Mike, or Michael, is the protagonist and first-person narrator of The Lock Artist. When Mike was a child, his father raped his mother, murdered her lover, and nearly killed Mike in an attempted murder-suicide—a childhood trauma that has left Mike mute since the age of eight. Partially as a coping mechanism for this trauma, which ended with Mike being rescued from a locked safe his father had thrown in a river, Mike has developed an obsession with picking locks and cracking safes. He is young—17 or 18 for most of the body of the narrative and about 28 at the time of the frame narrative—but he is cynical and embittered because of his childhood trauma and the brutality of his short criminal career. Mike assumes a colloquial, streetwise style in his narrative, addressing the reader “like we’re sitting together at a bar” (2).

Mike is misanthropic, wary of those who try to help him recover from his muteness. He frequently indulges in self-pity and self-aggrandizement: As early as Chapter 1, he moans, “Some days it’s all I can do to keep breathing” (3), and similar sighs permeate the novel.