The first five novels in the Hector Lassiter series—One True Sentence, Forever's Just Pretend and Toros & Torsos—are newly available from Betimes Books. (Ordering information below)
You can make a
good case for Ernest Hemingway having left a profound mark on hardboiled crime
fiction.
Graduate
students and crime fiction aficionados have murdered trees arguing whether
Hemingway influenced Dashiell Hammett or whether inspiration ran the other
direction.
Raymond Chandler
incorporated Hemingway in his fiction, wrote an astonishingly inept parody of
Hemingway prose and staunchly defended Hem’s much-pilloried novel Across the River and Into the Trees.
In A Moveable Feast, he writes of Gertrude Stein giving him a copy of Lowndes’ Jack the
Ripper novel The Lodger, sending Hem off on a Lowndes reading tear.
Later, he moved on to Simenon, and letters and book requests sent his editor
indicate Hemingway also sampled Chandler, Hammett and Ian Fleming.
In the Cuba
portion of Toros & Torsos, I allude to a woman’s mutilated torso
that was found not far from Hem’s Cuban home, the Finca Vigia. This is not an
invention on my part: the murder is remarked on in several Hemingway
biographies.
Presumably
unsolved, the mutilation murder was variously ascribed to a deranged spouse or
boyfriend, the Cleveland Torso Slayer, some other serial killer or some bizarre
rite associated with a secretive religious cult peculiar to Cuba.
Whatever the truth behind the grisly murder, it clearly made a very
strong impression on Ernest Hemingway as he writes about it in an eerie passage
that survives in his posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream.
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