Disposable Lit Reviews

Harper, 1990 (1971)
353 pp.
ISBN 0-06-100028-0

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Despite having half a dozen of Tony Hillerman’s novels im my possession, and having heard many good things about his Native American murder mysteries, I had never gotten around to reading one. So I went through what was on my shelf and found the novel with the earliest copyright date (1971) to start me off.

Turns out that it was NOT one of his reservation-set mysteries, though the cover of the paperback reissue mimics the layout of those bestsellers (minus, I saw upon closer inspection, any Indian iconography). New Mexico does show up as the setting for a couple of chapters in the center of the book, but the rest is set in a nameless midwestern state, where reporter Joseph Cotton covers the Capitol beat. As is standard in books revolving around such people, Cotton comes across evidence of a conspiracy when a fellow reporter dies under mysterious circumstances. It must be a conspiracy, because suddenly people are trying to kill Cotton as well, but he’ll be damned if he knows what the conspiracy is about, or what evidence he possesses in the deceased reporter’s battered notebook.

Even in this novel, outside of the series settings for which Hillerman is famous, it’s easy to see why he’s been so successful; his prose is deceptively simple and clean, not “artlessly,” but with an uncluttered attention to communication that makes him seem a styleless stylist. Even with a rather low-key story for much of the book, Hillerman’s writing is so effortlessly readable that it’s as easy to keep read as not.

In at least two ways, though, this novel may function best as a time capsule. The world of journalism almost four decades back is an alien landscape, one in which reporters typed their stories on carbon paper before typing them again on the teletype to the newsdesk, with discrete daily news cycles that have vanished in the world of 24-hour media. One looks at such a world of physical manuscripts and time-consuming transmission and wonders how anything urgent was ever reported in enough time to make a difference.

More importantly, though, it’s a time capsule of journalistic ethics at a crossroads. The titular fly on the wall is the emblem of Cotton’s sense of journalistic fairplay — to report as objectively as possible, and let the people decide the blame and the praise. But the case he uncovers of corruption in state government lends weight to the ethics of one of his fellow reporters; what if the corruption is being exposed for political gain, in order to swing a campaign toward a more ruthless, more self-serving candidate? What if exposing this particular evil ends up aiding an even greater evil? Does throwing any dirt that is found as headline fodder actually serve the public interest, or should the responsible journalist consciously and selectively emphasize what he reports for the greater good?

I say that that ethical question was at a crossroads at the time, because in the decades since, it seems to have been decided, with a journalistic establishment which maintains the old shibboleths of objectively while also forthrightly declaring itself privileged to frame the context of the narratives it presents, to foreground certain political and cultural goals and bend its reporting toward them accordingly. The public of the novel’s present couldn’t be trusted to look beyond the headlines and digest the complexities of the full story; the public of today has been trained that the news is supposed to be delivered to them pre-analyzed and pre-valued.

So no, no Indians in this one, but plenty to chew over for those who want to.