Distinctly Montana Magazine

57 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m become dangerous to your mental health in that way." He captured these realities in his second novel, Big Sky Blues. The job's emotional hazards are more adversari- al to the cop characters than the story's violent perpetrator, a be- draggled vagrant named George Rather. It's the first of Reid's novels to take place in fictional Rozette, Montana, with similarities to Missoula, when the mills and wood stoves caused smog and the Oxford still served brains and eggs. Secondary characters you feel you have encountered in Missoula populate Rozette. Take, for example, Pastor Roscoe Beckett, who is not a pastor. In a Harley-Davidson tank top with a bushy beard and ponytail, addressing anyone he talks to as "Jim," Roscoe's the kind of guy you meet at Charlie B.'s before noon, at the counter of a fusty downtown junk store, or fronting the Friday night band at the bowling alley. Unlike his characters, Reid doesn't curse much. He laughs as he re- counts a time he went back to Illinois. He attended church with his family. The minister introduced Reid to the congregation. The min- ister said he hadn't read any of his books, but understood the language was pretty bad. Author James Crumley blurbed Big Sky Blues as per- haps the finest police novel he had ever read. "Bob Reid is a wonderful writer—he's got a real gift for language balanced by a deep sense of humanity," Crumley told the Mis- soula Independent in 1994. "And he's a great guy. He's the kind of cop you'd like to have around if your family were in trouble." Despite living in two different worlds and not socializing much, Missoula's literary wild man, Crumley, and Reid became friends. Unlike Reid, Crumley liked the limelight. For Reid, publication proved an artistic victory, but he found it "conspicuous." At first, other officers kept him at arm's length for fear they would wind up in a book. They learned, however, that Reid is loath to incorporate people he knows or cases he has worked into his writing. He does not believe the homicides he has in- vestigated, for example, are his stories to tell. "I was involved

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