The award-winning, bestselling author of The Back of the Turtle and The Inconvenient Indian masters the comic mystery novel in this series opener, starring ex-cop Thumps DreadfulWater\nThumps DreadfulWater is a Cherokee ex-cop trying to make a living as a photographer in the small town of Chinook, somewhere in the northwestern United States. But he doesn’t count on snapping shots of a dead body languishing in a newly completed luxury condo resort built by the local Indian band. It’s a mystery that Thumps can’t help getting involved in, especially when he realizes the number one suspect is Stick Merchant, anti-condo protester and wayward son of Claire Merchant, head of the tribal council and DreadfulWater’s sometimes lover. Smart and savvy, blessed with a killer dry wit and a penchant for self-deprecating humour, DreadfulWater just can’t manage to shed his California cop skin. Before long, he is deeply entangled in the mystery and has his work cut out for him.\nA novel that will appeal to mystery fans as well as Thomas King’s loyal audience, DreadfulWater Shows Up is a catchy, clever read.

Buster Mesquite's Cowboy Band give a quirky southwestern retelling of a classic children's tale, with a much more satisfactory ending. Delightful illustrations by Navajo artist Ernest Franklin, who has been illustrating Tony Hillerman's Navajo policemen for many years. Visual puns and hidden jokes make Franklin's drawings a delight to revisit over and over, always with a fresh sense of discovery. Humor is a large part of Native American life and traditional culture.

Renowned author Tony Hillerman's original essays written for ""New Mexico"" and ""Rio Grande, "" plus two new essays, are complemented by the extraordinary images of Muench and Reynolds.

A rich gathering of essays that evoke the unique and mysterious appeal New Mexico has had for some of the twentieth century's best-known writers. Included are selections by Mary Austin, Oliver La Farge, Conrad Richter, D.H. Lawrence, C.G. Jung, Winfield Townley Scott, John DeWitt McKee, Ernie Pyle, Harvey Fergusson, and Lawrence Clark Powell. Hillerman's preface and introduction are choice specimens of his incisive humor and his own deep love of the state.\n"Should be required reading for all those who call themselves New Mexican."--James Arnholz

Text By Tony Hillerman ; Photographs By Béla Kalman. Maps On Lining Papers.

In Talking Mysteries, Tony Hillerman discusses his craft, including his approach to plot, characterization, and setting, and the wrinkles and twists that make his brand of fiction unique. These and other insights into how he writes emerge in an extended interview with his long-time friend and fellow author Ernie Bulow. An autobiographical piece by Hillerman details his early years in Oklahoma, first encounters with Navajo culture, and his eventual life as journalist and author. \nNavajo artist Ernest Franklin created twelve sketches of Hillerman characters for this book. Hillerman credits Franklin with "showing me what Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn look like." As an additional treat, a Jim Chee mini-mystery, "The Witch, Yazzie, and the Nine of Clubs," originally published in 1981 and long unavailable, is included.

Portrays Navajo country in the Arizona desert and describes the customs and culture of the native peoples

Lawrence Block, Sarah Caudwell, Tony Hillerman, Peter Lovesey, and Donald Westlake describe how they would commit the perfect murder

A leading chronicler of the Western landscape selects more than 150 pieces--fiction and non-fiction, classic and contemporary--that evoke the people and spirit of the West

A crime-lover's collection of short stories includes works by such notable authors as Robert Barnard, Antonia Fraser, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey, Sue Grafton, Ellis Peters, and Tony Hillerman. Reprint.

Edited by Tony Hillerman, the Southwest's foremost suspense writer, this first-ever collection of mystery stories set in the West contains 20 original entries by such luminary mystery writers as Marcia Muller, Susan Dunlap, and Robert Campbell.

Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. As early as 1917, Susan Glaspell evinced a poignant understanding of motive in a murder in an isolated farmhouse. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, led by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Hollywood detective Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot tall, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest--not to say love--of this quintessentially American genre. American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

In THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF THE CENTURY, best-selling author Tony Hillerman and mystery expert Otto Penzler present an unparalleled treasury of American suspense fiction that every fan will cherish. Offering the finest examples from all reaches of the genre, this collection charts the mystery's eminent history from the turn-of-the-century puzzles of Futrelle, to the seminal pulp fiction of Hammett and Chandler, to the mystery story's rise to legitimacy in the popular mind, a trend that has benefited masterly writers like Westlake, Hunter, and Grafton. Nowhere else can readers find a more thorough, more engaging, more essential distillation of American crime fiction.Penzler, the Best American Mystery Stories series editor, and Hillerman winnowed this select group out of a thousand stories, drawing on sources as diverse as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Esquire, Collier's and The New Yorker. Giants of the genre abound -- Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, Ellery Queen, Sara Paretsky, and others -- but the editors also unearthed gems by luminaries rarely found in suspense anthologies: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Damon Runyon, Harlan Ellison, James Thurber, and Joyce Carol Oates. Mystery buffs and newcomers alike will delight in the thrilling stories and top-notch writing of a hundred years' worth of the finest suspense, crime, and mystery writing.

In 1929, Dorothy L. Sayers published her landmark anthology, The Omnibus of Crime. More recently, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert decided it was time to produce a definitive new anthology representing the best of the genre since then - the critically acclaimed A New Omnibus of Crime. This extraordinary collection emphasizes the most exciting styles and voices in each genre, rather than taking a typical decade-by-decade approach. As a result, A New Omnibus of Crime boasts a broad range of engaging, page-turning, and spine-tingling selections from the past eight decades. Stories in this collection include Patricia Highsmith's "Woodrow Wilson's Necktie," Sue Grafton's "A Poison That Leaves No Trace," Alexander McCall Smith's "He Loved to Go for Drives with His Father," and many more. A New Omnibus of Crime is a marvelous achievement that brings together some of the greatest crime and mystery short fiction ever collected.