The Hemingway Heist by Wm. Jon McCormick, and: Hemingway's Heist by Chuck Ball (review)

In the chameleonic realm of fiction where writers for various reasons appropriate Ernest Hemingway as a character, either directly or indirectly, a fair number of titles may be said to have established a sort of cachet: John Dos Passos's Chosen Country, Leonardo Padura Fuentes's Adiós, Hemingway, Kirk Curnutt's Coffee with Hemingway, Joe Haldeman's The Hemingway Hoax, Gerhard Köpf's Hemingway's Suitcase, Paula McLain's The Paris Wife, Michael Palin's Hemingway's Chair, Dan Simmons's The Crook Factory, Clancy Carlile's The Paris Pilgrims, and William McCranor Henderson's I Killed Hemingway, to name ten. The publishers range from Houghton Mifflin and Simon & Schuster to Picador and St. Martin's.

And then there's the intriguing region of self-publication, as with the pair of romance-adventure novels at hand, the first, by Jon McCormick, who describes himself as "a 63-year-old retired attorney" who "operates a country inn in southwestern Pennsylvania," and presumably spends some time sailing in the Caribbean, notably out of Key West and the Bahamas. Chuck Ball, author of the second novel, worked his way around the world as deckhand on a Norwegian freighter before completing a degree at Elon College in North Carolina, where he now lives after having worked in the pharmaceutical industry, when he is not boating the Caribbean. Each writer claims two additional self-published novels.

The moniker of the first-person protagonist of The Hemingway Heist suggests Gaelic parallels with the author's name, Ian MacCammon, also, like Jon McCormick, an attorney. In the prologue, he reads the obituary of his lost love, the "very Catholic" Leni Steinhertz, and in the first chapter we are taken to October 1998 in Miami, by which time the narrator and Leni had been seeing each other for more than a month. He proposes they sail from Key Biscayne, on to Key Largo, and into the Caribbean. On the first page of that chapter we also encounter the first of a plethora of errors, the magnitude of which must be described as both astounding and distracting. "All the pre requisites," begins one sentence. Renée Zellweger's role as Bridget Jones is spelled "Brigette Jones," and as if to draw attention to that error, either McCormick or his publisher has seen fit to set the name in italicized bold font. On the same second page of the first chapter the author refers to a film "staring (rather than "starring") Susan Hayward and mentions parking a car that belongs to the Allan family as "the Allan's car."

Chapter 2 begins with an allusion to Richard Nixon's confidant Bebe Rabozo (rather than Rebozo); late in the book he misspells Steven Spielberg's name. In this age of spellcheck and Google search, such irksome flaws suggest careless writing, inept editing, or both. In the fourth chapter McCormick unfortunately dabbles in inept German, although the author might want us to think it's his narrator who hasn't bothered to crack his Deutsches Wörterbuch and discover that it's "die" Lorelei, not "der" (that's not the only errant German on that page). Oddly, when on page 82 Ian refers to the Scots as "a randy lot," he spells it, "we hielanders." But then McCormick is not even consistent in spelling the name of the sailboat, as "LaPeregrina" (spelled as a single word and not italicized) later shows up as "LaPerrigrina." Errors in punctuation also abound.

Hemingway enters the story via one Charley Paddy, an Irish former seaman who ran into Hemingway, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, and others in Havana in 1959. Occasional references to titles like "The Killers" and For Whom the Bell Tolls are scattered throughout, but the Hemingway nexus concerns a valuable "last unpublished manuscript," stashed at the Finca Vigía in 1959—Charley was present...