Mystery of the Purple Roses: hard-boiled, crime-solving newsman investigates murders

Photo shows mystery novel

Introducing Red Maguire, crime-solving ace newspaper reporter.

Buy! Mystery of the Purple Roses

By Kevin S. Giles

Clouds over the mountains felt close and heavy. Rain streamed off the windows. What a dreary day for a man to die but die he must. The revolver was loaded with six bullets. Five weren’t needed. The killer set aside the gun and caressed the photograph. Sorrow, what a regrettable thing.

That’s how I begin my first mystery novel. True to my Montana roots, I set the story in Butte, the mining city that once had hundreds of underground mines.

The protagonist of Mystery of the Purple Roses is a crime reporter at a fictional newspaper, the Butte Bugle, in 1954. The same leading character, Red Maguire, appears in my second novel as well. Once I publish my first novel I will set to revising and publishing the second. Should I stop there? I think I’ll write a trilogy.

A Montana city of hell-roaring past

There’s a grittiness about Butte you can’t find anywhere else in Montana.

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Boyhood memories of my Montana hometown library, a place of imagination

Postcard shows Montana library

An early postcard shows the Kohrs Memorial Library in Deer Lodge, Montana. An addition was built in recent years to accommodate the broadening of services.

By Kevin S. Giles

When I was a boy in western Montana I discovered the wonders of our local library. Granite steps led upward between a pair of sleek double pillars to heavy glass-and-brass doors. Behind those doors awaited a place of enforced quiet where the stern librarian tolerated only occasional whispers and the ticking of an ancient clock. There was a reverence about the place. To a book lover, ascending into that magnificent entrance felt like swinging open the gates of heaven. Or so I speculated, having no practical experience with the afterlife beyond the lessons at Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church.

Fines and admonitions

Books, all of the hardcover variety, filled rows of shelves in our town library. I came to appreciate how the struggle to learn the Dewey Decimal system in the public schools up the street had its merits.

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Welcome to the mysteries, crime reporter Red Maguire. Now go solve murders!

By Kevin S. Giles

I’ve read mysteries where the whodunit is truly glaring from early in the story, but I didn’t want to believe it was true.

I’ve read other mysteries that deceived me into thinking I had figured out the killer when the ending revealed it was somebody else.

And then those others, where the unfolding of the story is more of the reader reward than the surprise ending.

Good mystery fiction mirrors real life. We humans are capable of entangling ourselves in countless predicaments. Headlines prove that every day.

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Tell it like it is? Life experiences, all of them, make fodder for good novels

By Kevin S. Giles

Did you know most of you are writers? Potentially writers, at least?

(And no, I’m not your long-ago English teacher coming to haunt you, so relax.)

Writing doesn’t require any qualifications, certifications, degrees or pedigrees.

But life experience? Yes.

Who doesn’t have life experience? It’s the cornerstone of all writing. For purposes of example, let me take you back to English class (painful as this journey might be) for just a moment.

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It’s ghostly in Butte America. Listen close, for its heyday is only a good story away

By Kevin S. Giles

Three boyhood memories about Butte, Montana. Stay with me.

First, the uptown shopping district. Its crowded sidewalks and tall buildings impressed me as a big city. The first escalator I rode (and probably saw) was in Hennessy’s, the department store at Main and Granite. A later rash of fires left gaping holes in uptown. I’m thankful for remembering the district when it was more complete.

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‘Walking the wall’ meant seeing Montana’s prison from a tower guard’s point of view

Photo shows state troopers at Montana State Prison

My dad, Murry Giles, is shown kneeling and steadying the ladder outside Tower 7 the night of April 16, 1959. Armed state troopers climbed atop the wall to discourage inmates from attempting to break out. Tower 7, known also as “the main gate,” had fortified doors at street level that led into the prison. New prisoners walked through those doors to a life in the bars. Photo/Old Montana Prison

By Kevin S. Giles

Do high places bother you? Would you walk on a narrow wall 22 feet above the sidewalk? A wall lacking a railing?

When I read my father’s Montana State Prison hiring papers from 1958, after he applied for a guard job, handwriting near the bottom caught my eye. “Walked the wall OK,” someone wrote.

