One bartender's secret life as an author of cosmic murder mysteries.

The prose is as striking as it is surprising.

”The man did not hunt for sport, nor did he hunt for food; he certainly did not hunt as one hunts merely to sharpen skills, for he was beyond that; rather, he hunted only to kill.”

So it goes in the prologue of Loki and Simba by Michael Staley. Before I knew it I was knee-deep in the story and getting more absorbed by the minute.

That was what was surprising. 

I didn't see that coming.

The book looks self-published. (It is, in association with Great Spirit Publishing.)

The plot sounds outlandish: A police officer and a parapsychologist research how a historic murder trial of a man who executed another to prevent him from killing a family of wolves leads to a string of violent murders 80 years later. (But somehow it works.)

And the author is much better known as a bartender. (Staley is a veteran presence at Sandbar & Grill.)

Nevertheless, Loki and Simba quickly became a mild obsession of mine. Part of the obsession has to be due to the fact I didn't see such imaginative and other-worldly scenarios coming from such a seemingly low-key guy.

While attending the Neighborhood Playhouse acting school in New York, Staley began bartending as a way to earn a living, and then started writing shortly afterward.

He wrote his first published book, The Specimen, in 1971. (“Back when I had hair and buns,” he says.)

Later re-published in 2014 as Diarma, Staley’s first novel is a tale of a man, Christos, whose search for purpose leads him to a small Meditteranean island governed by a ruthless system.

“No, you were never our prisoner in any sense of the word,” Christos is later told, “but rather your own in every sense of the word.”

Despite the 40 year gap in publishing, there were only a few amount of changes needed.

“I could have updated it with computer-age stuff,” Staley says, “but the values and concept itself doesn’t really have a time parameter.”

Indeed, the struggles of coping with pressures and barriers (a major theme within his novels) have a universal appeal. Christos’ frustration with society and his apprehensions about the future are things everyone from students to retirees can relate to.

After the Weekly sat down with him to explore his passion for storytelling, his dual existence made more and more sense: He says he turned to bartending to "make a living" but counts on writing to “feel alive.”

Your stories have so many twists and turns. How do you start writing something like that?

I start with the philosophy and wrap my story around that. But I take very little credit for what lands on the page. The process is very vehicular. I simply wrap the philosophical concept in a more pallatable form for the reader. So if they’re not quite interested in the theory, then at least there’s a good story.

And what is the theory? What are you hoping readers learn from your stories?

I want them to think about things that they may not have thought about before.

For instance, with Loki and Simba its two-pronged: it’s a book for animals and a book for karma. I want people to think about action and reaction. Like how when you drop a pebble into a pond the ripples go on and on. The effects of what we’re doing now (in terms of the environment, for example) might not occur until much later.

With Diarma, I want people to entertain the thought that as bleak as the world may seem, there’s a natural process to evolve, for evolution, for survival. Not to say it’ll be easy. Looking at history, whenever a great leader arises we kill them. Think of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., two very important figures of my lifetime.

How would you describe books like Loki and Simba or Diarma?

Well, my very first publisher—she was terrific, a very knowledgable bright gal. But she asked me to cut out the philosophical aspects and confine the story to a specific genre and I just couldn’t do that. Though part of my objection might be due to some arrogance. I was young. But for that first compromise in life, that’s when the warning bells are ringing their loudest. And it was impossible to ignore.

But I cannot tell readers what the story’s about, it would ruin it. They need to read it and make their own conclusions. I tell them to go to amazon.com and look at the synopsis there, instead, if they want a summary.

What do you do besides writing and working?

Haha, not a whole lot. I have dinners with friends. But usually I read. I like mysteries, so I’ll read James Lee Burke, John Stanford, T. Jefferson Parker. I might read some essays, too, if I like the author.

What’s your next book?

I’m currently working on a new story based on the Weisberg Incident of 1982. And it’s the most difficult task I’ve ever taken on. Now, the Weisberg Incident was a gruesome affair in which someone discovered a dumpster full of fetuses in the L.A. area.

Normally, that alone should have guaranteed front page coverage, but hardly anyone talked about it. I went to all sources of authority—even sent a message to [former president Ronald] Reagan at one point—trying to get the story out. And it really shows how the power of the press in this country lies not in what it chooses to report but in what it doesn’t report.