Tony Hillerman's Dark Winds: Navajo Noir in the 1970s

Tony Hillerman (1925-2008), a writer of detective novels raised in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, and deceased in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is celebrated for his Dark Winds series published by Oscar Mondadori. Hillerman, of Anglo-German descent, was a journalist and university professor who deeply respected Native American culture. His protagonist, Joe Leaphorn, is a lieutenant in the Navajo Tribe Police based in Kayenta, near Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border. The stories are set in the 1970s, an analog era before cellphones, where car doors closed with a metallic 'clang' rather than the modern 'thump' of SUVs, and phones were wired on desks or kitchen walls.