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All his life Mike was a reader, a writer, and a wanderer. Mike and his wife Mary moved aboard their 36-foot sailboat, Rough Draft, in 2003. This move proved to be the adventure of a lifetime. They began on the Mississippi River and traveled from Minnesota to Mobile, Alabama. In Mobile they docked at a small marina on the Dog River and Mike worked on his writing until Hurricane Katrina dropped their boat into a neighbor’s backyard. They rescued the boat, then sailed on to Key West and Mike wrote while they anchored in the Garrison Bight mooring field.
Next they cruised up the east coast to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where they lived on Rough Draft at a twelve-slip marina a mile from the beach. They became friends with many writers at this time. Mike became a regular at the Mystery Writers of America's Florida Chapter meetings and a frequent participant in Sleuthfest. Mike also joined an exceptional writers group of published authors. The group's expertise and support were instrumental in Mike's journey to write and publish a total of nine novels and two novellas. Mike's five sailing mysteries with PI Wes Darling are all set in locales where they spent time enjoying paradise. His two paranormal mysteries featuring the World's Worst Detective, Artie Kowalski, are also set in Florida. Two of Mike's novels are stand-a-lone mysteries, one of them a dark historical novel set in 1935, the other a psychological thriller.
They hoisted the sails again in 2012, traversed the Gulf Stream, and explored the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas, then sailed up to the Chesapeake for hurricane season, and after that back to Florida. After three more hurricanes which caused damage to the boat, they sold Rough Draft in 2019 and settled in Dothan, Alabama. Here Mike wrote his Elwood Prim fantasy books, a book idea that had been tucked away in the back of his brain for forty years.
In April of 2025 at age 75, Mike was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he passed away in his home, surrounded by his family, on June 6, 2025.
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