BUY! Jerry's Riot

I didn’t fully grasp the significance of that notation until I began researching for my book, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, years later. The prison required applicants to “walk the wall” because tower guards rotated after an hour or two. Whether performing this feat was seen by administrators as a practical skill or a test of courage, I don’t know. The date on my dad’s application shows he walked the wall in winter. How did he avoid falling?

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What I learned after being reprimanded that I couldn’t ‘write the Queen’s English’

By Kevin S. Giles

I was a young reporter beginning my first full-time newspaper job when a snarling copy editor informed me one night, “You can’t even write the Queen’s English.”

He wasn’t wrong. Let me explain.

This frank assessment of my writing skills took place overseas at a metro paper in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I was 21 years old. The newsroom at the Courier-Mail felt foreign to me in many respects as I struggled to learn colloquialisms and the stiff manner of England-influenced news writing.

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Places in the heart: Memories zip us back to hometowns we knew and loved

Photo shows Deer Lodge, Montana, in 1918.

An apparent Fourth of July celebration, possibly during World War I, shows Main Street in Deer Lodge, Montana. Today the buildings look much the same but the globed light posts disappeared years ago and the fountain was moved to the courthouse lawn. Photo from Model T Forum.

By Kevin S. Giles

Hometowns fascinate me.

It appears I’m not alone. I see a proliferation of “I Grew Up In (Name Your Hometown)” social groups on Facebook, the preferred social media for nostalgia-inclined adults. I have my hometown and I’m sure you have yours. Get involved. Let it all out. Make some true confessions. What’s the point of living if you can’t admit that you, and some fine senior classmates, toilet-papered your English teacher’s house on Halloween?

I’m speaking for a friend, of course.

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Fate (her title): My teenage granddaughter reflects on her cancer journey

The Background …

(A leukemia diagnosis the summer before Kimberly’s sophomore year in high school led to a series of aggressive medical treatments. She participated in an experimental CAR T-cell trial at Stanford University in California that achieved partial success. Eventually she received a bone marrow transplant in Denver in 2018. She spent 70 consecutive days in the hospital to recover. Subsequent tests showed no evidence of cancer cells. Kimberly graduated from her Montana high school in early June. She now studies at the university toward her goal of becoming a nurse. She wrote the following poem for her high school English class. Kimberly is our granddaughter, our oldest daughter’s daughter, the third oldest of seven grandkids.— Kevin S. Giles)

Cancer survivor Kimberly Peacock

From Kimberly: “These beads, called ‘Beads of Courage,’ are a physical representation of my journey as a cancer patient and a bone marrow transplant recipient. Each bead stands for a different procedure, occurrence, or action while I went through treatment and recovery. For example, black beads represent needle pokes, red beads represent blood transfusions, and yellow beads represent overnight hospital stays. There are hundreds of beads on this string. It stretches over 20 feet long.”

 

By Kimberly Peacock

1.
time holds no significance
surrounded by people
you are dying
falling
flying through clouds of
oblivion
seeing is believing (1)
isn’t it?

2.
watch your life climb and fall
anxiously fragile
jolting awake at every bump (2)
there’s a snake on your arm (3)
squeezing
resting
you are too warm
too cold
too late.

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And now, ‘Mystery of the Purple Roses,’ my tale of a killer’s curious calling card

Cover shows 'Mystery of the Purple Roses'

Red Maguire, newsman crime fighter, investigates a string of odd murders in Montana.

By Kevin S. Giles

¶ Attention readers: Mystery of the Purple Roses is now published in paperback ($16.95) and e-book ($2.99) versions.

Buy! Mystery of the Purple Roses

Murder is his job.

The veteran crime reporter at a fictional newspaper in Butte, Montana, writes about a series of murders that shake the Mining City in 1954. Kieran “Red” Maguire turns out story after story on his battered typewriter as the killer remains at large. In Mystery of the Purple Roses, Maguire becomes a sleuth, tracking evidence to its improbable conclusion.

Butte’s rough-and-tumble history provides an alluring setting for a murder mystery.

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