Mike Haller

Created by Max Byrd
(1942–)

“I wanted to be nineteen again and be the grandson of Philip Marlowe.”
— Haller confesses, in California Thriller

Rough-and-tumble San Francisco gumshoe MIKE HALLER appeared in three very fine paperback originals from Bantam in the early eighties that — despite some particularly dubious covers in the US (not pictured) — managed to nab a Shamus and garnered a nomination for another.

The three books ring true, very much in the classic Chandler/Macdonald vein (and very much blurbed as such), but infused with their own sly wit and a more contemporary edge.

Originally from Boston, Haller has been in San Francisco for a couple of decades, and brings a shrewd Yankee’s eye to the California proceedings, while indulging in a little Chandleresque wink to knighthood in the very first paragraph of the very first book, the aptly titled California Thriller (1981), when he meets a client in a bar:

“The waiter cruised off into the darkness for refills. I put an olive between my teeth and pulled a little pink sword out of it, like a plastic Excalibur.”

From there Haller is off to the races, hunting for a missing reporter, and eventually tangling with a local mobster and his pal, a internationally renowned  biochemist. Robert A. Baker and Michael T. Nietzel in One Hundred and One Knights called it “the best private-eye novel ever written about the functioning and chemistry of the brain.”

In Fly Away, Jill (Like that title!), also from 1981, Haller’s off on another pissing persons case, leaving his office on Market Street to fly to London, hunting for a rich man’s errant daughter-in-law, while Finders Weepers (1983) finds Haller looking for a Mexican hooker who stands to inherit $800,000, while dealing with actually having his private investigator’s license yanked — a common threat from cops in PI novels, but this time it’s more than just talk.

Those of you craving good ol’ private eye action will find plenty of it in these books, full of and bob-and-weave plotting, and if the violence at times seems overdone, it’s tempered by Mike’s caustic first-person narration and smart, snappy one-liners. His “inscrutable combination of New England Puritan and bleeding heart” makes him an intriguing eye to follow.

He’s led quite a life, too, bouncing from stints at home and abroad with the Army,  Interpol, and the LA Times before settling in San Francisco, calling himself a “born drifter and slider, an uncommitted soul… which is what makes me such a good Californian.”

Mike even has a steady girlfriend, the smart and lovely Dinah Farrell, who works as a staff psychiatrist at Washington General hospital, training medical students and seeing patients. Any relation to Susan Silverman, of course, is purely coincidental.

It looked, at least to me, like the start of very promising, long-running series, in an era that already had plenty of them.

But then…

Pffft!

The author pulled the plug, although fortunately the entire trilogy was re-released in print (including in hardcover!), audio and digitally beginning in 2012.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Max Byrd was educated at Harvard and King’s College Cambridge, England, and has taught at Yale, Stanford, and the University of California, was a Contributing Editor of The Wilson Quarterly and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review. In addition to the P.I. books he wrote in the 80’s — California Thriller (1981) the first, was the one that won a Shamus for Best Paperback PI Novel in 1982, and Finders Weepers (1983) was nominated two years later, but chucked the Haller books, instead writing several well-received thrillers, including Target of Opportunity and Fuse Time, before deciding that “crime really did not pay” and turned to writing historical fiction (The Sixth Conspirator, The Paris Deadline, Jefferson, etc.). He’s has said that he doesn’t depend on his writing for his livlihood and so generally writes what and when he wants.

UNDER OATH

• “Max Byrd is a fine and forceful writer.”
  — Lawrence Block
• “Max Byrd’s plots, like his wit, are sinister and charming.”
  — Diane Johnson

NOVELS

• California Thriller (1981) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
• Fly Away, Jill (1981) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
• Finders Weepers (1983) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!