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.
Red Maguire, news crime reporter, investigates a string of odd murders in Montana. ‘Mystery of the Purple Roses’ is the first novel in the Red Maguire series.
What remains today of the city hints of its hell-roaring city’s past, when underground mining ruled, when hundreds of saloons catered to thirsty customers coming off shift. Butte was a city of extremes, of high-class entertainment and low-class buffoonery and a whole lot of color and character in between. It was a quilt of ethnic neighborhoods. Money poured out of the ground, much of it funneled into pockets of Anaconda Company men who wore suits, while legions of workers in bib overalls fought for better wages and safer conditions. Open-pit mining wiped out the Irish and Italian enclaves of Dublin Gulch and Meaderville, and several others. It also led to the demolition of Columbia Gardens, the amusement park where miners treated their families. Fires destroyed many of Butte’s marvelous signature buildings. A final burst of moral indignation prompted demolition of all but one of the city’s “parlor houses” in the fabled Mercury Street red-light district.
Why I wrote ‘Mystery of the Purple Roses’
And yet — and yet — so much of old Butte remains. Add imagination to the buildings and history and we have, well, a novel:
Mystery of the Purple Roses, introducing Red Maguire.
I sought to write a novel true to Butte, fashion a story from the shadows, walk in that legacy of grittiness. The pulp fiction genre, wildly popular in magazines a century ago, influenced my writing. Pulp fiction was all about hard-boiled detectives and nefarious killers, buttoned-up do-gooders and troublesome villains, two-timing blondes adorned in flashy jewelry and confident men who chase after them. In my imagination, pulp fiction matches Butte’s personality. So, I went with it.
Our hero Maguire writes salacious stories about crimes, mostly murders, as the cops depend on him to break cases. He’s a sleuth whose byline is widely known in Butte. He can’t find a good woman to save his soul. In Mystery of the Purple Roses, he becomes embroiled in the hunt for a killer who leaves an odd calling card. When murder calls, Red Maguire goes to work.
Mining history attracts writers like me
I grew up in Deer Lodge, 39 miles from Butte. I also lived in uptown Butte for about a year. These aren’t suitable qualifications for considering myself a “Butte rat,” as I’ve heard some Butte-born residents describe themselves. (So does a video promoting my novel.) Nobody dares to define Butte better than people who spent their lives there. Still, I’ve observed plenty about the city from the time I was a boy until my latest visit last fall. The blue-collar history of the city appeals to my own upbringing as the son of a prison guard. That’s Butte’s great legacy and what makes the city attractive to writers like me.
Yes, I had learned much about Butte, but I hoped to learn more. Good writing is only as strong as good reporting. My second novel in the Red Maguire series deals with underground mining.
My longtime friend in Butte arranged an outing with veteran mining engineer Larry Hoffman who spent several hours answering questions and showing us around. In one instance he took us to the Steward Mine, which ceased operations in 1950. We inspected the hoist houses and the gallows frames that lifted eight tons of ore to the surface from the drifts and stopes far below. We stood in the “chippy hoist” that raised and lowered workers to the crosscuts where they mined ore. I won’t go into all of our technical conversations. Let’s say that seeing the legendary Steward up close, and hearing stories told of it, made my day.
Utter darkness, deep underground
We also visited an underground mine built for demonstration purposes. We wore hard hats with head lamps. By the 80-foot level, the temperature had dropped at least 40 degrees and leaking water had turned the tunnel floor into mud. Larry told us to turn off our head lamps to grasp the utter blackness of underground mining. Early miners worked by candlelight as they chipped away at rock walls.
Eighty feet below the surface felt deep. Imagine Butte miners entombed 2,000 or 4,000 feet below ground in dark, clammy, confining spaces. Think about the total isolation from the sunlit world. As they say, it wasn’t for the faint of heart.
So I contribute my own novel to the body of work invoking Butte.
I imagine someone, a librarian perhaps, can cite the exact number of Butte books written. I’ve read several of them in recent years, including Work Song by Ivan Doig (fiction), Montana’s Dimple Knees Sex Scandal by John Kuglin (nonfiction) and Butte Trivia by George Everett (facts). One of the best critically acclaimed accounts of Butte as a mining city appears in a 70-year-old book, High, Wide, and Handsome, by Joseph Kinsey Howard.
Now we have Mystery of the Purple Roses. Read on.
Buy! Mystery of the Purple Roses
Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.