BY LINDA DeNICOLA
Staff Writer
JEFF GRANIT staff Making up stories to tell his son, Andrew, led Michael Tuite to write “Mike the P.I.,” a book of detective stories geared for middle-school readers. Michael Tuite likes to make up stories and tell them to his son, Andrew, who enjoys them so much that Tuite has put them into a book.
Tuite, a Red Bank resident, hopes his book of detective stories will appeal to people of all ages, but it is geared toward children of middle school age.
“Mike the P.I.” is written as linked short stories, tied together by the main character in each story and the cases that he tries to solve. The soft-cover 99-page book is published by Tate Publishing, Mustang, Okla.
Mike the P.I. is Michael Heart, a private investigator who started out as a police officer in a medium-size police force. After about six months, he was taken off the streets and assigned to an antifraud team, which turned out to be a desk job, something that didn’t appeal to him. He quit the job and opened up a private investigation firm, which wasn’t exactly a big success.
Eventually, he is hired as an undercover detective in the Public Investigation Division of the police department.
The introduction sets up the character in the first-person narrative. You learn that Mike was married to a wealthy, morally deficient woman, subsequently divorced, and that he has a sense of humor.
Right on the first page, Michael Heart advises readers, “You might as well close this book back up and put it back where you found it if [you’re] looking to find things like romance, education or a stupid dog that saves the boy in the end. What you will find is what I’d like to call ‘hit and run’ action.”
Tuite believes this premise is sure to appeal to his young readers, especially boys.
Then Mike the P.I. describes getting hit by some guy 10 times his size, a lot of running, and action that results in Mike getting hurt most of the time.”
The book is written in the breezy style of most detective stories, with chapters sporting colorful titles like “Squeeze Play,” “The Masked Robber,” “The Lost Treasure, “Tony, the P.I.,” “Master Getaway,” “Return of the Mask” and “The Lost Treasure: Again.”
It is easy to see how a young boy would be charmed by these stories. The characters have names like Mr. Woodhats, Bobo, Mr. Texas Smith and Copy Cat Frieda.
The stories are short, the plots are action-packed and they unfold in places like the Grand Canyon, Rome and the Chilean Andes. In addition, readers are invited to formulate their own conclusions about characters and events.
Tuite says his inspiration for writing has been his wife, Michelle, and Andrew. But now he has another inspiration: his baby son, Aiden, 10 months old.
“If not for witnessing the joy that my stories brought to Andrew, I would not have realized their true potential, or the need to share them with anyone else,” he said.
Tuite grew up in the Port Monmouth section of Middletown. He attended Thorne Middle School and Middletown High School North, where he said English was his favorite subject. He went to Rutgers University for one year and then transferred his credits to Western International University, an online school, and received a degree in business administration. He is working toward his MBA at the same university.
“Initially, when I started school, I was an English major. I was always into writing and have written two other volumes along the same lines as ‘Mike the P.I.,’ ” he said. “They will be coming out soon.”
He also has written two novels that are in the editing stages.
“They are more adult-oriented novels, about natural disasters. One of them is about 500 pages and is very close to what happened during [Hurricane] Katrina. It’s about a storm that hits New York City. But I sent it to the publisher before Katrina hit.”
He said the idea for the story came to him in a dream. “I’ll have vivid dreams and get up in the middle of the night to write,” he explained.
Tuite said that for years he wrote for fun and wasn’t thinking about publishing, but when he saw how much his son enjoyed his stories and the characters he created, he went on the Internet looking for a publisher.
“That’s how I found this particular publisher,” he said. “They are not one of the subsidy publishers. It didn’t cost me anything.”
“Mike the P.I.” is available at Barnes & Noble and Borders Books, and online at Amazon.com and through the publisher at www.tatepublishing.com.

