Mickey and Frank

Blog from The Frightened Physicists, pages 4-5: For those of you who have read at least one of my mystery novels, maybe you hoped to see a succinct description of the two best friends and heroes, Mickey Mathews and Frank Tuttle. Indeed, those two became friends in my first mystery titled Final Secret, which is set in Hawaii in 1941 and describes the actual events leading up to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7. By 1943, Mickey and Frank both ended up in Ypsilanti, Michigan, for the mystery called Long Pursuit, and in mid-1944 they shared Frank’s bungalow in Ypsilanti along with their wives, Patty and Norma Jean, respectively.

But for readers who may have started my series with The Frightened Physicists (Doce Blant, 2021), this mystery offers the following characterizations of Mickey and Frank:

… When he first met Frank [Tuttle] in Hawaii in 1941, Mickey knew he was the kind of man he wanted for a friend. Words like trustworthy, determined, and tough sprung to mind. At six-foot-two and just under two hundred pounds, Frank was a warrior who got tougher as circumstances demanded. When danger appeared, he proved fearless time after time. He was deadly with weapons, especially his military-issue M1911 .45 semi-automatic pistol. He wasted few words. He knew how to have a good time. He never let a friend down. He had saved Mickey’s life more than once, but Frank would be the last one to reveal such heroics.

Thinking about his own background, Mickey, a graduate of Normal College’s Class of ‘33, learned to be an investigative writer and a novelist. He liked writing fictional tales for magazines like Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. He wrote two novels in the next six years, Sabbath Slugger and Guns of Wyoming. In March 1941, his publisher, Random Books, sent him to Hawaii to write a book about a possible Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s real-life aerial assault occurred on December 7. By that time, Mickey had predicted the date.

When his novel about those experiences was completed, he named it Final Secret. He had a problem with his left eye which had kept him out of the peacetime Army. In 1941, Mickey was too old for the draft. Instead, he served by traveling around the Pacific and Europe theaters, writing war-related articles. He stirred the wartime waters with his novel about “battle fatigue,” which he entitled Still Fighting. In late August 1943, Yancey White asked him to return to Ypsilanti and investigate a blackmail threat against a friend who was president of Baxter College in Ann Arbor. Mickey arrived, telephoned Frank, and that night they met again.