Hemingway Cutthroat: A Mystery

There were no bullfights in 1937 Madrid, just bombs, freedom fighters, journalists, and plenty of corpses. Ernest Hemingway, covering the Spanish Civil War for the American press, came looking for stories and danger, and found something else: a friend murdered amid the ruins.

            With a new novel stirring in his head and his veins pumping with booze, Hemingway sets out to find who killed José Robles Pazos, a bureaucrat in the Popular Front, and who’s covering it up. There is, after all, nothing like risking death in a war zone if it means living fast, nailing the bastards, and avoiding a deadline. With the writer John Dos Passos at his side, Hemingway wades into the darkness, discovering that his old WWI buddy is no mere casualty of war—-but victim of something far more terrible.

            Boisterous, bare knuckled, and stewed to the gills, Hemingway Cutthroat captures the writer at the height of his career and in a Europe teetering on untold cataclysm, struggling to find out not just for whom, but why the bell tolled.

There were no bullfights in 1937 Madrid, just bombs, freedom fighters, journalists, and plenty of corpses. Ernest Hemingway, covering the Spanish Civil War for the American press, came looking for stories and danger, and found something else: a friend murdered amid the ruins.

            With a new novel stirring in his head and his veins pumping with booze, Hemingway sets out to find who killed José Robles Pazos, a bureaucrat in the Popular Front, and who’s covering it up. There is, after all, nothing like risking death in a war zone if it means living fast, nailing the bastards, and avoiding a deadline. With the writer John Dos Passos at his side, Hemingway wades into the darkness, discovering that his old WWI buddy is no mere casualty of war—-but victim of something far more terrible.

            Boisterous, bare knuckled, and stewed to the gills, Hemingway Cutthroat captures the writer at the height of his career and in a Europe teetering on untold cataclysm, struggling to find out not just for whom, but why the bell tolled.

Publishers Weekly

Set in civil war-torn Spain in 1937, Atkinson’s solid sequel to 2009’s Hemingway Deadlights finds the celebrated author feeling like “a fraud, a three-dollar bill, a charlatan everyone treated like a messiah.” With the occasional help of fellow writer John Dos Passos, Hemingway looks into the execution of José Robles, a medical volunteer and accused Marxist spy, with whom he was acquainted years earlier in Italy, after Robles’s body lies in the hills outside Valencia for more than three weeks before it’s discovered. Hemingway’s base in Madrid, the hectic Hotel Florida, sees the likes of Errol Flynn, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), various prostitutes, and annoying socialite Mordaunt Worsleighson, who becomes Hemingway’s unwelcome assistant through much of his determined search for Robles’s killers. Plenty of sex and violence help move the action along, but the underlying reasons for Hemingway’s obsessive quest never become fully clear. (Aug.)

MICHAEL ATKINSON is a former film critic for The Village Voice and has written for The Believer, Spin, Details, Maxim, The Guardian, The American Prospect, LA Weekly, The Boston Phoenix, The Stranger, In These Times, Interview, and numerous other publications. In addition to Hemingway Deadlights, he is the author of five books, has published hundreds of poems in the last two decades, and his work has been named as both Best American Poetry and Best American Movie Writing selections. For more than a decade he has lectured on film history and screenwriting at C. W. Post/Long Island University and New York University. The father of three, he lives with his family on Long Island.