Tony Hillerman, who died of pulmonary failure in Albuquerque on Oct. 26 at the age of 83, was a man of parts and of words. Whenever and whatever he wrote, you knew you were in safe and clever hands.

Whether dealing with breaking news during his days as an editor at The New Mexican, writing a factual article, or penning one of his immensely popular Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries set on the Navajo Reservation, Hillerman was an archetypal storyteller. Like his bardic predecessors, he wove intricate, golden narratives that drew readers in and then urged them along. The tale's path was always paved with technical skill, but Hillerman's ability to choose just the right word or phrase or transition, plus his mastery of believable dialogue that was somehow both direct and subtle, meant that craftsmanship was servant rather than king. The dovetailing in a piece might be perfect, but it was never obvious.

Those abilities came not only from a strong stream of creativity that developed through his many life experiences — as student, soldier, husband, father, friend, poker player, and lover of nature — but also from the disciplined attention to facts he learned as a journalism major at the University of Oklahoma. Both attributes were honed during his newspaper and wire-service career in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, including his stint as United Press International bureau chief for Santa Fe in 1953-1954 and his later reporting and editing at The New Mexican. When he left this paper as executive editor, it was to teach journalism at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he influenced several generations of reporters along the way.

Working all the time

"When I was growing up, he was at The New Mexican," recalled the author's daughter, reporter and writer Anne Hillerman. "My family moved to Santa Fe in 1953, and he left the paper at the very end of '62 or in early '63 to go to UNM. He talked about the paper all the time, because that was what he did.

"I was going to school at Loretto Academy, and after school I would walk over. The New Mexican was an afternoon paper then, and he should be wrapping it up by 4, but often he'd stay there till 6, and I'd do my homework. He was working all the time. He'd come home, and the phone would ring, and the phone would ring, and the phone would ring."

Speaking of her father's later work, she added, "I've always felt that Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn were like my uncles. I feel I know them more even than some of my distant relatives!"

Former New Mexican reporter Lew Thompson first met Hillerman in their student days at the University of Oklahoma, and they later wound up in the same newsroom in Santa Fe. "We met in journalism school," Thompson explained. "I was a year and a half or two ahead of him. I was nominated to be the editor of The Covered Wagon, which was OU's humor magazine. I told them I would do it if I could get Tony Hillerman to be my associate editor. We put out a publication that got named 'most collegiate' by The Harvard Lampoon, and I said then, 'Most of the credit goes to Tony Hillerman.'"

Like Hillerman, Thompson was a poker hound. When he applied to The New Mexican in the late '50s, Thompson made sure there were several games going on regularly. "There were three poker games in town, and that was one of the first things I wanted to know before I made an application to work here," he said. "Of course, we didn't play the high-stakes game. Mostly we had The New Mexican and the AP [Associated Press] guys for low stakes. There were three raises, and I think $5 or $10 a raise. You played with dollar chips. You'd win $20 or $30 or lose $20 or $30. Of course, that was a lot of money then.

"Tony was UPI bureau chief and had an office to himself up in the northeast corner of the old radio building [east of the New Mexican building on Marcy Street]. I think he was making that transition from UPI then. He shifted to The New Mexican and became the political reporter, the Roundhouse reporter. I had the privilege of being there when he was just coming into his new [editorial] positions, in 1958 or '59."

Thinking back, Thompson is sure that Hillerman instituted a part of the paper that continues today: Pasatiempo. "I was on the committee to name a publication that would be about the arts, and I think it was his idea. We published that thing on newsprint, and we had to figure a way so people would know it was a new edition. They had three colors of newsprint — they had a brown and a reddish and a greenish color. We would alternate between colors so they would know it was a current issue of Pasatiempo. We could fill 12 pages if we were lucky."

Back then, the Marcy Street building was split in half longitudinally, with Schifani Brothers Printing on one side and the paper's operations on the other. The departments, from front to back, according to Thompson, were classified, editorial — where he and Hillerman sat — circulation, and press, which at that time meant mechanical composition presses. It was the day of notebooks and typewriters rather than of digital recorders and computers, but a nose for news was still the most essential skill.

