Reviews 273 Big Bonanza (1876), still in print and still regarded as the best contemporary account of Comstock lode mining tales and shenanigans. But Dan De Quille never seemed to get around to collecting the best of his numerous short pieces. His daughter tried to do this and failed, but, almost one-hundred years after his death, Lawrence Berkove has managed to get this material carefully and pretty accurately into print. To accomplish this task, the amount of travel, released time from teaching, reviewing anonymous and suspect sources, andjust plain sheer drudgery must have been, in the parlance of today, awesome. The scholar ship here seems very good and very careful. The actual quality of the selections, however, is another matter. Here, one may question whether all of the time and effort of editing and introduction writing were worth the work involved. True, shorter works these days are getting more respect as these best short stories and biographical accounts deserve, but there are still a lot of problems with this book. Much of what De Quille wrote were humorous anecdotal reminiscences that only a young male would find to be quality. When De Quille gets more serious, aswith the title story, he sounds appallingly like a refried version of melodramatic Bret Harte. Most of this material, however, is certainly a leap and a bound better than Robert Service, but the incidents in the volume we can see mostly used to be funny. There are some exceptions. “Tongue-Oil Timothy Dead”does have true aspects ofmagic realism and grim humor. However thankful we may be that this complicated collection has been completed, one would certainlywish for awork of more than historical interest. PATRICK D. MORROW Auburn University TheJim CheeMysteries: People ofDarkness, TheDark Wind, and The Ghostway. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990. 556 pages, $15.95.) When I first began reading Tony Hillerman’s fiction only three or four years ago, my first taste was of PeopleofDarkness, and it still recalls Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness as an evocation of the sinister brilliance of which e. e. cummings’ “manunkind”is capable. Italso displays thejanus Face of Hillerman’s talent: his commendable passion for educating us into the ways of the Four Corners’ Indian Country which unfortunately results in a sometimes excessive didacti cism and a too frequent and somewhat patronizing review of the evidence. Hillerman combines innovation and timeliness in the quantum of Anima operative in the psyche of Chee, a cop never really comfortable with his gun. A female reader told me she likes Hillerman’s Indians and women, a tribute, in my opinion, to both his enlightened liberalism and his instinct for bestsellerdom . Whether, for instance, Jim Chee really intuits his crime-solving 274 WesternAmerican Literature breakthroughs by a logic more Navajo/circular than European/linear I leave to brains more right-hemispheric than my own. I find it more literarily interesting that Chee’s great career decision—to remain a Navajo and perfect the nearly lost rituals of the medicine men, rather than to Go East to an affirmative action position with the F.B.I. and a mixed marriage—is almost the exact opposite of the opting ofJames Joyce/Stephen Daedalus for the Priesthood ofArt over that of theJesuits and for International Exile over humble native provincialism. I doubt thatJoyce would have endorsed the cautionary wisdom of The Wizard ofOz. The Ghostwayregrettably exhibits a convention common to both the Eastern Urban and the Western Rural Establishments: L.A. bashing. I’ve lived in South ern California twenty-seven years and I don’t recognize the one of which Hillerman writes, neither its topography nor its people nor its police. He’s on firmerterrawhen he sticks to his own turf. Whatever seeming indictments I may have levied above, I have read virtu ally all of Hillerman’s novels and look forward to whatever else he may write with a sense of assured pleasure that I associate with few authors. A critic’sjob is to criticize, but I read these books lovingly with myAAA Indian Country map at my elbow. And though I abhor the notion that the ultimate test of a book is whether it gets made into a movie...