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Michael Haskins
Publishes Two
“Lost Manuscripts”
By Shirrel Rhoades
Sitting there in the Key
West sunshine, smiling from behind his bird’s-nest beard,
being interviewed for the CBS Early Show, Michael Haskins
could pass for a latter-day Hemingway.
In fact, that’s what he
was talking about with CBS news anchor Jeff Glor, Hemingway’s
influence on Key West writers, “why it’s still here, why it
will be here in 50 years.”
The thirty-minute
interview was boiled down to 1.5 minutes of airtime. “They
asked about my first coming to Key West and I mentioned it was
to see Hemingway House because I’d likely never be in Key West
again. I lived in Southern California at the time. My
daughters and I were visiting Naples and I decided to drive
down to see where Hemingway lived.”
He shrugs at the
obvious. “Like so many, I came and then moved here because Key
West is a muse of many sorts.”
Haskins continues, “The
half-minute answer to whatever the question was, was that
Hemingway had been my hero since high school and there was no
one like him. Of course, the original questions had to do with
writers today. Who would have thought in the ’50s or ’60s that
mystery/thriller writers would be on the New York Times
Bestseller List. No one equals what Hemingway was, but I did
say a writer in the mystery field, like James Lee Burke, comes
to the standard.”
Haskins credits a
high-school incident for his love of Hemingway. “If my English
teacher in the ninth grade had not told me to put down a copy
of Hemingway’s short stories (I had taken it off a bookrack
during study class) because I was ‘too stupid to understand
it,’ I might never have wanted to read. Thank you Mr. Carlin!”
Michael Haskins – a
former newspaperman and photojournalist – is becoming known
for his own mystery books. “Chasin’ the Wind” was published in
March 2008. That was followed by “Free Range Institution” in
March 2011. “Car Wash Blues” is scheduled for release in
August 2012. And “Stairway to the Bottom” is still being
finished up on his Sony Vaio, but should publish in 2013. All
these titles feature a crime-fighting freelance journalist
affectionately known as Mad Mick Murphy.
Over a cup of con leche
(mine, because Haskins has sworn off caffeine this week) at
Coffee Plantation on Carolina Street, Michael Haskins and I
chatted about his latest two entries in the series, “Revenge”
and “Tijuana Weekend.”
Although Mick Murphy is
a fictional character I feel like I know him pretty well. Not
just because I’ve read all the books. It’s because I know
author Michael Haskins.
Like his alter ego, Haskins is a bearded Irish-bred newsman
from Boston. Both he and Mad Mick Murphy love Jameson Irish
Whiskey. Both smoke good cigars. And both live in Key West.
They even share the same given name, he and Liam Michael
Murphy.
Michael Haskins laughs
and shakes his shaggy head, assuring me those are the only
similarities. “I don’t have red hair like Murphy, but I do
have a beard.” Removing his duck-billed Fenway Park ball cap,
he brushes his stubby fingers through a mop of graying hair,
adding, “Even in my good days I wasn’t a redhead.”
I point out that he and
his creation have followed the same roadmap – moving from
Boston to California to Mexico to Key West. “Murphy is much
more adventurous than me,” he says. “I’m more laid back.”
When pressed, he says,
“Mick is much braver than I am. I’m a coward. You start
shooting at me I’d duck for cover. You hit me, I’d scream in
pain.”
He waves away the
comparisons. “The shorthand of having Murphy similar to me
gives me a chance to concentrate on the other characters.”
“Characters all have to
have a persona. Everyone has something taken from a person I
know,” he says. “People come here to reinvent themselves. But
Key West brings out the best or the worst in people.”
Haskins is a disciplined
writer. Up at 6 a.m. Have a con leche, read the paper. Start
at 7:30, write till 9:30 or 10:30. “I keep a journal of how
much I’ve written. It takes me about six months to complete a
book.”
He describes this
process as “writing in the morning, reading in the early
afternoon, and editing what I’ve written before dinner. My
evenings are set aside for the battle between ego and checking
account.”
“That’s today’s
literature,” he opines. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s
literature, the coming of age stuff, their audience is growing
smaller and smaller.”
“If I lived back in
their day, I’d be considered a pulp writer. But mysteries are
now a large genre.”
