Write, revise, rewrite. On it goes as a writer strives to improve the story. Photo by Kevin S. Giles of personal ‘Purple Roses’ manuscript.

Kevin S. Giles, why did you decide to write a mystery novel?

My first inspiration came from The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, a monstrous compilation of magazine stories from the heyday of gritty detective stories. When my wife gave me the book I promised I would read all of the 1,100 pages before my death, presuming it didn’t come early. These “pulp” stories, named after cheap paper used to print them, appeared in popular crime magazines in the 1920s and 1930s and in “dime novels” that found wide audiences.

Pulp heavyweights such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner spun stories of hard-boiled detectives who solved crimes — usually the hard way. I didn’t know much about pulp fiction until I began reading this big book. Soon I understood why people bought these stories. The characters got right to business, good or bad.

This city defines ‘grit’

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.

My second inspiration came from a visit to Butte, Montana. Anyone paying attention will hear ghostly voices in that rowdy mining city of torn earth. The past speaks. Butte is pulp personified. Talk about grit. It’s in the air, on the streets, in the bars, in the remains of immigrant neighborhoods swallowed by the shovel. You know what I mean about grit? Stories of people without pretense, people who throw their shoulders into labor at any cost. They live by a code that’s neither polished nor presumed. It’s rough living, reactive, tribal, instinctive.

We visited longtime friends in Butte. Don is a machinist. I’ve known him since the summer before we started high school. I was best man when he married Buggs. During this most recent visit he and I went uptown to the famous M & M bar to down a few cold ones. Brewed locally, of course. We got to talking about Butte’s past. I had this insatiable desire to imagine people on the streets, 60, 70 years ago, when the underground mines were operating. Imagination is a wonderful thing.

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And then you wrote Mystery of the Purple Roses?

Soon as I got home to my laptop. Writers can’t sit on stories or they’re not writers. We express ourselves through the written word. I felt the story coming. It came to me and I wrote it. The novel is an expression of my creative urges at that time. People commonly ask writers how they choose a topic for a novel. We live in a world of impressions. A writer becomes enamored with an idea and doesn’t let it go. Then comes the hard part.

I recently read Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King, father and son. At the end they talk about why they wrote it. Owen came up with the idea. Stephen told him to write it. Owen asked if they could do it together. They worked that idea between them for months. They could have written anything else. Any novel of any topic. Instead they started with this single idea and developed it into a whopping thick novel with about three dozen characters. Whether writing big or little, writers who put pen to paper, so to speak, let their minds wander.

How long did it take you to write Mystery of the Purple Roses?

I finished the first draft in three months. Subsequent revisions took longer. I made a rookie mistake of writing from a vision in my head instead of first drafting a story outline. As a result I spent too much time correcting repetitions, timeline disagreements and conflicting names. A strong outline would have kept me on track. I also repaired portions of the original manuscript that took off at right angles from the story line. The lesson here for any writer is this: map out your plot in advance to avoid wasted effort. My other challenge was that I deliberately wrote short, adhering too strictly to the no-frills pulp style I’ve come to admire. I fleshed out my first draft of 38,000 words to a more worldly 70,000.

It wasn’t that I wanted to write longer. I wanted to tell the story better.

What’s the secret to becoming a published author?

First, become a writer. Write. Revise. Write some more. Don’t shoot for the moon. The Great American Novel can wait. Learn to tell a story. Second, harness life experiences. Most writers draw on what they know. Their plots contain inflections from upbringing, jobs, friends, travel, you name it. I think possibly the saddest mistaken assumption among wannabe writers is that they need a pedigree or that real writers are somehow born into the craft. None of us should compare ourselves with the superstars of the literary world. Forget the big shots. Just write.

When did you decide to become a writer?

When I joined the staff of my high school paper eons ago. The craft of journalism, reporting the news, requires writing skills. News writing is much more regimented, a far different style, than creative writing. I doubt I understood that when I was a high school sophomore. Subsequently I spent a career reporting and editing for newspapers. I met some gifted newspaper writers over that time. It wasn’t easy to break stellar writing into the news columns.

Journalism is a fact-based craft that requires accuracy, balance and immediacy. Getting the news out quickly and comprehensively is the priority. Particularly at metro papers, two or three editors in succession work over a single story, all of them striving to “sharpen” the top several paragraphs by compressing every thread of news into available space. Journalism serves better for nonfiction writing than for writing novels. Fiction writing, to me, means practice and experimentation. I work on breathing more expression into my writing, more imagination, more risk.

I recall a conversation I had once with Montana author A.B. “Bud” Guthrie, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction writing with his historical novel, The Big Sky. “If you want to succeed as a novelist, get out of newspapers before they ruin you,” he told me. Bud ought to know. He was managing editor of a Kentucky paper before he wrote The Big Sky. Fiction writers have few limitations. The tradeoff is that while journalism brings a framework for writing, the fiction writer invents a story from scratch. That’s no small order.

Did journalism make positive contributions to your fiction writing?

Journalism might be the best craft to understand human nature. I wrote thousands of stories over my career on thousands of topics. Journalists must sufficiently understand complex circumstances to report the news accurately. So I learned that way, but I also learned by witnessing people as different from each other as senators, cops, taxi drivers, actors and grieving families in their newsmaking time and place.

Like I said earlier, writing is giving expression to life’s experiences. It’s not only what we personally experience but what we see around us. Take note of everything from conversations around you to writing on bathroom walls. You never know when you recall an observation, a phrase, an incident that suddenly becomes useful in a story.

What are your expectations for Mystery of the Purple Roses?

That I earn a million dollars off royalties and become famous like Stephen King? Well, no. I feel fulfilled at having written my first mystery novel. I stuck with it through publication. That was my first expectation — to stick to my vision. My second expectation is finding more readers. Some will like the novel, some won’t. I’ve arrived at that place in my writing life where I want wider readership more than acceptance. My third expectation is that writing Mystery of the Purple Roses makes me better at crafting future novels. That’s writing in a capsule. Write and get better at it.

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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.