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‘Knock it Off with the Mystical Horseshit:’ Detection in the American West

ABSTRACT This article offers two close readings of prominent American detective novels: Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way and Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish. Both texts display aspects of the Western wilderness (the Great Basin and the Great Plains) which, in different but related ways, remodel the dynamics of the investigation through several motifs: the missing person, the hidden or lost clue in the apparently empty, sidereal space, the constraint of distances, the paradox between the enclosed Reservations and the open Plains. Most of all, the two novels are centered on very strong detective figures: the Tribal Policeman Joe Leaphorn and the blasé Sheriff of Absaroka County, Walt Longmire. The land shapes these two men, whose ethno-ecological awareness is an essential part of their detecting methods as well as of their own identities.