Mike Faricy was awarded the 2016 IACM Silver Award for Best Mystery Author. His books have held the #1 slot in the Kindle Store in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and India.
His Dev Haskell tale, The Office, was a finalist for the 2018 Minnesota Book Awards and the 2018 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award. He was awarded the Crime Masters of America Poison Cup Award in January 2019. His Dev Haskell tale, Star Struck, was a mystery finalist for the 2019 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award – the same City of Grudges was also a finalist.
I asked Faricy to describe Dev Haskell.
“He’s the sort of the guy you maybe knew in high school and you hadn’t seen him for a couple of years and you’d wonder, ‘I wonder what he’s up to,’ but you know in the back of your mind, you don’t want to get too close,” he shared.
He added, “Dev would never be the guy parachuting onto the roof of The White House to save the President. Most of the people he deals with are involved in a life that has some bad decisions. But then bad decisions make for pretty interesting stories.”
The Haskell series is set in St. Paul, Minn. What makes the town such a rich place for Faricy’s storytelling?
“Well, it’s a crazy town,” he said. “I could go back in history, and it was the vacation spot for the mobsters in the ’20s and ’30s, and gradually got straightened out. But going forward, I was born and raised here, so I’m familiar with it, and the places I described actually exist.”
Faricy continued, “The Spot —that Dev is always in—is a real place, pretty much the way I describe it. The restaurants, the coffee shops, the streets, that type of stuff. I know it, and yet I feel pretty strongly that when people read it, they can also transfer it to wherever the locale they’re in.”
“I think because of the familiarity that I have with it, it just helps me keep that in line with Dev that he’s the guy you know, or know of. And like I say, you’ll want to maybe keep your distance.”
Faricy has written 26 Devlin Haskell novels—two released this year, Cash Up Front and Dream House. I asked him what was his secret to being so prolific.
“Well, I’m the most boring guy in town,” he laughed. “Actually it’s no secret, I am blessed to be doing something that I love to do. And I can do it full time, which I do seven days a week, I’m writing or editing or God forbid some marketing of some sort in today’s world.”
He shared that he works off a general—”really just a sort of three pages of notes that I more or less follow and add to and delete as we go along.” When he send off a book to his editors, he begins the next one within 24 hours.
What is Dream House about?
“A number of books back, I wrote a title called What Happens in Vegas,” said Faricy, “in which Dev, through a series of events, has a trip to Vegas, with a girlfriend named Barbie Dahl. How can I put it? A surgically enhanced avid follower of the Barbie doll. When she gets to Vegas, she ends up staying there as Dev’s investigating a crime.”
Now 10 books later, Barbie Dahl is back and out to establish a hospital that repairs Barbie dolls, called “The Dream House.”
“Unfortunately her million-dollar Barbie collection is missing. She’s taken up with a guy whose real name is Arnold Wazinski, but he’s Ken Carson, a male version of Barbie’s attachment to the Barbie doll. He’s attached to Barbie’s significant other in the doll world. Anyhow, he’s missing with her Barbie collection and Dev is in the process of trying to locate it. It gets a little crazy, but for my generation, certainly every American girl had a Barbie doll it’s sometime or another.”
Faricy recently released the final novel in his Corridor Man series, Corridor Man 10: Bye Bye Bobby.
“The Corridor man is about a disbarred attorney named Bobby Custer, he’s serving time for some illegal procedures and makes a deal with the Feds and they cut his sentence short,” said Faricy. “They guarantee him a position at a law firm that’s suspected of conducting some under the counter activity. And he gets there and through a series of events, he gets hooked up with not the nicest people in the world and basically fits right in.”
“And over a period of 10 books he builds his own criminal enterprise and, in the process, destroys the law firm. It’s actually somewhat based on an individual I knew of, who served sometime after some illegal misbehavior. And it’s been a lot of fun to write. It’s a lot more gritty and violent than the Dev Haskell series.”
You will enjoy this episode.
To learn more about Mike Faricy, visit mikefaricybooks.com.