By Kevin S. Giles

Destruction haunts this Montana city.

It’s estimated that fully a third of Butte’s majestic buildings fell to flame or the wrecking ball since the demise of underground mining.

The end didn’t come all at once.

One mine after another went silent after the Anaconda Company began excavating its first open pit in the 1950s. Several closed even earlier as the cost of mining underground exceeded profits.

The Company tore down entire neighborhoods and buried others. The first “million-dollar fire” destroyed the renovated Butte Hotel on Broadway Street and several businesses to the east. (Fire departments saved the iconic Hirbour Block at Broadway and Main.) The Montana Standard described the smoking Broadway Street hotel, once known as Liberty Hall, as “one of the most historic hostelries in the West.”

I thought of Butte’s fires as I considered various plots for my third Red Maguire mystery novel. The previous two stories take place in Butte. I built the first one (Mystery of the Purple Roses) around a series of unsolved murders. In the second novel (Masks, Mayhem and Murder), I tied the central plot to labor corruption.

A city of pain and passion

All of these dastardly scenarios — fire, murder and labor violence — go with Butte as predictably as Irish stew and the Cornish Jack pasty.

Writers have no difficulty uncovering conflict in Butte. Disasters stain the pages of Mining City history. Fires plagued Butte as much as mine disasters.

I saw how easily I could put Maguire to work investigating that first million-dollar fire. He’s a crime reporter at the fictional Butte Bugle newspaper. Like any effective journalist, Red approaches every story with skepticism. He recognizes BS when he hears it. He knows there’s more, much more, that nobody’s telling.

Red investigates the hotel fire (I call the place the Liberty Hotel in my novel). As I say on the book’s back cover, Red “risks his life to pry into well-kept secrets.”

Yes, I dreamed up Red Maguire, but he’s hardly a stranger to Butte. Had he been a real person, he would have belonged. Comfortably, I think.

Drawing on my experience

Writing Red’s newsgathering instincts came naturally. I worked at six newspapers as an editor and reporter. I covered many serious crimes over the years and saw firsthand the hurt. I’m not Red, but he’s a projection of how I view a rough-and-tumble crime reporter in Butte during the 1950s.

My novel takes Red in circles. Like any investigator, he runs into bluffs and blind walls. He endures death threats and encounters gunshots in the night.

Here’s the beauty of writing a novel that takes place in Butte: even fiction rings true. Meaning, it’s hard to conjure any wild story from the imagination that hadn’t already happened in some fashion in this hell-roaring city. Butte natives know what I’m talking about. The city made its reputation on tragic loss, brutal violence and outlandish characters. It’s known for scandal and sorrow and bloodied faces.

I lived in Butte for a while and know as well as anybody how there’s more to the story in that town. Any story. Secrets lurk in every dark alley. They hide behind every tall façade, every deep mine, every memory yet uncovered, every fire unsolved.

Then it came to me

So, I wrote my novel around the factual occurrence of the Butte Hotel fire. The fire was real. The story I attached to it is fiction. I imagined Red writing furiously in the city room of the Butte Bugle after a day of news gathering. He would solve Butte’s great fire mystery. And the title became clear:

Headline: FIRE!

The title nods to the plot I engineered, yes, but also to Butte’s ongoing fire history. The biggest fires happened in the decades after the Butte Hotel fire. Among them were the Beaver Block at Granite and Main in 1968; J.C. Penney’s Department Store at Park and Dakota in 1972; the Owsley Block (Medical Arts Center) at Park and Main in 1973, and the Silver Bow Block and Intermountain Building (housing the Butte Daily Post) on Granite Street in 1978.

‘Lost Butte Montana’

These details come from Richard J. Gibson’s splendid book, Lost Butte Montana. He writes authoritatively about fires and what he terms the city’s “era of destruction.” His impeccable research includes the torching of Columbia Gardens, Butte’s cherished recreational playground.

Gibson published his book before fire destroyed the M & M bar and cigar store, possibly uptown Butte’s best-known landmark. I mention the M & M in my novels. It’s the favored drinking hole for Maguire and his buddy at the police department, Captain Harold “Duke” Ferndale.

So! Does Red Maguire get to the bottom of the big fire at the Butte Hotel?

Readers, you tell me.

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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.