Who, What, Why, When and Howe

Clark Secrest doesn’t write antiquarian books, but he does write about antiquarian times, and to do so, he’s had to turn to…antiquarian books and documents. So it makes sense for the former Denver Post police-beat reporter and editor — now the author of a book on Denver’s shadier days and editor of the Colorado Historical Society’s Colorado Heritage magazine — to speak at this weekend’s Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Book Fair, where he’ll join other Colorado-history authors in a panel discussion on how they research their factual tomes.

Secrest’s own 1994 tour de force, Hell’s Belles: Denver’s Brides of the Multitudes, is a special case, one in which the detective work went all the way back to the source: Denver police detective Sam Howe, who served on the city’s inaugural force in 1874 and remained a cop until retiring in 1920 at the age of eighty. Though Secrest says Howe was one of the longest-serving policemen in the nation, his main claim to fame was his meticulous scrapbooks detailing Denver’s crime history — volumes now housed at the historical society.

“The scrapbooks are huge,” Secrest says. “They go two stacks all the way to the ceiling here.” And what makes them so unique? “In the late 1800s, there was no good method of keeping police and crime records,” he notes. “Howe discovered the most efficient way to keep records was to clip newspapers. Denver had five daily papers then, and that’s what he did every day for forty years.”

It all fits into Secrest’s theory that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction, and that’s what he plans to emphasize at the fair. “I’m not a novelist, and I don’t know anything about writing fiction,” he says. “But some of the history I’ve read surpasses anything a novelist could dream up.”