“While writers seem to
vacation here, few writers live here fulltime and even less
write about the island. My friend Tom Corcoran has a
long-running series – the Alex Rutledge Mystery series – set
in Key West, but I can’t think of anyone else besides Tom and
me with a series set in Key West. You don’t run into many of
New York’s published elite here or publishers. If they come,
most of them must continue to live as if they are still in
Manhattan and avoid the local riffraff like myself.”
Yet the island has a
long history with writers like Thomas McGuane, James Leo
Herlihy, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Sanchez, Richard Wilbur,
Annie Dillard, Hunter S. Thompson, Elizabeth Bishop, and John
Hersey.
What about Key West
brings out the best in writers? “Its attitude will become your
Muse if you let it,” smiles Michael Haskins. “I fell in love
with Key West, the history, the architecture, the water, the
diverse people and felt at home, something I hadn’t felt since
leaving Boston. I don’t know what else it could have been if
it hadn’t been a Muse guiding me to where I belonged, where I
could write and be happy.”
After working as a
newspaperman for the Record-American, Sunday Advertiser, in
Boston, he moved to the West Coast where he spent 28 years in
the production department of ABC-TV. Also he freelanced as a
photojournalist for such publications as the Valley Green
Sheet, the Valley Press and for a rodeo company. “I shot a lot
of pictures of cowboys getting thrown off horses,” he
reminisces.
A couple of times
married and a couple of times divorced, he decided to pack it
in when Disney bought ABC. “I was heading to La Paz, Mexico,
but friends warned me that gringos might not be welcome after
the upcoming election in 2000. I’m a devout coward, so I
headed for Key West instead.”
Landing on the island in
1996, Haskins spent five years as the business editor of the
Key West Citizen, then another five as the public information
officer for the city. Now he handles PR for such local
entities as the Key West Art and Historical Society, the Hog’s
Breath Saloon, and the Fury Water Sports. He’s also a stringer
for Reuters.
And he writes mystery
novels.
Haskins is quite active
in the Florida chapter of the Mystery Writers of America,
serving on its board. And he’s a member of the International
Thrillers Writers.
“When I first came to
Key West, I lived on a floating home. That’s basically a home
on a barge. The one-bedroom structure had a large upper deck
with TV, hammock, plants, barbecue and became a hangout for
many of my friends.”
As Haskins tells it, “In
1998, Hurricane Georges blew through the Florida Keys and took
my floating home with it. It was never found. I put my
computer in the car, my dog, and a few belongings. I had more
than one thousand books, mostly first editions, signed, and
now Davy Jones is reading them. Along with the missing boat,
my writings from Mexico and California were gone too. My ‘lost
manuscripts,’ I like to call them.”
Alas. Just like the
rumored lost manuscript of Hemingway, supposed left on a
train.
However, fate intervened
for Michael Haskins. “One day not long ago I got a 2x2 floppy
from my sister. She said, ‘I’ve been holding this for you.’
I’d forgotten that I gave her a backup of my stories for
safekeeping.”
Haskins didn’t even have
a disc drive that would play an old-fashioned floppy. “I had
to borrow one and hook it up to my computer. On the disc I
found three novels, two finished and one incomplete. Who would
have expected this good fortune?”
He chuckles. “I have
very little faith in technology. These days I keep my stories
on two backup drives, two flash drives.”
Reading over his
recovered novels, he was amazed at how well they had held up.
“I upgraded the stories, did a little bit of rewriting,
changing Vietnam to Kuwait – but that’s all.”
“Revenge” can be seen as
a prequel, introducing us to Mick Murphy during his California
days. “The book was originally called ‘Keeper’,” confesses
Haskins. “I don’t remember why.”
A quick
can’t-put-it-down read, I liked this plot with a twist ending:
Having given a talk at his old alma mater of Harvard, Mick
Murphy bumps into a mysterious Filipino woman who accompanies
him back to Redondo Beach. She’d got his attention with her
story of familial revenge involving her brother, one of Mick’s
old classmates. Mick finds himself attracted to this
Annie-Hall-attired chick, an attraction that leads to
beatings, bloodshed, and the appearance of Mick’s pal Norm, an
armed-to-the-teeth government agent. His guardian angel.
Yes, this first-ever
mystery by Michael Haskins gives us another look at the Mad
Mick Murphy we’ve come to know in his current Key West
setting. Murphy is a journalist driven by curiosity, stubborn
determination, and his, uh, libido. A good read indeed!
