Best-selling mystery author Tony Hillerman was born on this date in 1925. The Shape Shifter is the 18th book in the series centered on Navajo Tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Hillerman had an interesting website with excerpts from all the books, but it has disappeared. There he told us that:
Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green ‘crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers–my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.
. . .Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of PEOPLE OF DARKNESS make sense–and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever’s “Days of Old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in universe of consumerism.
Mystery writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on this date in 1894. Hammett departed from the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels (Sherlock Holmes for example) and transformed the genre with his less-than-glamorous realism. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Hammett actually was a detective with Pinkerton for a few years just before World War I. Contracting TB during military service, he realized his health would keep him from resuming as a detective. He turned to writing. He published his first story in 1922, and then about 80 more, many in the popular pulp crime magazine Black Mask. Hammett’s first novel was Red Harvest, published in 1929. His most famous character, Sam Spade, made his appearance in Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930). (It was the third—and only successful—attempt to turn that novel into a film when Humphrey Bogart played the role in 1941.) The Thin Man (1934) was the last of Hammett’s novels.
By the early-thirties, Hammett was established and famous. He began a relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman that lasted for 30 years despite his drinking and womanizing. Though both eventually divorced their spouses, they never married. Hammett served in the Army in World War II, enlisting as a private at age 48. His involvement in left-wing politics and unwillingness to testify about it before Congress however, and the continued drinking, diminished his stature. Hammett died in 1961.
John Cheever was born on this date in 1912.
He wrote for more than 50 years and published more than 200 short stories. He’s known for writing about the world of American suburbia. Even though he was one of the most popular short-story writers of the 20th century, he once said that he only earned “enough money to feed the family and buy a new suit every other year.”
In 1935 he was published in The New Yorker for the first time, and he would continue to write for the magazine for the rest of his life. His stories were collected in books including The Way Some People Live (1943) and The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the few collections of short stories ever to make the New York Times best-seller list.
Cheever died in 1982.