Synopsis
It is 1956 and Hemingway has spent much of the year at his home in Key West, hiding from tourists and autograph hunters. But a friend’s sudden death rouses Papa from his idyll. To say that the cause of death is suspicious is to put it lightly. It’s not every day that a part-time smuggler is impaled on a harpoon.
A witty, literate, and action-filled debut, Hemingway Deadlights catches the famed author in his later years, battling to solve the injustices in a flawed world.
Publishers Weekly
Set in 1956, Atkinson’s rollicking, if at times improbable debut neatly captures the personality and uproarious lifestyle of an American literary icon. When Key West fisherman Peter Cuthbert, a friend of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, gets harpooned to death and the local police don’t seem to care, Hemingway, who’s suffering from writer’s block and feeling like “a big, fake water buffalo con artist,” decides to find Cuthbert’s killer. The Nobel Prize winner’s daring quest takes him to Batista’s impoverished Cuba, where he meets such luminaries as high-living mobster Meyer Lansky and even Fidel Castro in the revolutionary’s mountain hideaway. From Che Guevara he learns Cuthbert was anything but an ordinary fisherman. Back in Key West, Hemingway finds himself caught in a spat between the FBI and the CIA, who are both funding Batista’s corrupt government. Atkinson, a former film critic, deftly mixes fact and fiction with graphic sex and violence in a mystery sure to please Hemingway aficionados. (Aug.)