Hemingway Deadlights

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.)

Library Journal

Set in 1956, this first outing in a new series featuring Ernest Hemingway as sleuth finds the graying Nobel laureate with his leg in a plaster cast after getting plastered and falling off the roof of his Key West home where he's holed up for some creative drinking away from the sour, disapproving gaze of A'berbitch wife Mary (a wonderfully nasty characterization) back in Cuba. His quiet bender, alas, soon is rudely disrupted by the unusual murder of a fisherman/smuggler crony. Angered by the cops' shelving the case, Papa takes up the trail, leading him through a dizzying maze of Hungarian thugs, the CIA, FBI, Fidel and Che, horny coeds, amorous spies, and the mob, during which he's threatened, chased, followed, kidnapped, and shot at-and that's nothing compared to what Mary wants to do to him! Atkinson knows his subject well but has come neither to praise nor bury Hemingway, who is fat, stubborn, violent, tough, crafty, and alcoholic, but has a sense of friendship and justice. With equal doses of mystery and espionage, the story also is presented with great humor. This is a tasty cocktail of suspense, sex, laughs, and literature. Though Hemingway didn't do these things, he damn well should have. Mystery readers will love it. [See Rogers's LJXpress interview with Atkinson at http://tinyurl.com/cuncdv.-Ed.]
—Mike Rogers

Kirkus Reviews

With the Nobel Prize safely his and no new book percolating, Papa can turn his attention to the strange case of the harpooned friend. When law enforcement comes calling on Ernest Hemingway in Key West, it gets a welcome warmer than it might have expected. Relatively sober at this moment in 1956, between projects and without an important woman in his life, the 58-year-old author is disposed to listen with particular interest to the tale of the late Peter Cuthbert, who was apparently speared by a king-sized harpoon. Why does this demise, piquant as it is, bring the police to Papa's door? Phone-company records indicate that on the night of his death, Cuthbert had attempted without success to reach his friend Hemingway. Actually, friend overstates the case-occasional drinking companion would be more precise-but the writer decides to take his death personally. Cuthbert may have been little more than a petty criminal (and a pretty good watercolorist): still, attention must be paid. Haphazardly, boozily, Hemingway launches an investigation during which he confronts, among other notables, a young Fidel Castro, who tells Papa that his reasons for nosing around seem "a little thin, a little airy." A palpable hit, Fidel. Former Village Voice film critic Atkinson writes well, but you really have to like his Hemingway-no easy task-for this debut effort to work. Agent: Barbara Braun/Barbara Braun Associates