Please Welcome Mystery Author Robert White

with Robert White

We are delighted to welcome mystery author Robert White to Omnimystery News today.

Robb's latest Thomas Haftmann mystery is Saraband for a Runaway (Grand Mal Press; July 2013 trade paperback and ebook formats).

This is the author's second full-length novel to feature the character — he's appeared in numerous short stories —  and we asked Robb to introduce us to him, which he has … via an interview with the ex-Cleveland homicide detective, current private investigator.

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Photo provided courtesy of
Robert White; Photo credit Frank Vaccariello

White: How old are you?

Haftmann: How old did you make me?

White: About forty-eight, maybe a little older.

Haftmann I'm thirty-nine.

White: Why are you an existentialist?

Haftmann: Why aren't you?

White: Look, I'm asking the quest —

Haftmann: Keep your shirt on. I'm an existentialist because the world is basically a sewer filled with hungry albino alligators.

White: Let me handle the metaphors. Explain.

Haftmann: I don't "solve" crimes like a superhero. I'm more of a catalyst for action. I do ordinary things to make my living in a small resort town you'd miss if you blinked going through one intersection. I look for lost teenagers for parents who can afford to hire me. Once, I looked for a lost dog —

White: Yes, I remember. "The Dog Returneth to His Vomit." It was —

Haftmann: Don't interrupt me again.

White: Sorry.

Haftmann: I do skip-traces, small favors for friends when asked.

White: You drink — a lot.

Haftmann: Who do I have to thank for that?

White: Whom. Besides your corrupt English, I needed to add a few flaws to your character to allow readers to empathize with you.

Haftmann: A few flaws? Empathize? You relocated me from Cleveland, which is bad enough, but then you drop me off in this third-rate town in the boonies. Worse, I'm kept so short of paying clients that I can't pass a restaurant dumpster without feeling a tingle in my belly and I have to cadge drinks from my only friend.

White: That would be Tico, right? He owns the tavern directly across the street from your pathetic, one-man agency.

Haftmann: You made me moody and friendless except for Tico. Even then, his wife Marta — when she sees me bellying up to my favorite bar stool — makes me think of the look on Dorothy's face when she saw the winged monkeys of Oz.

White: Part of your problem in life is that you make a stick to beat your own back.

Haftmann: Easy for you to say.

White: To return for a moment to your existentialist philosophy.

Haftmann: It isn't really a philosophy. It's a collection of attitudes. It has to do with being accountable to oneself in a world of moral relativism.

White: Big word there, huh?

Haftmann: I know what it means. I'm not a Hemingway hero, if that's what you're implying. I'm not searching for God because there is no God, not for us, not here. We have to make our meaning, and therefore our values, in our deeds, not in our words. That's your department, though, isn't it? A lot of puffed-up words and no action.

White: It serves no purpose to be rude.

Haftmann: Really? In a world as depraved as this, you can pretend to be offended by a mere incivility? In a time like ours where Greed is king, where children are thrown away or neglected and they learn fast to be as vicious and insensitive as the adults around them? Where our entire culture is drenched in sleaze from top to bottom? The hand of God Himself couldn't raise us to the level of the curb. You must be joking.

White You invoke God, yet you say you're an existentialist. You are confused. Besides, my man, I don't joke. It's not in my DNA.

Haftmann: Let me ask you a question. When you decided to play at being a detective-fiction writer, why me?

White: I don't understand.

Haftmann: It's simple. I'll repeat. Why me, Thomas Haftmann?

White: OK, I'll play. I like the notion of a protagonist who is not, as you say, a superhero. I wanted you to be ordinary, flawed, but capable of doing good even if, as in Haftmann's Rules, you spend more time blundering around Boston than solving the case. That's why I despise books by writers who create tough-guy cops, men who are fearless and brave as they are handsome —

Haftmann: Thanks a lot.

White: I didn't say you were ugly. But I don't want you killing psychopaths between drinks on page ten and bedding down women on pages fifteen through twenty-five like some Mickey Spillane private eye.

Haftmann: I've got news for you, pal. In Saraband for a Runaway, I get the girl.

White: Not … exactly.

Haftmann: I'll point out the page and the paragraph if you need me to.

White: That was a one-night stand. I just felt guilty for keeping you chaste through two novels despite the fact you allegedly have a colorful sex life in Haftmann's Rules. Besides that, seeing you getting your head bashed in so much made me pity you. Finally, I wanted to challenge myself. It wasn't my best writing, however.

Haftmann: You're telling me? You need to do more hands-on research in —

White: Let's leave it right there, shall we? Lance said to keep it at a PG- rating.

Haftmann: When's my next outing?

White: That depends.

Haftmann: On sales?

White: What doesn't in this world?

Haftmann: Now you sound like the forlorn and miserable existential cynic you've tried to turn me into.

White: Get used to it, pal.

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Robb White has published two hardboiled detective fiction novels under the name Robert White: Haftmann's Rules (Grand Mal, 2011) and Saraband for a Runaway (2013) — (more on Facebook). His noir, crime, and mainstream stories have appeared in several webzines. His feature-length film script, East Palestine, has been nominated for a bronze award in the action category at this year's TrindieFest in Trinidad, Colorado. He is an almost lifelong resident of Ashtabula, Ohio, is married, has three children, and two grandchildren in Austin, Texas.

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Saraband for a Runaway
Robert White
A Thomas Haftmann Mystery

Private eye Thomas Haftmann jumps at the opportunity to escape the frigid Northern Ohio weather. Beautiful, troubled Raina Toivela has run away from home again. All he has to do is fly down to Miami, show her photo around, ask a few questions, and take a stroll along the beach before coming back to his tiny office in a second-class resort town and the routine of skip-trace jobs.

But it won't be that easy, and a bullet wound to the head is just the start of his troubles. To find Riaina, he'll not only have to recover, but wade through a muck composed of lowlife schemers, hungry alligators, and rich degenerates with their drugs and sex parties, all the while knowing two killers will be looking for him to finish the job, and aware at every step of his investigation that the man who ordered his murder is watching his every move with blood colder than any reptile.