"I remember we had a system: someone would have to come in on Saturday morning and open the shop and be there in case anything happened," Thompson said. "I had the duty one day. This would be about 1960. I was going down to Josie's to get a cup of coffee, and I saw a black man in front of the barbershop. He asked me, 'Would you ask those people in there if they would cut my hair?' I said, 'Oh, you can ask them.' And he said, 'No, please, I'd rather you did.'

"I said, 'Sure,' and I stuck my head in the door and asked them, and they said, 'No. You tell him to go down to Burro Alley. There's a shop there that will cut his hair.' I went with him to Burro Alley to make sure he would be OK, and then I beelined it back to The New Mexican and called Tony and said, 'The barbershop won't cut this guy's hair. I think there's a story here.' He said, 'Of course there's a story here! I'll be right down.'"

Thompson paused a moment for effect and then went on. "Tony came in, and we started calling hotels and motels, asking if they'd put up a black person. I called La Fonda, and they said, 'We wouldn't put up a black person off the street, but we'd put up Satchmo because he's a celebrity.' La Posada said the same thing, and all the motels up and down Cerrillos. Here we were in Santa Fe, and we had no idea this was going on.

"This is the point of it — that I thought it was a good story, and Tony damned well knew it was. He not only confirmed it, he extended it out and made a feature of it."

Hillerman was always alert for ways to increase readership, Thompson said. One of his first ideas was to create fictional letters to the editor from a Mrs. Pincus, who supposedly was visiting Santa Fe from West Texas. "The circulation would go up after every Mrs. Pincus letter," Thompson laughed. "People would get up in arms about it, and it would be controversial. I think I did a piece once on tailgating at the opera — against it — and signed it 'Mrs. Pincus.' People wrote in and said, 'We don't need tailgating; it's uncouth." Other people said it wouldn't be the opera without tailgating."

Hillerman's sense of style was as strong as his newspaper skills, Thompson said, and that let him cross boundaries others might find impassable. "At OU, embellishing a story led to being sent to the professional writers' school," he said, "where you would learn there were storytellers and then there were people who told stories. We interpreted that as: if you told a story, you were a reporter, but if you were a storyteller, it gave you the privilege of being creative. If anyone ever qualified to be a storyteller, it was Hillerman. And he demonstrated that, obviously."

Letting the facts speak

According to George Johnson, science writer for The New York Times and a much-published science author, Hillerman wasn't content to be a storyteller himself: he loved to help others learn the art and craft. Johnson found that out when he studied at UNM under Hillerman in the early 1970s.

"He instilled us with the idea that the journalist was a guard against corrupt politics and corporate power," Johnson said. "He also stressed this idea about writing, how good nonfiction requires the same creativity as good fiction, except it has to be true. At the same time, he would tell all these stories about his adventures as a journalist.

"The Tierra Amarilla raid was one story that he covered. And I remember his account of witnessing an execution in New Mexico in the electric chair, and it apparently made a big impression on people in terms of bringing out objection to capital punishment. He didn't make a polemical argument against capital punishment. He went and described it in the story.

"Besides absolute accuracy, he pushed the ability to bring people to life with words — the same narrative technique as fiction. Every other class I took in journalism — and I am sure this would be true anywhere — was basically worthless: formulaic writing, the old AP style, the five W's, the inverted pyramid [story structure]. It's almost like he was giving you permission to write well. The idea was, you have to tell the truth, you have to get the facts across, but there are ways you can use your creativity."

Johnson said his mentor kept his personal beliefs out of newsroom teaching, though hints surfaced now and then. "In many ways, Mr. Hillerman was a very conservative man," he said. "I guess he was a good Catholic, and he was certainly socially conservative. I remember one thing that struck me in class. We were talking about shield laws protecting reporters. He made a strong argument that it wasn't necessarily a good idea and that treating reporters differently from anyone else who had to testify in response to a subpoena was wrong.

