eventually build a house there.
Oh, don’t even say that. If Dick Francis goes, too, my world will be pretty dark for a while.
What sad news. I met Mr. Hillerman when the Smithsonian hosted “Tribute to a Generation” during the inauguration of the National World War II monument in Washington D.C. I was honored to be part of the resident staff at the hotel, and he was a benevolent, humorous guest. He would come by the hotel office and stay and tell stories about his days in the service. He even brought pictures and loved to hear how handsome he looked in uniform. I remember hugging him and having my picture taken with him and him cracking a joke about it.
What a sweet man he was. We always set out a chair for him, and once even spoke about how crushed we would be when we inevitably heard of his passing.
Godspeed, Tony.
Okay, I do remember that. It wasn’t a major plot point, just an explanation. I got the impression that Leaphorn felt it was the Right Thing To Do, rather than His Heart’s Desire, and so neither of them pushed it.
I’d like to reread the series in chronological order. <sigh> Not the order in which they were written, and I can’t find my notes on which happens next. Once upon a time, I had the books in order on my shelves, but three moves later . . . not so much.
Oh, well, I can stand a bit of minor jumping around in the first few stories. Getting to the final installment could be rough, knowing it’s the very last.
Damn.
Not only am I saddened at this news, but so is the wife, possibly his only Thai fan. I turned her on to his novels, and she has enjoyed them just as much as I. There’s a Japanese bookstore chain here that carries a few copies of his stuff, and we always look to see if something new has shown up. We only recently read The Shape Shifter, so I guess that’s the end of the series? Damn.
I first heard of Hillerman’s Leaphorn novels back in Texas, from an anthropology professor. When I moved to Albuquerque, his stuff was everywhere, and that’s where I started reading him – I remember if you got off the plane at the airport, you’d walk into a wall of his work on display. You could always count several people reading his novels in cafes in Santa Fe. I heard he lived in a normal working-class neighborhood and that if you saw his house, you’d never guess there was an award-winning writer living there.
Wow. That sucks. I wanted him to keep making new books for me for as long as I lived. Selfish prick. I guess I’ll just have to read them over and over, like Dorothy Sayers’s books.
Please expand on that. While I enjoyed the novels immensely, I wasn’t aware of an anthropological significance other than how difficult it was to investigate a murder if you couldn’t speak the dead person’s name, or that you had to park in front of the guy’s house and wait a good while before you knocked to be polite.
Not aware of an anthropological significance? 
The books are chock-full of Najavo and other lore, not to mention Leaphorn’s uniquely Navajo way of approaching things.
But the prof mentioned the books in passing one day, didn’t really make a big point of them. When I moved to Albuquerque and saw them, I was reminded of that.