Ironic that in this first novel Mick falls for a Filipino
looker, and today Michael Haskins finds himself married to a
lovely Filipino lady, Celine Ezpeleta. Life imitating art? Or
art predicting life?
As for “Tijuana Weekend,” it’s actually the second novel in
chronological sequence. “Unfortunately, not much has changed
in Central America since I wrote this back in 1994,” he says.
So he dated each chapter to put it in the context of the
times.
“I spent most of 28
summers in Tijuana attending the bullfights and had the
opportunity to befriend many of the city’s residents. I
started writing this novel in Mexico on a vacation with my
twin daughters, sitting by the pool with a legal pad.” He
dedicates the book to “Seanan and Chela, who spent many of
their summers with me in Mexico and at the bullfights, walking
the streets and mercados of Tijuana.”
What to expect? “Bless
Murphy’s heart, he’s got everybody in trouble again,” says
Haskins. Here we meet Sonia. (Isn’t there always a woman?)
Amid beers and bullfights, our journalist-at-large meets up
with an old friend, a Jesuit priest named Seámus McGillicuddy,
a hunted man who needs to get across the border with
information about a massacre in El Salvador. Can Mick help him
without falling under the gun sights of the secret police?
Bad guy Nevil Cluny
makes his first appearance in this book, a British mercenary
who would bury Mick in a shallow grave if he could. “Hey, what
do you expect? I’m Irish, so all my villains are British,”
Haskins laughs.
But wait, wasn’t there a third novel on that errant floppy?
Yes, but it was unfinished, a book Haskins doesn’t expect to
complete. Actually the third in sequence, it tells the story
where Mick’s girlfriend dies in Mexico, an event that has
haunted him in future stories. We’ll cross our fingers that
Haskins changes his mind, filling in this gap in the history
of his reluctant hero.
Haskins glances out the window of Coffee Plantation, taking in
the island town that figures so prominently in many of his
books. “Live where you write,” he advises. “I do. I write
about places I knew, places I care about.”
He takes a sip of his juice drink, wishing it were a con leche.
“I’ve been here 15 years.” His eyes twinkle. “I love this
island though I bring the violence to it, at least on paper.”
In “Free Range
Institution” he has a character escape through an alley behind
Fairvilla. “Bill Murphy of Fairvilla might point out, ‘There’s
no alley between me and Pat Croce’s.’ But I tell him, ‘Maybe
not in your world, but in mine.’”
“I try to be true to the island where it’s important,” he
says.
Is he noodling any Mad Mick Murphy adventures beyond the
upcoming “Staircase to the Bottom”? Matter of fact, yes. “The
next one involves me going to Europe. But it’s a little
expensive to go there to do the necessary research, so it may
have to wait. Stairway to the Bottom will change everything in
Murphy’s life and his answers are in Europe.”
In the meantime, Haskins hints there could be still another
book series, one involving Murphy’s mysterious friend Norm.”
He cites the mystery series by his friend Robert Crais,
starring a detective named Elvis Cole. More recent Crais
novels have featured Elvis’s sidekick Joe Pike.
And mystery writer John
Sandford (the nom de plume of Pulitzer Prize-winning
newspaperman John Camp) has strayed from writing about his
Lucas Davenport character to concentrate on one of Davenport’s
cohorts, Virgil Flowers.
We’ll see. But for the
time being – after reading “Revenge” and “Tijuana Weekend” –
we can only wait for “Stairway to the Bottom” to be published
in 2013.
If you’re already a Mad
Mick Murphy fan, you’ll want to add these early adventures to
your reading list. And if you’re not yet a fan, here’s the
chance to start reading them in chronological order. Both
trade paperbacks are priced at $15 each. Key West Island Books
will be hosting a summer book signing on August 12 at 5:30
p.m.
You want even more?
Perhaps Michael Haskins will be tempted to reconstruct that
third “lost manuscript.” After all, now that we’re hooked on
Mad Mick Murphy, we’re interested in his past as well as his
future.
When I pose this idea to Michael Haskins, he smiles. Enjoying
this power over his readers. And his characters. As he likes
to joke about his writing, “For a little bit of time in a
room, I’m God.”
Or a latter-day
Hemingway posing as a pulp writer.
srhoades@aol.com
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