"On the other hand, I remember we were talking about the rules of what's on the record and off the record. He talked about being a statehouse reporter in a room with someone, and someone would leave something on the desk and leave the room — maybe on purpose, maybe not. So he said you had to learn to read upside down!"

Jim Belshaw, a longtime columnist for the Albuquerque Journal and one of Hillerman's poker buddies, met the author at UNM in September 1970, when Belshaw first went to school there. "I presented myself to Scholes Hall," he said. "I was about 60 hours out of the Vietnam War. I had my discharge and my first GI Bill check. I went to the counter, and they did what they did. At the end, a woman scribbled a name on a piece of paper and said, 'This is your freshman advisor.' One thing I knew how to do was how to report," so off he went to find Hillerman. "I had a copy of my ACT scores. I handed them to him, and his eyes went to the math score instantly, and then he looked over the top of his glasses and said, 'Journalism major, right?' I said, 'Yes, how did you know?'

"As the years went by and I thought about him more, I realized that was my introduction to Tony Hillerman's unerring ability to get to the heart of the matter quickly. He had good radar. He could cut through all the baloney and all of the distractions that anyone would want to throw up and get to the heart instantly."

Belshaw graduated in 1973, worked at the Las Cruces Sun-News for about a year, and then moved back to the Albuquerque Journal's copy desk for six months, "but it was a bad fit." So when UNM advertised an opening for a public information officer, he applied for the job and got it. Right around then, in 1975, he heard about a regular poker game that took place on Tuesday nights. He joined it and found Hillerman in the group, and they kept playing together for more than 30 years.

"In the course of those years I got to know him very well, of course, and about 10 or 12 years ago some of the guys decided they wanted to play for a little more money," Belshaw remembered. "So we started playing on Thursdays, and now we're playing twice a week. In 1992, I built a house in Corrales around the same time Tony built a house in the north valley. It was also the same time Tony was getting leery about driving at night. He had been wounded in World War II and almost lost his sight, and he always had trouble with his eyes." So Belshaw became the de facto driver.

"I'd talk to him frequently [because] twice a week we wound up traveling together, and we wound up fishing together. We became friends. Tony would say this all the time: that poker game was an exercise in ego adjustment because nobody was important. We had a president of the university; we had Hillerman, who was this international novelist who sold millions of books; it didn't make a difference. Everyone would go out of their way to chop you down a bit in a good-natured way."

In his journalism classes, Belshaw said, Hillerman sometimes talked about the relationship between a writer and a copy editor and how it should and should not work — ideally, theoretically, and practically. In the late '90s, Hillerman demonstrated the give-and-take process in a way Belshaw hadn't expected.

"Tony had just finished a book — I don't remember which one. He said, 'Belshaw, this book has the most difficult and the best chapter I've ever written in my life.' The manuscript goes off to New York, and a few weeks later it comes back with a note from the copy editor: 'Tony, this is the greatest book you've ever written in your life. It's a breakthrough work. There's only one thing wrong, and it's chapter so and so.' And of course it was the chapter he thought was so good. I asked him what he did, and he said, 'What the hell do you think I did? I rewrote it!'

"I think the man was always working. His mind was always working. I've traveled with him, and I've seen it; he's just watching people and watching relationships. I thought, Somewhere, somehow, in some book, maybe just a moment, this kind of person is going to show up."

Though his friends say Hillerman never showed malice and never seemed to lose his temper, he did have two bêtes noirs, Belshaw said, and he loved to go at them in his mysteries. "He loved to tweak West Point and the FBI. He did this in almost every book. The reason he loved to tweak West Point was he was a private in the Army, and he had to put up with officers. Some were good, but some weren't." As for the FBI, "it was the big, powerful federal government come to tell one of Tony's characters how to do his job. Tony could not abide the abuse of power. That's what made him the novelist he was, the journalist he was, the person he was."

