Kieran “Red” Maguire is back at it in Masks, Mayhem and Murder.

The Butte, Montana, newspaper reporter, who solves crimes, captured national attention with his lurid coverage of a series of murders in the first novel, Mystery of the Purple Roses.

In the winter of 1954-55, Red uncovers a new scoop for the Butte Bugle.

Men wearing children’s Halloween masks demand ever-ballooning payoffs from honest business owners. Secrets behind the masks promise even more danger for the legendary mining city of Butte.

A labor union enters the picture

As the mystery unfolds, Red and his best source for crime news, police captain Harold “Duke” Ferndale, investigate a miners’ union led by a surly giant.

Author Kevin S. Giles outside the famous M&M bar and cigar store in Butte, Montana, two summers before it burned. Photo by Don Bob Sundberg.

In the new novel, Masks, Mayhem and Murder, Red encounters provocative women, gun-wielding assailants, confidential informants, and an underworld teeming with troublesome characters. Under Red’s byline, the Bugle prints it all, sending dozens of newsboys to street corners to shout the latest shocking headlines.

Says Red of his crime stories: “Suffering sells big in Butte.”

Author Kevin S. Giles says many of the same characters from the first Red Maguire novel continue in Masks, Mayhem and Murder, although the storyline is new.

masks, mayhem and murder

“Red continues reporting crimes in the newspaper and in doing so solves them,” Giles says. “He tends to get involved with women who distract him from his mission. Like anybody in real life, Red’s character becomes entangled in complications. He’s as close to a detective that a crime reporter can get without being a sworn police officer.”

BUY! Masks, Mayhem and Murder

Giles said he wrote the Red Maguire novels in the pulp fiction genre that was wildly popular in crime magazines a century ago. “Pulp fiction was all about hard-boiled detectives and nefarious killers, buttoned-up do-gooders and troublesome villains, two-timing blondes adorned in flashy jewelry, and confident men who chase after them. In my imagination, pulp fiction matches Butte’s personality. So I went with it. I sought to write a novel true to Butte, fashion a story from the shadows, walk in that legacy of grittiness.”

color and character, that’s butte

Substantial evidence remains in modern Butte of the city’s hell-roaring past, when underground mining ruled, when hundreds of saloons catered to thirsty miners coming off shift. Butte was a city of extremes, of high-class entertainment and low-class buffoonery and a whole lot of color and character in between. It was a quilt of ethnic neighborhoods.

Money poured out of the ground, much of it funneled into pockets of Anaconda Company bosses who wore suits, while legions of workers in bib overalls and slouch hats fought for better wages and safer conditions. The emergence of open-pit mining in the 1950s wiped out the Irish and Italian enclaves of Dublin Gulch and Meaderville and several other ethnic neighborhoods.

The widening Berkeley Pit also led to the demolition of Columbia Gardens, the amusement park where miners treated their families to unfamiliar leisure away from gallows frames (also known as “gallus”) and torn earth.

Masks, mayhem and murder. and, deceptions!

Over the past 60 years, fires destroyed many of Butte’s marvelous signature buildings. A final burst of moral indignation prompted demolition of all but one of the city’s “parlor houses” in the fabled Mercury Street red-light district. Now, only the Dumas remains.

Giles says: “Our hero Maguire writes salacious stories about crimes, mostly murders. He’s an amateur sleuth whose byline is widely known in Butte. In Mystery of the Purple Roses, he becomes embroiled in the hunt for a killer who leaves an odd calling card. In Masks, Mayhem and Murder, he follows a twisting road of deceptions. When murder calls, Red Maguire goes to work.”

Both novels can be ordered through local bookstores, through his publisher BookLocker.com, and through online bookstores such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.