The dark, pessimistic streets of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. The shady cop hangouts of William P. McGivern’s Philadelphia. The sultry heat of James Lee Burke’s New Orleans. And, of course, those sandstone and juniper-lined vistas of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Nation.

Now, I couldn’t tell you who killed who in Chandler’s The High Window, what went wrong in the heist in McGivern’s Odds Against Tomorrow, who Dave Robicheaux wound up busting in Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, or what clue tipped off Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee in Hillerman’s A Thief of Time. What kept me reading, and what has keep me coming back to writers like Chandler, McGivern, Burke and, especially, Hillerman is how their prose sweeps me away from wherever I am, and how they treat land as a powerful and complex character, and how that land has shaped and shifted their detective heroes.

Hillerman’s West was vast, but ever changing, bringing new challenges his Navajo Tribal police officers must face.

When I set out to write Killstraight, I couldn’t escape Hillerman’s influence. Well, I didn’t really try. Instead of setting my novels in the contemporary West, however, I opted for the 1880s, a time of constant change for Comanche Indians living on a reservation in what today is southwestern Oklahoma.

Once rulers of an empire that stretched across the Southern Plains, the Comanches had been forced to surrender to white authority in 1875. By the 1880s, many young Comanches -- indeed Indians from several tribes -- were being shipped off to Indian boarding schools. My hero, Daniel Killstraight, returns after seven years back east learning to travel “the white man’s road,” takes a job as an Indian policeman and reluctantly sets out to prove that an Indian friend of his was wrongly executed for a double murder. He returns home unsure of his identity to a reservation full of corruption and a people struggling to adapt, to cope.

What held them together was the land.

There’s a story a Comanche friend told me about how Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains were formed, which I use in Killstraight.

“There were just plains out there,” he told me. “Women and old people were camped there, with a couple of scouts left to watch the perimeter after the men left to go hunting. A scout came in and told them the Pawnee were coming, too many of them to fight, so the people began packing up camp, trying to get going. But an old medicine woman got some rocks in her hands, prayed and prayed and prayed. She told the others to go on, and they left her, and she planted those rocks and covered them up, then left. When she caught up with her people, they told her they had to hurry, but she said, no, and they turned around. There they were, the Wichita Mountains. She told them, ‘That will hold off the Pawnee till our warriors come back.’”

Certainly, Oklahoma isn’t as scenic as Hillerman’s Navajo country of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, but there’s a lot of character, and a lot of stories to be told, in that country.

What other characters are synonymous with their surroundings?

Editor's Note: Johnny D. Boggs is the author of Killstraight. He's been hailed as "among the best western writers at work today."