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.

Search begins for the killer

Readers and viewers rarely tire of mysteries, a genre of fiction that almost always involves clandestine murder. It’s the solving of the case — accompanying the novel’s protagonist on a quest to figure out the culprit — that keeps us turning the pages. Plots, circumstances and locations vary, but the central theme is almost always the same. Crime committed. Search begins.

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

My novel, Mystery of the Purple Roses, is my first attempt at writing in the genre. Maybe I pulled it off. Maybe I missed it by a mile. I’m not worried. Readers will decide. Mystery novels take on many flavors. I’ve never discerned how a writer can go wrong with a mystery novel — unless, of course, there’s no mystery to it.

As a reporter for a metro newspaper, I covered murders and trials in true life, witnessing the awkward consequences that come of violent struggles. Bad things happen to real people. Reasons for crimes differ, just like in fiction, but in the end everybody suffers. Suffering is the one predictable outcome.

At least half the murder suspects I observed in the courtroom didn’t fit the public perception of a tough malicious bully. Some were small and introverted. Others, suddenly sobered before judge and jury, asked for forgiveness from the victim’s family. A few, yes, denied their guilt (and defied justice) even when overwhelming evidence left no doubt. In most cases, drugs and alcohol greased a will to kill, as did poor judgment and unstable thinking.

Detective work isn’t for faint-hearted

I came to appreciate the relentless detective work that went into solving real-life murders and other capital crimes such as kidnapping and first-degree rape. It’s grisly work rife with unpleasant discoveries. In the old days, black and white crime scene photographs shown to juries weren’t viewable from the gallery.

Nowadays, courtrooms have large TV monitors that show murder scenes and autopsy photographs in color to everyone present. It’s common practice for victim-witness advocates to lead a victim’s family out of the courtroom before the judge permits testimony that involves showing those images. Families can stay if they wish, but most don’t, seeking to avoid catching a glimpse of their deceased loved one and hearing a prosecutor’s graphic interpretations of a medical examiner’s findings.

Buy! Mystery of the Purple Roses

It was my newspaper experience that led me to choose a newsman, the fictional Red Maguire, as the protagonist in Mystery of the Purple Roses. Why not allow this loveless chronicler of crime some freedom to help the cops corral a killer?

Remember Perry Mason?

I read once that newspaper reporters as crime-solving heroes was an idea that never caught on with TV viewers. My novel takes place in 1954 when the TV drama Dragnet, starring two stoic “just the facts, ma’am,” detectives, defined an era of cop shows. Later that decade came the popular Perry Mason, the lawyer-courtroom series that even 60 years later continues showing in reruns.

But who says a novel can’t feature a news reporter? I recently finished reading Montana, the first novel by Gwen Florio in the Lola Wicks Mystery Series. In this contemporary mystery, Lola is a hard-nosed reporter who covered the war in Afghanistan. She puts her journalism experiences to use investigating a friend’s murder in northwestern Montana. Lola, by training and experience, sees wrongdoing when other people don’t.

Introducing Red Maguire

And so, I invented Red Maguire, a strapping Irishman who knows the desperate secrets and dark alleys of Butte, Montana, the fabled city of a million stories. He’s not invincible. He makes mistakes. Through his reporting he accumulated a head full of knowledge about how criminals work the streets. Police rely on him to help solve their toughest cases.

Imagine crime investigations in 1954. No video. No helpful citizens recording on their mobile phones. No computers, therefore, no online databases. No social media. No email, no voice mail, no caller ID. Cops and reporters alike gathered information the old-fashioned “shoe leather” way. People depended on newspapers, mostly, to read details about heinous crimes.

Prowling those mean streets

In my novel, Red Maguire won’t let them down.

Imagine him, dressed in a dark suit and his familiar fedora, prowling the mean streets in search of crime stories.

Welcome to the mysteries, Red.

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.