The old saying that a watched pot never boils has a modern translation. A watched telephone never rings. For a day and a half, I’ve been trying to contact Tony Hillerman about “A New Omnibus of Crime” he edited with midcoast Maine writer Rosemary Herbert. Despite the calm assurances of Ms. Herbert, Hillerman has yet to return my increasingly desperate phone calls and e-mails. A deadline looms.

Finally the phone rings. My wife answers in the kitchen. “It’s him. It’s really Tony Hillerman,” she calls. Somewhere trumpets are playing a flourish as drums roll a steady tattoo. Having Tony Hillerman on your telephone is like having Carl Yastrzemski on your front steps.

Hillerman, for the uninitiated, is a lion of Southwestern detective fiction. His lead character, detective Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police, has solved mysteries in an armada of novels in the Navajo series. Hillerman, a past president of Mystery Writers of America, has received their Grand Master Award. He also has received the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award, as well as the Nero Wolfe Award, among others. His latest mystery is “Skeleton Man.” “The Shape Shifter” is due out in May.

While he has never set foot in Maine, Hillerman has ties to the Pine Tree State, having collaborated twice with Herbert. In 1996, the two co-edited “The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing.” A little bit of history brings this dissimilar pair together. Seventy-five years ago Dorothy L. Sayers published “The Omnibus of Crime,” a seminal collection of crime and mystery short stories then emblematic of the genre. At that time, emphasis was on new ways to commit the crime as well as to solve it. Plot was king. Characterization and love interests were thought to distract rather than enhance.

Herbert, Down East Books publicist and former book review editor at The Boston Herald, says “It took two lifetimes of reading” to set the tone for “The New Omnibus of Crime” (Oxford University Press,

2005, $35, 434 pages). The book has 27 short stories, including two by Hillerman and one by Sayers. It is a cornucopia of different styles by the great authors of the genre in the last 75 years. Hillerman’s “First Lead Gasser” is right out of his newspaper days. It is eight pages of riveting starkness that leave the reader with conflicted emotions. Peter Lovesey’s “The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown” reminds the reader that even the most well-intentioned of individuals can stumble into major trouble.

What Herbert and Hillerman and their contributing editors, Sue Grafton and Jeffery Deaver, found was that the rules have changed – big time! Character is king. The question could now be phrased, “Who is it?” instead of “Whodunit?” as writers probe the depths looking for clues of why an individual commits a crime.

Love is not only permitted, but in many quarters, expected. Hillerman’s Lt. Leaphorn, a widower, now has a girlfriend. Sgt. Chee and Bernie Manuelito appear to be inching toward the alter. Regional scenes and voices have become commonplace. The mystery or crime story has moved from Victorian England to any darned place the writer wants it to be. Hillerman’s Lt. Leaphorn in Shiprock, N.M., is just one example of the crime solver who could be living next door.

Born in 1925 in Sacred Heart, Okla., his early days were spent on a farm in the classic Dust Bowl-Depression setting. There was neither telephone nor electricity at home while he was growing up. “We didn’t know we were poor. Nobody else had any more than we did.” Asked what he remembers growing on the farm, Hillerman replied, “Alfalfa, peanuts, any damn thing we thought we could sell.” His neighbors were Potawatomie and Seminole Indians. He went to elementary school every day with young American Indians. It was only natural that they would become a major component of his fiction.

Joining the Army in 1943, he received for his service the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster and the Purple Heart. Those combat wounds have caught up with him and lately have limited his ability to travel. After his World War II service ended, he was making a delivery to a Navajo reservation as part of his truck driving job when he witnessed a Curing Ceremony for two Marines returning home. He was hooked on Navajo culture for all time.

Upon graduation from the University of Oklahoma in 1948 he became an “ink-stained wretch,” or newspaper reporter. He spent the next 14 years moving up the ladder, ending as editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Much of the time he spent writing court and political news, which would be the inspiration for some of his short stories.

In an indication of his sense of humor, Hillerman remembers writing a headline when the Mayflower Society held a convention in Santa Fe. “Immigrant Society Visits Santa Fe.” Easterners may need to be reminded that the history of the Southwest precedes considerably the founding of New England.

Hillerman enrolled in the master’s program at the University of New Mexico in 1965 and stayed on as a professor of journalism until 1987. In 1970 he published “The Blessing Way,” the first of the Navajo series.

In our interview, he admitted that he had never been in Maine. “We were going one year and got as far east as Vermont. We had to turn around and go back. I can’t remember why. Maybe we ran out of money.”

What if he wound up living and writing in the Pine Tree State? How would Maine culture be woven into a mystery? Hillerman says he would “play on the endless tensions and frictions because of cultural differences,” suggesting such themes are in play wherever one lives. “If I were a Canadian writer, I’d be thinking about the animosity between the RCMP and the local police.”

When questioned about what makes a good mystery, Hillerman, with a laugh, quoted Elmore Leonard. “Leave out the stuff the reader skips.” Becoming serious, he asked the writer’s question, “Who are you aiming at?” His advice is to write for two people; “yourself and an imaginary person who thinks the way you do.”

“When I write, there is the intention in mind to educate people. I am also aware that I am doing it to entertain people.” This theme is recurrent in our discussion. Through him millions of readers have been taught, painlessly, about the culture of the Navajos, among others, while being endlessly entertained by the exploits of Lt. Leaphorn, Sgt. Jim Chee and his fiancee, Bernie Manuelito.

Most of Hillerman’s novels are set in the stark beauty of the desert areas of Arizona and New Mexico. Anyone who has traveled the area and watched the rays of the falling sun reflected on the Sangre De Cristo mountains, will return again and again to his books, if only to be reminded.

Who does Hillerman return to? He answers without pause, “Joan Didion. She’s a spectacular example of how to write.”

Of his own books, Hillerman says “Finding Moon” (1995) is the one that is “closest to my heart, but not to those of the editor, publisher, and many of my fans.” “Finding Moon” is not about the Navajos, but an adventure novel, much of it set in the Philippines. He also admitted, true to the heart of a former ink-stained wretch, he received free airfare to the Philippines to do his research.

At the age of 80, Hillerman plans to continue his craft “till I can’t write anymore.” He has a new Leaphorn-Chee novel due out in May. He would like to write a collection of essays about his newspaper days and title it “Confessions of an Ink Stained Wretch.” In the next breath, he tells of a newspaper colleague who covered politics in a Southwestern state capital and claimed that in 11 years he never had to buy his own lunch. Hillerman, faithful to his roots, hopes the story is true.

Chuck Veeder can be reached at cveeder@surfbest.net.