Roger Howell

Roger Lynn Howell was one of half a dozen kids raised in a somewhat migratory family, by a mostly single mom, and mostly in a dozen different houses in Boise. They lived in houses in Idaho Falls, Cobalt, Butte, La Push, and Baker, too. They lived in wall tents in Idaho City and Frenchtown, and in a Studebaker on the south bank of the Boise, in the willows below Barber Dam. Roger learned two things moving around so much. First, if you’re in arears on the rent it’s best to depart at 3:00 a.m., and then: if starting a new school part way through the year it’s best to say little and watch and listen a lot.

Things settled down by high school, and he attended Boise State University, U.C. Santa Barbara, Gonzaga University, and Clemson University, receiving degrees from three of the four. He has since spilled a couple million words onto paper, mostly in the form of technical memoranda, reports, and journal articles during an eventful career as a geologist and environmental engineer. Atypical preparation for a novelist, but he’s also lived and worked in every small town in the mountain west. He’s walked the roads and crossed the fences; he knows the people of the west—and the distances between them.

Also by Roger Lynn Howell:

• The Magpies’ Song, his second novel, is set in the modern-day northwest: a small, failing town much like that in McMurtry’s Last Picture Show. Everyone in Fort Quittence takes care of Carl, who barely survived “The Accident” that ended the town’s last good summer. After years of recovery he sweeps the streets and struggles with half-memories of sunrises, drugs, and bridges burned. When skeletal remains are found in a canyon, Carl becomes his own unwilling suspect. There was a girl, Lindsey, whose eyes were blue and whose perfect body was never found after the accident.

• Always Something Sings (coming in the summer of 2020) is also set in central Idaho, in the summer of 1951. Ada Reed agrees to fill in as acting sheriff of a rural county when her tough, lawman husband is recalled to duty in Korea. But a young girl’s murder and a soldier’s false confession catch her unprepared for the corrupt world she’s entered, yet unwilling to return to the submissive life she’s known. Ada must step clear of her husband’s shadow and of her own past to find she is, with a woman’s eye, awfully good at the job.