FIRST PLACE

The elderly couple, wearing their Sunday best, lay side by side on the bed they’d shared for 58 years. Her right hand nestled in his left. His right hand held a pistol.

“Homicide and remorse culminating in the perps’ unlawful death by suicide,” declared the young detective.

A silver-haired patrolman marked the speaker as an insensitive jerk with poor career prospects. He wanted to be home with his wife, to tell her of love witnessed within a wallpapered room in a small wooden house surrounded by yellow tape.

Jack Hoyle, 64, recently sold Gallery 516 in downtown Reno. Hoyle’s job history has included working in many trades—from marine construction to the arts—in many places, including Haiti, South America, Europe and Reno. Hoyle said he’s inspired by the words of Gustave Flaubert, who said, “It is a delicious thing to write. Today, for instance, as man, as woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horse, the leaves, the wind, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”

“Who could say it better?” Hoyle asks. “Who could ask for more. ‘Almost close'—that is really delicious.”