Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Chronicling Ernest Hemingway's Relationship With The Soviets

Nicholas Reynolds, author of a new book on Hemingway, was interviewed on NPR.

CIA archivist Nicholas Reynolds discusses his new book, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures. It describes Hemingway's relationship with Soviet intelligence.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

You'd think it might be hard to find new insights into one of the most famous lives in literature, but Nicholas Reynold's new book does just that - "Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures," which reveals a secret that a writer who stripped them from the lives of others concealed in his own - that he'd offered to be a spy for Soviet intelligence and tried to spy for the U.S., too, during World War II.

Nicholas Reynolds, a former historian at the CIA Museum, joins us in our studios. Thanks so much for being with us.

NICHOLAS REYNOLDS: It's my pleasure.

SIMON: I'll explain in the interest of full disclosure, I'm on the Hemingway Council. Now, Hemingway is perhaps the best known American novelist. And even before he wrote "For Whom The Bell Tolls," he went off to witness the Spanish Civil War and crossed from being a journalist into a participant, didn't he?

REYNOLDS: Absolutely. So Hemingway before the Spanish Civil War was largely apolitical. And it was only in the Spanish Civil War that he starts to develop his own signature brand of politics. And if I had to characterize them in two or three words, I'd say anti-fascism is the governing idea there.

SIMON: And that wound up putting him in touch with elements of the Soviet espionage establishment?

REYNOLDS: That's exactly right. In Spain, on the anti-fascist side, the only serious support was from the Soviet Union. On the fascist side, that is, the nationalists, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were supporting Francisco Franco.

You can listen to the interview and/or read the rest of the transcript via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/18/520631331/chronicling-ernest-hemingways-relationship-with-the-soviets 

Frederick Forsyth, Thrilling In Real Life

NPR.org offers an interview with British thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, author of the classic thriller, The Day of the Jackal and The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue.

Gotta grab a reader with the first sentence? Here's one from Fredrick Forsyth: "We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one."

Forsyth has written masterful thrillers for more than 40 years, from The Day of the Jackal to The Dogs of War to The Odessa File and The Kill List. He's said he won't write an autobiography. But he doesn't mind sharing a few stories about the life and times that have shaped him, and his work.

"It was a very simple little mistake, I suppose," Forsyth tells NPR about almost starting a war. "I was in East Berlin, middle of the night, 2 a.m., motoring back through the city, towards the wall, and suddenly I was just assaulted by division after division of Soviet troops, rolling through the city towards the wall. And I was the Reuters correspondent, and I thought, what do I do, I can't not file, so I just filed what I'd seen — well, apparently, I woke up the whole of the Western world. What they found out, around dawn, by ringing up Moscow and saying, 'what the hell are you doing,' was that it was the rehearsal for the May Day parade!"

You can read the rest of the piece and listen to the interview via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/17/449158992/frederick-forsyth-thrilling-in-real-life

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Frederick Forsyth via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/09/on-crime-thrillers-frederick-forsyth.html

NPR: Revisiting A Suburbia-Gone-Sour In Ross McDonald's Crime Fiction

The Library of America has published four of Ross Macdonald's crime novels and Maureen Corrigan offers her view of the late great crime writer at NPR.

Ross Macdonald had a smart answer to the tedious question of why he devoted his considerable talents to writing "mere" detective stories: Macdonald said that the detective story was "a kind of welder's mask enabling writers to handle dangerously hot material." Like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (the great hard-boiled masters whom he revered), Macdonald set out to excavate the dark depths of American life, but to find his own "dangerously hot material" Macdonald descended into uncharted territory. His hard-boiled predecessors had walked the mean streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles; Macdonald moved to the suburbs — a California landscape of mortgaged dreams that already seems exhausted in the four mystery novels of the 1950s reprinted in this Library of America collection. All those images of suburbia-gone-sour that distinguish the work of a John Cheever, Richard Ford, Tom Perrotta, or even the early seasons of Mad Men owe something to Macdonald's penetrating vision.  

You can read the rest of the piece or listen to it via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/21/401222454/revisiting-a-suburbia-gone-sour-in-ross-macdonalds-crime-fiction

'Justified' Creator Aims To Stay True To The Late Writer Elmore Leonard

Terry Gross at NPR's Fresh Air interviewed Graham Yost, the producer of TV's Justified, the crime show based on the late great crime writer Elmore Leonard's novella, Fire in the Hole.

The FX series Justified, which is in its sixth and final season, is based on the novella Fire in the Hole by Elmore Leonard. Leonard was an executive producer of the series until his death in 2013. The show's creator and showrunner, Graham Yost, says he has made it his mission to stay as true as he can to Leonard's vision and storytelling style.

"Ultimately I look at this show as Elmore Leonard's show, and we're all in service of him and his view and his way of writing and creating these characters," Yost tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "So whatever feels like it works within that world is something we're open to."

Set in Harlan County, Ky., which is coal mining country, the story revolves around two men who have known each other since they were in the mines together as teens: Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, and Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins. Raylan is now a deputy U.S. marshal and Boyd is an outlaw whose criminal activities include robbing banks. Raylan wants to move to Florida to reconnect with his ex-wife and their 5-month-old child, but first he wants to bring Boyd down, which means catching him when he pulls off his next heist.

The show is violent, but Yost says he and the writers have to walk a line to keep the network happy.

