Tag Archives: Butte America

Mystery behind the mysteries: Simple plots, made exciting with sleight of hand

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Page shows text of 'Masks, Mayhem and Murder'

I wrote “Masks, Mayhem and Murder’ in the pulp fiction genre.

By Kevin S. Giles

The other night I watched the original Psycho movie. It features Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, a lonely forbidding motel that a new highway bypassed, and a beckoning second-story light shining from a creepy Halloween-style house.

And there’s producer and director Alfred Hitchcock, the brain behind the 1960 movie’s tense scenes.

I can’t recall watching Psycho all the way through when I was younger. Maybe I stopped at the shower scene.

clearing up the mystery

This time, I paid attention to how Hitchcock crafted the plot. He started with a crime, invented an escape, confused the viewer with some misdirection and, finally, brought a psychiatrist into the final scene to explain what had happened.

When I began writing mysteries a few years ago, I learned it was no easy take to mimic the masters. I learned something else, too.

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Sad stories: The fire-charred legacy of Butte, Montana’s legendary Mining City

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Medical Arts fire in Butte, Montana

One of Butte’s most sensational fires occurred on July 28, 1973, when the Medical Arts Building burned. Numerous businesses were lost. The prominent building previously was known as the Owsley Block. Photo permitted by The Montana Standard.

By Kevin S. Giles

Fire stories: Butte burned again and again in its first century, killing 359 people in nearly 500 fires.

In a city built too fast, sprawling as it was across Butte Hill’s broad face, fire departments couldn’t win the battle of the flames. Buildings of all descriptions pressed against one another. When one caught fire, others did too. Commonly, entire city blocks perished.

Sadly, the fires continue in Butte’s second century.

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

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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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A Montana writer’s view of Butte, Montana (better yet, it’s Butte America)

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Photo shows Butte, Montana

Uptown Butte in its heyday was a happening place, full of stores, bars, movie theaters and, as this photo shows, a shop that sold furs. Mining kept the crowds coming, although this looks like a quiet day, possibly a Sunday.

By Kevin S. Giles

It’s a temptation to build novels around Butte. Anyone who asks “Butte where?” hasn’t been listening.

Butte, Montana. Butte, America. Butte, for crying out loud.

Mile High City. Mile High, Mile Deep. The Mining City. Richest Hill on Earth. You know.

Once home to Italians, Serbs, Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Finns and a dozen other nationalities who converged on the city, way back, when the mines ran dark and deep and coughed out copper by the ton. Right?

Today Butte is a lesser place, shorn of many of those characters that made it one of the strangest, naughtiest, more daring cities in America. Back then, of course, when men mined tunnels a mile underground and died of accidents, fires and explosions or, later, the lung disease from the poisonous dust they inhaled. Back then.

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