I began writing commentary and book reviews for the Washington Times in 2012, and from 2019 until recently, my On Crime column appeared in the Washington Times.
I'm proud to have been a contributor to the fine newspaper.
One of my final Washington Times On Crime columns covered the late, great American writer Ernest Hemingway.
You can read the column via the link below or the text below:
A fine collection of Hemingway's novels, short stories and letters - Washington Times
I’ve been an Ernest Hemingway aficionado since my teens, so I
was pleased to read the Library of
America’s collection
of the late, great writer’s stories, “Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms & Other
Writings 1927-1932.”
The Library of
America, a nonprofit organization, champions our nation’s cultural
heritage by publishing America’s greatest writing in new editions. “No
twentieth-century writer had a greater influence on American fiction than Ernest Hemingway,”
The Library of
America writes. “This volume, the second in Library of
America’s definitive edition of Hemingway’s works,
brings together Men Without Women, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the
Afternoon, the three books that followed his groundbreaking debut novel, ’The
Sun Also Rises,’ and solidified his status as a preeminent literary modernist.
“The appearance of “Men Without Women” (1927) confirmed Hemingway’s determination
to leave his mark on the short story form. It comprises fourteen spare and
unsparing stories about wounded soldiers, boxers, and bullfighters, each
displaying the extraordinary economy of language that is the hallmark of his
prose.”
While Hemingway is
mostly known for writing about war, bullfighting, hunting and fishing, he also
wrote what I believe are two of the best crime short stories ever written, “The
Killers” and “Fifty Grand.” Both short stories, which are about boxers and
crooks, are included in this collection.
The killers in “The Killers” are mob hit men who show up at a
diner late one night where Hemingway’s autobiographical
character, young Nick Adams, is working. He overhears the two hoodlums
discussing their plans to murder the boxer.
Some years ago, I read “Ellery Queen’s Book of Mystery Stories.”
The crime stories in this collection were written by writers who were not
generally recognized as crime, mystery, or thriller writers.
Edited by Ellery Queen, the pseudonym of the writing team of
Frederic Dannay and James Yaffe, and the name of their fictional detective
character, the book offered crime stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens,
Robert Louis Stevenson and a dozen other writers. Ernest Hemingway’s “The
Killers” is also included in the collection.
“Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” is one of the best-known short
stories ever written, and no volume dedicated to the literature of crime would
be complete without it,” the editors wrote in the introduction to the story.
“It is revealing nothing new about Hemingway to
point out that essentially, he is preoccupied with doom - more specifically,
with death. It has been explained this way: ‘The I in Hemingway’s stories
is the man that things are done to’ - and the final thing that is done to him,
as to all of us, is death. No story of Hemingway illustrates
this fundamental thesis more clearly than ’The Killers,’ nor does any story
of Hemingway illustrate
more clearly why he is a legend in his own lifetime. Here, in a few pages, is
the justly famous Hemingway dialogue
- terse, clipped, the quintessence of realistic speech; here in a few pages,
are more than the foreshadowing of the great literary qualities to be found in
’A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.’”
In “Fifty Grand,” Hemingway’s story
is about Jack Brennan, an over-the-hill fighter. Jack Brennan is visited at his
training camp by two flashy men described as “wise guy” pool hall owners. The
men, Steinfelt and Morgan, called “big operators,” want the boxer to throw the
fight as they have big money on his opponent. Jack Brennan, who thinks he will
lose the fight anyway, bets 50 grand on his opponent to win.
Hemingway,
a noted amateur boxer, was a huge boxing fan. He knew the sport and the
parasitic crooks who clung to the fighters like remoras to sharks.
A good companion to the Library of
America’s Hemingway book
is the Cambridge University Press’s “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway 1934-1936.”
In her introduction to the volume, Dr. Verna Kale, associate
editor of the Hemingway
Letters Project, wrote, “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway:
Volume 6 (1934–1936) is a book about fish. It is about other things as well, of
course: writing and art, friendship and fatherhood, the ongoing Great
Depression and the rising threat of fascism in Europe. And fish — so many fish.”
The Hemingway
letters cover the publication of Hemingway’s experimental
nonfiction book “Green Hills of Africa” and his work on short stories, his
twenty-plus pieces in Esquire magazine and his view of other writers.
Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and
thrillers.
Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms & Other writings. 1927-1932
Edited by Robert W.
Trogdon
Library of
America, $32, 1037 pages
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway 1934-1936
Edited by Sandra
Spanier, Verna Kale and Miriam B. Mandal
Cambridge University Press, $45, 700 pages
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