Tag Archives: Montana writers

Mystery of the Purple Roses: hard-boiled, crime-solving newsman investigates murders

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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.

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Reunions remind us of time and place, also restore valued face-to-face contact

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Kevin S. Giles with high school classmates (and longtime friends) Eric and Don at the July 2019 all-class reunion in Deer Lodge, Montana.

By Kevin S. Giles

Long before social media became a convenient tool for organizing reunions (or displacing them), people traveled great distances to enjoy face-to-face gatherings with friends and relatives.

Today reunions endure. We have reunions to celebrate music, religion, employment, ethnic heritage, history, neighborhoods, cities and military service.

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Personal experience in reviving a dying child, and thoughts on lifesaving rescues

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CPR on a small child requires a lighter touch to avoid breaking ribs. This photo links to a site that explains the procedure in detail.

By Kevin S. Giles

Commotion from a crooning bear named Billy Bob and his band’s clashing symbols hid the first cries of distress. I didn’t expect to encounter a dying toddler at ShowBiz Pizza.

I had gone there with my family for lunch. We were somewhere in Kansas City several years ago.

As the girls watched Billy Bob and his cacophonous crew in the back room, I went to the men’s room. I heard wailing. It was high-pitched and mournful.

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Once upon a time somewhere on a Montana highway, eastbound

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On the road, you never know what’s over the next hill. Photo by Kevin S. Giles

By Kevin S. Giles

Only room left in town.

Door won’t latch, casing splintered, footprint on the door.

Ashtray overflowing beneath no smoking sign.

Motel promises local channel. Nothing but gray fuzz.

I go outside. Kitchen chair by the door is the old metal kind with chrome legs and padded seat. Suspiciously resembles furniture at the diner down the road. Had a burger there, two pickles and an onion slice. Ketchup if you ask. Not bad, considering.

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Most everyone has a hometown. Mine is Deer Lodge, Montana, still fresh in my mind

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Photo shows Deer Lodge, Montana

Deer Lodge once was a two-stoplight town. It’s a quieter, less-populated place now. The town lost 1,000 residents after the railroad pulled out. This view looks south toward the old prison, towers visible in the distance.

By Kevin S. Giles

I have memories of my father building a contraption that sprinkled used motor oil on the gravel road beside our house. He hitched it to his 1953 Chevy pickup, driving it back and forth to keep the dust down. Neighbors who wanted to help with this endeavor, which included everyone living in the four houses at the intersection of College Avenue and Claggett Street, stood on the

Photo shows digging basement

This photo from 1965 shows a conveyer belt hauling earth out of our expanding basement at the corner of College Avenue and Claggett Street in Deer Lodge.

contraption as it bounced along, turning faucet handles that released the oil. It seems gravity created the flow. Possibly it was something more ingenious than that, such as a pump, but time has blurred the details. Dad was blue collar to the core. His first love, I think, was tinkering with machinery. When he wasn’t working inside the walls of Montana State Prison, he was running machines in the detached garage behind our house. He rebuilt motors. He also owned at least a dozen machines for sharpening saws and blades. Often, he kept several running at once, a cacophony of grinding and screeching. Even today, I hear those ear-wrenching sounds.

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Hitting the open road in California in 1971. Rolling down Highway 1 on a hippie bus.

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By Kevin S. Giles

Oranges rolling down the aisle. That’s what I remember about that bus. Bright oranges as big as softballs tumbling from a yawning-open drawer in a rattling dresser.

Roy and I gripped an array of battered furniture as the old school bus shook and swerved. The hippie chick stayed with her man up front as he drove toward Los Angeles. They were nice enough folks, completely trusting, as they welcomed two hitchhikers aboard. “Hey man,” the driver greeted us. We were young. He looked hardly older. As the man grinded the bus into gear, the girl guided us through a doorway of dangling beads into their apparent living quarters. Tapestries ballooned from the ceiling and music posters blocked light from the windows.

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My brush with a five-star World War II general came in Montana, underground.

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By Kevin S. Giles

I was a young newspaper reporter in Helena, Montana, when a friend’s father tipped me off that the nation’s last living five-star general was seeking relief for his arthritic knees in a nearby radon mine.

I knew enough about World War II history to understand that Omar Bradley was a big deal. He was the “soldiers’ general,” a leader known for his compassion toward his troops. In 1945 he led four armies into the heart of Germany, destroyed the remnants of Hitler’s war machine, and declared: ”This time we shall leave the German people with no illusions about who won the war and no legends about who lost the war. They will know that the brutal Nazi creed they adopted has led them ingloriously to total defeat.”

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We can’t go home again to Montana? Look again at those majestic mountains

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Photo shows Glacier National Park

Unspoken beauty: This is how St. Mary’s Lake, in Glacier National Park, looks from the air. Pilot David R. Hunt, a Deer Lodge native, took this photo.

By Kevin S. Giles

From my aisle seat aboard the sardine can of an airplane, I manage a glimpse through the window before the sleepy woman in front of me, blinded in a purple sleep mask, fumbles the shade down to block any evidence of the outside world. Imagine flying over some of the best mountains on earth and she doesn’t want to look.

Mountains look small from several miles up. We see them blotched over the landscape like paint globs on a canvas, snow gracing their highest peaks. We see their beginnings and endings and the context of their existence in the wide and wild place we know as Montana.

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It’s always a bit unsettling returning to my native state. The mountains point the way to a long-ago place, a yearning deep in the spirit. Random glimpses through tiny plane windows show me little of what I already know is down there. Those mountains are intensely familiar to me but a sudden turnabout from the crowds and traffic noise that surround me in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, now approaching 4 million residents. It takes time to hear Montana’s wind-born silence. Montanans know what I mean.

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Rough and rumble on a hot August night in 1958 in Deer Lodge, Montana

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Photo shows Deer Lodge, Montana

In the 1950s, Main Street in Deer Lodge was a happening place with not one — but two — stop lights. Teenagers found the long wide street, also known as State Hwy. 10, great for cruisin’ (and sometimes looking for a bruisin’).

By Suzanne Lintz Ives

The gangs in my high school time were from Anaconda. Hairy girls tucked cigarettes packs into their rolled-up T-shirt sleeves. They were tougher and meaner than bear. They were really scary.

One Sunday afternoon, a couple of those wild females ones from Anaconish (as we sometimes called the neighboring town of ruffians), were quietly strolling Main Street in Deer Lodge. My gang and I (five of us) were cruising the drag in my Dad’s Pontiac (the one with the clutch), when my buddy, Dood, yelled out the window, “Hey, look at that! Street walkers!”

That’s when the brown, sticky stuff hit the centrifuge …

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Makings of a writer (as an adventuresome boy) in western Montana

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Photo shows Author Kevin S. Giles as Boy Scout

In May 1964, I left at 6 a.m. to attend a Boy Scout campout at Dillon, Montana, according to my mother’s notes on the back of the photo. I was suitably prepared with my dad’s sleeping bag.

By Kevin S. Giles

I often wonder why I didn’t write more as a boy, or if I did, where it all went. My father, forever inclined to purge the attic of anything resembling sentimentality, might have pitched whatever I wrote. Or, maybe, I hardly wrote at all?

Writing seemed painful then. I realize now that was my first lesson about this craft of putting words to innermost thoughts.

In 1965 – the year that my novel Summer of the Black Chevy takes place – owning a personal computer seemed as far-fetched as landing on the moon. My mother had a black Royal typewriter with big round keys that clunked when pushed. Until I was a high school junior I didn’t know how to type anyway, and writing on tablets echoed homework, so I kept stories in my head and went to hang out with friends.

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