To those who read Tony Hillermann: Has he lost it?

[LittleClarkie]

I'm part of the way through the book, and it would be just fine if he hadn't rebooted Leaphorn's retirement. Did I miss something, or is Hillerman posting from an alternate dimension where ol' Joe just retired a month ago, instead of years ago?

Alittle disappointing because otherwise I like that the book is focussing on Leaphorn this time. I prefer him as a character to Chee.

But what the heck?

[Capn Sunshine]

1. which one are you reading?

?

[LittleClarkie]

2. Oh sorry. The newest one: The Shape Shifter

Maybe he thought that Joe should be dead by now, and so telescoped the time line.

[Flaxbee]

3. some authors do that, when it seems that a LOT of time has

passed, they pretend like it was just a few days, or months, at the most. Martha Grimes started out with her characters Jury and Plant in their mid-40s, and with all the cases they've been through if she hadn't started to mess with the time continuum, they'd be in their 70s-80s by now. And she prefers her protagonists to be middle-aged.

And Kinsey Milhone (from Sue Grafton) has aged about 2-3 years and is still in her 30s where by now with all that Grafton has put the character through she'd really be much older.

Oh well. Poetic license, and all that. It is otherwise good, aside from the skewed time line?

[TorchTheWitch]

4. I don't get it. It's fiction. what does the timeline have to do with real time?

Is that your complaint? That you're comparing the timeline of the story to real time in the real world?

Maybe I'm confused at just what it is that you find a problem.

[LittleClarkie]

5. Wasn't what I was getting at, no. But if an author has set up a time line

and has written more than one novel where the main character has been retired for a while, and then all of a sudden he's only been retired a month, it sort of messes with one's suspension of disbelief.

My complaint was that the author doesn't seem to remember the history of the character that he himself set up, or is rewriting it. A lack of copy-editing on the part of the publisher, I suppose.

I suppose if one of your lead characters is old, and you think that he wouldn't be alive anymore (Hillerman has been writing since the 70's after all) then I suppose in order to continue writing about that elderly character, you might fudge and hope people don't mind.

Just an annoyance really, no biggie. But do you see how that might be annoying if you've been reading an author for a while? You want the books to be consistent within their own personal reality, and for the author to remember what he's written before. It's just a bit sloppy.

I'm thinking that the author is getting a tad sick of writing these particular novels. He's tried once or twice to get away from his most famous book series, but they're never as popular, and he always ends up coming back.

[tigereye]

6. didn't Leaphorn start working as a consultant after his retirement?

I can't remember if I've read that one yet- did it just come out?

The movies they made of his books had Leaphorn all wrong, IMO. Chee looked more the part....


I'm a big Hillerman fan.... and a serious mystery junkie.


:hi:


I'm still mad at Colin Dexter, if you read the Morse mysteries.... ;)

[CreekDog]

7. Far from losing it, he has it and keeps using it again and again and again...

I only needed to reaqd 3 books of his to get the idea and that's when I was driving through the Navajo Nation regularly.