"Elmore's world is a violent world," he says. "In the best Elmore scenes, you think that something is either going to take a hard turn into romance and some kind of liaison, or it's going to take it the other way and go into violence. There's often something oddly humorous about the violence in Elmore's movies and in his books."

You can read the rest of the piece and listen to NPR's audio clip via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/26/395534419/justified-creator-aims-to-stay-true-to-the-late-writer-elmore-leonard

Note: You can also read my Crime Beat column on Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite writers, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/05/return-to-elmoreland-elmore-leonards.html

NPR Books: A Cure For Sochi-Fatigue, Shaken Not Stirred

To combat Sochi-fatigue, Lev Grossman recomends reading one of the best of Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The Sochi Winter Olympics haven't been short on drama: The Russians upset the South Koreans in figure skating; the Dutch upset us in speed-skating; everybody got upset about Bob Costas's eye infection. But after two weeks and a great deal of curling, a certain amount of Sochi fatigue is setting in. So it might be refreshing to look back at one of the iconic heroes of winter sports: Agent 007 himself, James Bond.

Bond's career as a winter athlete peaks in Ian Fleming's 11th novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond's nemesis Blofeld, having spent his ill-gotten gains on an alp, has set himself up in a remote, super-exclusive ski resort near St. Moritz (which happens to be the site of both the 1928 and 1948 winter Olympics). Bond decides to infiltrate the place. It doesn't hurt that the resort doubles as a health spa for ski bunnies who appear to be suffering from chronic sexiness.

... On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the epitome of mid-century Alpine glamor, full of apres-ski trysts and flasks full of schnapps and blonds in tight sweaters and exciting-sounding Swiss-German ski terminology like langlaufing. But what makes it truly great is that unlike the Bond films, it's not a hymn to human invulnerability. Bond's knees tremble; his ankles ache; he's constantly worrying about his outdated skiing style and lousy form — "keep forward, you bastard!" he tells himself. "Get your hands way in front of you!"

You can read the rest of the piece and listen to the NPR broadcast via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2014/02/21/280759118/a-cure-for-sochi-fatigue-shaken-not-stirred

Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop': Journalism Is A Duplicitious Business

Alexander Nazaryan at NPR looks at the state of journalism and looks back at Evelyn Waugh's classic satiric novel Scoop. 

In only a few years, a child will ask a parent about newspapers: What was their purpose? What did people do with them, and why? The parent, a little flummoxed, will explain that, long before biosensitive data aggregators simply uploaded information into the neurons of our frontal cortexes, people actually read the news by holding a piece of paper in front of their noses and scanning columns of text with their eyes. There were many such newspapers, to be read in the morning, over breakfast, and in the evening, over scotch. The newspapers competed with each other by sending actual people out into the actual world to report what had taken place, was going to take place — or, even, was alleged to have taken place but didn't. On days when there was little so-called news to report, the newspapers filled their pages with stories about, say, puppies who could recite Macbeth or people who wore jeggings to work. Also, there were crosswords.

Of course, this fictional parent could give his/her fictional child Evelyn Waugh's Scoop — a fictional 1938 tale of British foreign correspondents reporting on a civil war in the fictional East African country of Ishmaelia. Fictional, yes, but to a journalist like myself, most everything about the novel is too real. Waugh was a master at mixing humor and pathos, as evidenced by his two most ambitious novels: A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. Scoop, on the other hand, is all laughter, of the sort that will make the person next to you on the subway think you have problems. Every time I read it, I miss the glory days of the ink-stained art — but also see why they have come to an end.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2013/06/16/189218139/evelyn-waughs-scoop-journalisms-a-duplicitous-business

Istanbul: A City Of Spies In Fact And Fiction

 

 

Two of my favorite thrillers, Eric Ambler's Journey Into Fear and Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love, take place in Istanbul, so I was interested in NPR's look at the Turkish city and its history of spies in fact and fiction.

Headlines today in Turkey feature stories of alleged Iranian spies, gathering information about Kurdish militants who are responsible for many deaths in Turkey this summer.

But these tales of deception and intrigue pale in comparison with the city's storied past as a mecca for spies. Turkey's golden age of espionage was World War II, a period that continues to serves as a muse for writers of historical thrillers.

You can listen the NPR broadcast and read the story via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/09/160771041/istanbul-a-city-of-spies-in-fact-and-fiction

Wiseguy Henry Hill Has A Permanent Place In Mobster Lore

Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, a book that chronicled the life of crime of a street hoodlum named Henry Hill, was published 25 years ago. The book was later made into Martin Scorsese's classic crime film Goodfellas.

A 25th anniversary edition of Wiseguy is coming out and Nicholas Pileggi appeared on NPR to discuss the book and Henry Hill.

Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy remains one of the signal narratives about life in the Mafia. Adapted by Pileggi and director Martin Scorsese into the 1990 film GoodFellas, it follows the rise and fall of true-life Brooklyn gangster Henry Hill — "a little cog" in the Lucchese crime family who turned FBI informant after a drug arrest.

He was sort of a soldier in Napoleon's army," Pileggi remembers. "And I said, 'You know, if you're going to do a book about Napoleon, it might be interesting to see that world from the point of view of the soldier.' "

You can listen to Pileggi and/or read about Wiseguy via the below link:

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/27/140804164/for-one-wiseguy-a-permanent-place-in-mobster-lore