A cloud man

As a man who loved words, Belshaw said, Hillerman also loved learning that people liked his books — or liked reading at all. Once, the two men and their friend Bill Buchanan were fishing on the San Juan River in Northern New Mexico, and motel employees spread the word about their famous guest. One evening, there was a knock on the motel-room door.

"A guy from the gas company, a guy in his pickup truck, showed up with a copy of a book and asked Tony to sign it," Belshaw said. "Of course, he did. After he left, Tony said, 'You know, there are a lot of people in this world who would be shocked that a man like that reads books.' And that was the kind of thing that made Tony mad, somebody writing off people like that, figuring that a guy who worked for the gas company wouldn't be reading. I suppose the term for how he felt really is populist.

"He was a cloud man," Belshaw added. "Many, many times on the way to a poker game, especially in summertime when it was still daylight or dusk, he'd make me stop the car so we could get out to admire clouds. You can find that in his books.

"The thing I think I admire most about his writing was his sense of place. He had that tremendous ability to put you in the scene. When you get a Hillerman mystery, you're really getting a twofer. You're getting a mystery, which is entertaining, and he's opening the door to a culture you don't know anything about."

Belshaw and Thompson both spoke affectionately of the basic Hillerman, the man beneath the fame and glory, who never forgot where he was from or what living a proper life meant. Through thick and thin, good and bad, from striving to success, Hillerman stayed the same person.

"You know, all the awards this guy got, he was never anything at bottom but this country boy from Sacred Heart, Oklahoma," Belshaw said. "I tell people all the time that the best way to describe Tony and his wife, Marie, is that if you had the power to choose your next-door neighbors, these would be the people."

Thompson agreed heartily. "You know what they have nowadays, they have editors now who help you put your book together, and they have people who consult with you. I'll tell you what he had in a single word: Marie. I'm telling you, she's a saint. She did all of the things that helped make him successful along the way.

"Marie was a great influence and a great helpmate. I'd be talking to him on the phone and ask him something, and he'd say, "Marie, Lew's on the phone. How do you spell meilleur? And the wonderful thing was, Marie would know."

"He enjoyed all the trappings that came with the success — the limos in New York and all that business," Belshaw said. "But he enjoyed it in a way that always made you laugh when he talked about it. It wasn't like he was bragging about it or expected people here to treat him like this. It was like a kid in a candy store: look at all this they're doing for me."

Anne Hillerman said she and her father never discussed writing much, including her food writing, though before he died they worked together on a picture book (due in 2009) depicting the many Navajo Reservation landscapes he described in his books.

"Because he was in Albuquerque when I was writing for The New Mexican, he didn't see it [her work], and when I was writing for the Journal North, that doesn't go down there either," she said. "His idea of a good meal was chicken-fried steak at JB's, so he wasn't really an avid gourmet eater. His idea of good food was quick, hot, inexpensive, and gravyfied. Is that an adjective?"

Belshaw laughed when he heard about Anne's story. "He told me he liked JB's because he could understand every word on the menu," Belshaw said. Another quintessential Hillerman moment happened when someone took him to a fancy restaurant in Albuquerque. "He said, 'Belshaw, you ever had a club sandwich?' I said, 'Sure, I like 'em.' He said, 'The only thing I recognized on the menu there was a club sandwich, so I ordered it, and they brought me something with olive oil on it. Olive oil!'"

A favorite Hillerman anecdote for both Thompson and Belshaw involved a dinner meeting where the author was being fêted, wined, and dined by his New York publishers.

"He had a dinner party meeting with a bunch of editors and publishers and eggheads," Thompson said, "and this person, the wine steward, came by with his key hanging off his chest. And they were talking vintage wines, and they were talking palate. ... He let them all go through their selections, and then the wine steward said, 'What would you like, Mr. Hillerman?' And he said, 'Uh, you got any Diet Dr Pepper?'"