Hillerman's novels fit into so many traditional sub-categories of detective fiction that he becomes almost impossible to classify in such terms. Ethnic detectives like Chee and Leaphorn have appeared in the earliest detective fiction, as Edgar Allan Poe's protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, was a Frenchman living in Paris, and his other major detective figure, Legrand, is a displaced Huguenot living in South Carolina.

As an ethnic detective writer, Hillerman belongs in the same category as Australian Arthur Upfield, whose works featuring halfAborigine half-Anglo Napoleon Bonaparte apparently influence some of Hillerman's writing. Bonaparte also must work in relatively isolated areas—many even largely and more sparsely populated than the "Big Reservation." Like Bonaparte, Chee and Leaphorn also hark back to the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper and others, in which the hero finds himself struggling between the opposing cultures and values of civilization and the...