Review by Booklist Review
This work is a fictionalized account of the counterespionage operation set up by Ernest Hemingway during World War II. With the permission of the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Hemingway assembles a group that includes a 12-year-old orphan, an American millionaire, a jai alai champion, a priest, fishermen, prostitutes, and sundry others. The FBI obliges by sending special agent Joe Lucas undercover to keep an eye on the amateurs and report to J. Edgar Hoover. Lucas, who is fluent in Spanish and German, is also an efficient killer, a skill that Hoover darkly hints may be necessary in this assignment. At one point, Lucas and Hemingway rescue a young Cuban prostitute from the clutches of corrupt police only to discover later that she is a German double agent. In the background are Hemingway's indifferent wife and a score of guests to their dinner parties, including Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Ingrid Bergman. Hemingway tells Lucas that "fiction is a way of trying to tell things in a way that is truer than truth." It's a statement actually attributed to Hemingway and reflects the contours of the game of deception all the characters are playing: writer, actors, spies. Sickened by the interagency rivalries that motivate cover operations, Lucas becomes charmed by Hemingway's sincerity despite the writer's blustering character. Measured against Hoover, a paranoid so self-absorbed that national security takes second place to protecting his own vaunted position, Hemingway and his motley group begin to erode Lucas' sense of mission. This fabulously compelling and humorous rendering of little-known war operations and secret agent skulduggery in the Caribbean in the summer of 1942 will surely charm readers who love history, suspense, and intrigue. --Vanessa Bush
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In previous novels, Simmons has cast John Keats as an intergalactic emissary (Hyperion) and Mark Twain as an occult adventurer (Fires in Eden). His new excursion in fictional literary biographyand first nonfantasy since Phases of Gravity (1989)is a gutsy speculation on Ernest Hemingway's exploits in wartime espionage, much of it apparently based on fact. In 1942, Hemingway petitioned the American embassy for help in establishing a counterintelligence outfit he called "The Crook Factory," designed to investigate Nazi activity in his adopted home of Cuba. Joe Lucas, a dedicated if unimaginative young FBI agent, thinks he has been assigned to humor the well-connected writer but soon discovers that Hemingway and his crew of colorful sycophants have stumbled on a Nazi spy nest abuzz with activity. Someone is channeling information through the island's intelligence underground, all of it implicating a host of historical celebrities. The more deeply Hemingway's team probes, the more Lucas is persuaded that the Crook Factory has been deliberately set up as an expendable military subterfuge. As vividly depicted by Simmons, pre-Communist Cuba is an exotic locale whose volatile wartime intrigues are comparable to those of the cinematic Casablanca. It's the perfect milieu for Hemingway, whose larger-than-life evocation must be accounted one of Simmons's sterling literary achievements. The macho figure he cuts here is the stuff of countless Life magazine photos, and his development as Joe's friend and mentor is handled with intelligence and dignity. No one will mistake the novel's immersions in the numbing, repetitive detail of secret service operations for Papa's own concise prose. But the web of conspiracy Simmons spins, the zesty characters it entangles and its intricate cross-weave of fact and fiction distinguish this celebration of the Hemingway centenary. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Simmons, the author of award winners like Hyperion, has written a novel that actually sounds like a lot of fun. In the summer of 1942, FBI agent Joe Lucas locks horns with Hemingway, who is in Cuba playing at being a spy. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Simmons leaps from fat genre novels (suspense/horror/sf fantasy) to fat mainstream historical suspense in retelling the story of Ernest Hemingway's submarine-chasing exploits off Cuba in 1942'43. As is often the case with the author's overplanned and hyperdetailed novels, this one boasts proliferating plots and subplots. At its center lolls the brawnily bravura Falstaffian bully/braggart Hemingway, who at age 43 lives with fourth wife Martha Gellhorn in their finca outside Havana, coasting on the great reviews of For Whom the Bell Tolls from two years earlier and editing his anthology Men at War; Hemingway is also overdrinking and trying to assemble a raggle-taggle spy group (or crook factory) in Havana to support his pursuit of Nazi subs with his famed fishing boat, Pilar, while falling under the spell of the FBI and IRS (who undermine his sanity, causing the paranoia that later leads him to suicide). And that barely scratches the surface. Simmons also takes on Hemingway's sense of ``the-true gen'''that is, how things work: guns, boats, boxing, fishing'and rivals him at his own game by creating a smartly characterized narrator, FBI agent Joe Lucas, who reads no fiction, has never read a word of Hemingway, and outsmarts Papa on boats, boxing, guns, and the true gen of spycraft. Simmons claims that ninety-five percent of his book is 'true,' derived from FBI files. Regardless, though, what helps vastly is that utter pragmatist Joe Lucas, fatally ill, has only nine months to write the book, unburdened by any strivings for an artistic excellence he knows nothing about. Thus when Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman show up to talk about filming For Whom the Bell Tolls, Joe has only the vaguest idea of what's under discussion. Also on hand: foppish top spy Commander Ian Fleming, getting charged up for his James Bond novels. For a change, Papa never utters a syllable that rings false. Meantime, Simmons (Children of the Night, 1992, etc.) more than handily ladles out suspense, a German Mata Hari, and a steady stream of solemn bemusement.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
