Sunday, August 17, 2014

GERTRUDE STEIN & ERNEST HEMINGWAY: MYSTERY FANS




ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook


The conflict between literary vs. genre fiction is an old and storied war with no good end in sight.

My novels featuring author Hector Lassiter are pitched at the center of that perhaps unwinnable cultural siege.

Hector, a consummate survivor who comes to be known as “the last man standing of the Lost Generation” went to 1920s Paris dreaming of becoming a literary writer. He emerged a crime novelist and sometimes screenwriter compelled to apologize for his work to his literary friends who people my novels: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams…Gertrude Stein.
Alice B. Toklas &
Gertrude Stein

My novel One True Sentence, is the one in which Stein and Hemingway cast their longest shadows. OTS is a re-imagination of Ernest Hemingway’s 1920s Paris memoir A Moveable Feast as a historical thriller. The murders of literary magazine publishers plague the Left Bank; Stein gathers the city’s foremost mystery writers to catch the killer.

Stein, the Modernist grand dame of 1920s Paris — the woman who coined the phrase “Lost Generation” and an avant-garde experimenter in prose whose writings remain opaque or even unreadable to the most patient of readers — was, in fact, an avid fan of mystery fiction. Stein affectionately dubbed favorite crime fiction authors her “mystifiers.” She contended the mystery novel was “the only really modern novel form.”

When a young Hemingway, newly arrived in Paris and bearing a letter of introduction from novelist Sherwood Anderson first visited Stein in her salon, he left with many literary recommendations, including Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Jack the Ripper novel, The Lodger.
Marie Belloc Lowndes

Stein’s preface to that reading recommendation was charged: “You should,” she said, “only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.” Lowndes’ writing, Stein assured, was “marvelous in its own way.”

Hemingway agreed: “I read all the Mrs. Belloc Lowndes that there was… I never found anything as good for that empty time of day or night until the first fine Simenon books came out.” For his part, Hemingway remained a crime fiction fan, reading Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming when they were each new and still largely under the reading public’s radar.
Scene from first film adaptation of THE LODGER.

Hemingway’s Key West-based To Have and Have Not, for much of its early going, reads like a hardboiled crime novel.

Consistent with her insistence upon always having the last word, consider Stein’s rather mysterious summation of the value of the mystery novel:

By having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins… The only person of any importance is dead.”

That “important” dead person, to Stein’s mind, was the traditional literary hero. Detectives, therefore, were the survivors, and as such, what Stein termed a new kind of “literary hero.”

NEXT: The first of two prose pieces, in Hector's own words...


ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

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