LANSING – Real-life mysteries can be violent like those Frederick Stonehouse tells or subtle like those told by Tom Springer.

Both Michigan writers have turned their attention to dramas large and small in new books.

For Stonehouse, a well-known Marquette chronicler of lighthouses, Great Lakes shipwrecks and now crime, drama may be an account of the state’s lynching legacy or stories about the Purple Gang of racketeers that terrorized Detroit during Prohibition or…

In 1866, a mob broke into the Ingham County jail, seized 18-year-old John Taylor who’d been arrested for attacking three women with an ax, and strung him up from a beech tree in Mason.

“The mob graciously allowed Taylor a couple minutes to make peace with his maker, then hauled smartly on the rope and the miscreant danced in thin air,” Stonehouse wrote in his new book, “Great Lakes Crime II: More Murder, Mayhem, Booze and Broads” (Avery Color Studios, $16.95). “The body swung in the breeze for a full hour before being cut down and buried in a secret grave close to town.”

Nor was Taylor destined to be Michigan’s only lynching victim. In 1881 for example, Menominee residents hanged Canadian lumberjacks Jack and Frank McDonald, who’d been involved in a fatal street brawl. Rape suspect Tillot Warner met a similar fate in Cheboygan in 1883, as did accused rapist Archibald Pelon in Grayling in 1888 and admitted rapist-murderer William Sullivan in Corunna in 1893.

In Detroit, the Purple Gang engaged in bootlegging, bookmaking, extortion and protecting drug dealers, according to Stonehouse, who wrote, “The Purples were never bashful about murder.”

Ultimately, the gang collapsed due to internal fighting, with the remnants absorbed into other gangs by 1935.

Stonehouse ends the book with the story of Frederick (Killer) Burke – also known as Fred Dane, also known as Richard White – a participant in Chicago’s 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He fled after the shooting, but an ill-timed car accident in St. Joseph drew the attention of a local police officer.

During the ensuing car chase, Burke fatally shot the cop and again went into hiding. After he was caught in Indiana, he was extradited to Michigan, pleaded guilty to murdering the St. Joseph police officer and imprisoned in Marquette, where he died behind bars.

In contrast, Springer finds his mysteries in nature.

An editor at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek and a former Capital News Service correspondent, Springer writes of rural life, of rivers, of serviceberries ripening in June in the Upper Peninsula and of the guinea hens he raised in a failed effort to control the ticks that infested the orchard grass around his home in Park Township near Three Rivers.

“Looking for Hickories: The Forgotten Wildness of the Rural Midwest“ (University of Michigan Press, $19.95) is a collection of essays that reveal the wonders of the world around us.

For example, “From Local Acorns, Mighty Oaks (and Gorgeous Guitars) Grow” opens with his experience as a far-from-successful 20-year-old trapper who came to wonder “just how and where could a modern person of humble means earn a living from nature’s bounty?”

It then explains how Jan Burda, a Berrien County conservationist and ex-Whirlpool Corp. chemist, answers that question: Burda now makes guitars by hand, using native hardwoods – walnut, black cherry, ironwood – growing wild on his land.

Springer talks about his fascination with the smaller mysteries of southern Michigan.

“The region we live in – the beauty of it, the landscape – is greatly unappreciated,” he said. “People always want to see beauty Up North, or out West or rafting the New River” in West Virginia.

But the southern part of the state offers “remnant woods and quiet rivers. It’s almost like a lost civilization. The parts are still here but many people don’t get it,” Springer said.