J.M. “Mike” Hayes is the writer I wanted to meet when I went to Manhattan, Kansas, for the second edition of the Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave. He was published, a Kansas writer who uses a Kansas sheriff as his detective. I had a manuscript—not my first mystery but the first that held the promise of publication—and I, too, used a Kansas sheriff for my detective.
If I get a contract, I asked Mike, would you read my manuscript?
He really didn’t want to—he was working on his next book—but he said yes. Mike’s a gentleman. However, he probably thought he’d only have to read a couple pages, that the story would be somewhere between ho-hum and awful, that he could throw the manuscript in the recycle bucket and be done with it.
But Early’s Fall hooked him. He read the whole thing and wrote a great blurb for the book.
Mike does one thing I cannot do. He writes characters, scenes, and situations that are laugh-out-loud funny. Pick up one of his Mad Dog and Englishman books and you’ll see.
Kansas mystery writer goes for the laughs
Mad Dog, in Mike Hayes’ series of Mad Dog and Englishman books—mysteries set in fictional Benteen County, Kansas—is the odd, strange, but not crazy Cheyenne-wannabe-shaman brother of Sheriff English, Hayes’ protagonist.
And in the chronology of creation, Mad Dog came first as a character, not Englishman.
“Mad Dog was my town oddball,” says Hayes. “He was the character on whom I saw my series as being based.”
Mad Dog is a modern version of the cliched character of novels and movies 60 years ago and more—the funny drunken Indian there to provide the laughs.
Today, we writers can’t stick the funny drunken Indian into our stories that have a western bent. It’s just not politically correct. But what if he were a white guy who wants to be—who believes he should be—an Indian? And not just an ordinary Indian, but a shaman?
So here comes Mad Dog, Hayes’ self-taught Indian.
“He was always going to be my figure of fun,” Hayes says, “but he’s turned out to be much more.”
Mad Dog became an important character in the series, not a bit player.
However, he needed a balancing force. So Hayes created a brother for Mad Dog. That’s Sheriff English, a much more substantial character, a person who is calm where Mad Dog borders on the hair-brained.
Most mysteries we read are straightforward, serious. There may be some laugh lines, but they are few. Hayes’ first novel, The Grey Pilgrim, was this way. It did not do well, and Hayes couldn’t interest the publisher in a second book. So he fished around for couple years before he hit on humor and Mad Dog.
Ten years elapsed between the publication on The Grey Pilgrim and the first Mad Dog and Englishman novel titled Mad Dog & Englishman. It came out in 2000. Four more books followed, including Server Down published last year.
“In this series, I throw in an awful lot of humor,” Hayes says, “but I still take on very serious societal problems and deal with them in what I think are rational ways. Humor gives you an opportunity to deal with these problems more deeply, more personally, and more harshly because then you can draw back and make it into a joke. So I think it has worked out very well for me.”
The serious problem in Server Down? The world of online computer games.
Want to know more about Mike and his books? Here’s the link to his website: jmhayes-author.com
© Jerry Peterson.
