Hell's Belles, Revised Edition
392 pages, 8 1/2 x 10 7/10
Paperback
Release Date:15 Feb 2002
ISBN:9780870816338
Hell's Belles, Revised Edition
Prostitution, Vice, and Crime in Early Denver, With a Biography of Sam Howe, Frontier Lawman
University Press of Colorado
This updated and revised edition of Hell's Belles takes the reader on a soundly researched, well-documented, and amusing journey back to the early days of Denver. Clark Secrest details the evolution of Denver's prostitution, the gambling, the drug addicts, and the corrupt politicians and police who, palms outstretched, allowed it all to happen. Also included in Hell's Belles is a biography of one of Denver's original police officers, Sam Howe, upon whose crime studies the book is based.
The popular veneer of Denver's present-day Market Street - its fancy bars, posh restaurants, and Coors Field - is stripped away to reveal the street's former incarnation: a mecca of loose morals entrenched in prostitution, liquor, and money. Hell's Belles examines the neglected topics of vice and crime in Denver and utilizes a unique and invaluable historic source - the scrapbooks of Detective Sam Howe.
...loaded with spicy information...engaging, lively and informative, highly professional but written for popular consumption.'
—Boulder Daily Camera
...the definitive work on prostitution in the West, not to mention one of the best-written, most enjoyable reads in Western history.'
— The Denver Post
Clark Secrest retired in 2001 as an editor with the Colorado Historical Society. There he researched and wrote numerous articles for the society's quarterly journal Colorado Heritage.
