The scribe of Cape Girardeau

When Morley Swingle was a boy, his father read "Treasure" Island" and "Tom Sawyer" to him. When Swingle was 9, Zane Grey's birthplace was one of the stops on a family vacation in the West. His father, a Missouri State Highway Patrol sergeant who enjoyed playing the piano when he came home from work, died suddenly that same year.

In high school Swingle kept reading, including every one of Louis L'Amour's books. In college he majored in English. "I wanted to be a writer long before I ever wanted to be a lawyer," Cape Girardeau County's prosecuting attorney said.

The Southeast Missouri State University Press has just published Swingle's third book, "Bootheel Man." He is working on three more simultaneously.

Swingle manages to be both lawyer and writer by writing on weekends when many other lawyers are playing golf. "That's what I do for fun," he said. On a good Saturday or Sunday he can produce 20 pages by noon. "It's hard on my church attendance," he conceded.

One week a year he takes a writing vacation in his soundproof basement study. It begins on Friday and concludes nine days later. He has written up to 180 pages during those vacations.

The original version of Swingle's first book, "The Gold of Cape Girardeau," weighed in at 1,600 pages. He'd been working on it since the 1980s. The publisher deemed the manuscript too lengthy and suggested that parts to be cut out might be the basis for other books. "The Gold of Cape Girardeau" was published in 2002 at 520 pages. Deleted chapters were about the Mound Builder culture in Cahokia, Ill., central to "Bootheel Man." Another excised section will be included in the third book in his Southeast Missouri trilogy. That one will employ Hernando De Soto's expedition through North America to tell another modern-day story involving Swingle's heroine, defense lawyer Allison Culbertson.

Following his books "The Gold of Cape Girardeau" and "Scoundrels to the Hoosegow: Perry Mason Moments and Entertaining Cases from the Files of a Prosecuting Attorney," "Bootheel Man" begins with a man named Joey Red Horse flying off the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge in Cape Girardeau. Before leaping into the Mississippi River he tosses in a 1,000-year-old effigy called Gazing Woman. To find out why, the book takes readers from Cape Girardeau in the present back to the Cahokia Mound site in 1050 A.D. Romance, courtroom drama and historical exposition ensue.

At the book's heart are the history and mystery of the Mound Builders, a story many who live here in the region of the Mound Builders know little of. Swingle belonged to that number before beginning his research, which took him to the Oklahoma home of the Osage Tribe. The Osage once fiercely controlled 100 million acres of land west of the Mississippi, south of the Missouri and north of the Arkansas rivers. He believes they are the descendants of the Mound Builders.

At the settlement's zenith in the 13th century, the population of Cahokia rivaled London's. Up to 30,000 people lived in a city with buildings up to 10 stories high. They raised huge corn crops and traded with other settlements up and down the Mississippi River. As evolved as they were, Swingle discovered that they also practiced human sacrifice. The religious ritual plays a role in "Bootheel Man."

His research also uncovered the lively black market in American Indian -- the term his sources prefer to Native American -- artifacts in Asia. The book explores the American Indian movement to repatriate the thousands of American Indian skeletons -- the Smithsonian has 18,000, and 300,000 are scattered in museums around the U.S. -- and artifacts in museums.

Swingle began work on the book on the side of the archaeologists who think it's important to preserve and study ancient cultures. His interaction with people in the Osage Tribe grayed the issue for him. "I became very sensitive to their viewpoint," he said. Particularly persuasive is their view that tampering with the bones affects the deceased's journey through the next world.

The Osage eventually signed treaties that gave away most of their land, retreating to a reservation in Oklahoma the size of Delaware. When oil was discovered on the reservation, the 2,229 people in the tribe became the richest per capita in the U.S.

In December, Swingle will return to Oklahoma for a book signing. The book has drawn favor from members of the Osage Nation.

If his father inspired his interest in writing and his mother was first to read his earlier works, Swingle's 14-year-old daughter Veronica has become his muse. She accompanied him to Oklahoma to research the Osage. And just as his father read to him, Swingle read Veronica each chapter of "Bootheel Man" as it was finished. "She was enjoying the story so much she would nag me to go back and write another one," he said. Veronica accompanied him to Oklahoma to do research. "Bootheel Man" is dedicated to her.