Hunting for Hemingway

Nearly ninety years later, David Barnes, a womanizing academic from City College in Chicago and an expert on Ernest Hemingway, claims he has recovered these lost Hemingway works — 11 stories and 20 poems — and is putting them up for auction. They are worth millions. 

Controversy swirls. Could they be real or are they fake? Then David is murdered. The unexamined manuscripts cannot be found. Were they stolen, or was their entire existence a hoax? 

Enter DD McGil and American Insurance. DD is a late-thirties fallen academic whose current profession, freelance insurance investigation, she likens to “jumping from ice floe to ice floe.” American Insurance has, perhaps unwisely, insured these missing manuscripts. American Insurance’s CEO, Mitch King, chooses DD to investigate the disappearance of the Hemingway manuscripts because she knew David Barnes at one time, she has formal training in literature, and, most importantly, he is trying to get DD back into bed. 

DD’s entire life can be symbolized by the fact that she is forced to use her initials instead of her actual name. She loves sports and men, but at thirty-nine, living alone with her Ragdoll cat, faces the reality of having no millions in the bank, no Nobel Prize and no Prince Charming in her bed. 

In DD’s mission to recover the manuscripts, if genuine, or to prove that they are fakes, she’s aided and abetted by her friend, Tom Joyce, Chicago’s well-known antiquarian book dealer. They love puzzles but don’t like being targets. Then DD’s asked to investigate how some high security software is being dumped on the open market, and suddenly she’s not sure who’s aiming to stop her. 

The identity of the murderer is revealed in a climatic scene set in the old Graue Mill, a working grist mill in Chicago’s western suburbs that was once a stop on the Underground Railway near Hemingway’s boyhood home of Oak Park. The whereabouts of the missing manuscripts remain a mystery, and throughout the novel, readers ask themselves, “Could Hemingway’s lost manuscripts still be out there somewhere?” 

ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S 1923 PASSPORT PHOTO – No. 359666 

Quotes 

“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics’ – Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, 1945, Selected Letters 

Model Corona #3 Similar to Hemingway's Typewriter 1921-1922

Here are a few stories about Hemingway’s Corona #3 Typewriter from 1921 – 1922 

Reference: Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 1969, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons. 

(1) Page 80 

“…(Hadley Richardson) gave him a Corona typewriter for his twenty-second birthday…” 

This would have been July 21, 1921. 

They were married later that year 9/3/21 and left for Europe in Dec 1921. 

(2) Page 90 

He sent this poem he wrote about his new Corona to Harriet Monroe in Chicago in February, 1922: 

“The mills of the gods grind slowly; 

But this mill 

Chatters in mechanical staccato, 

Ugly short infantry of the mind, 

Advancing over difficult terrain, 

Make this Corona 

Their mitrailleuse.” 

(3) Page 97 

On Sept. 25, 1922, Hemingway left for Constantinople to cover the war between Greece and Turkey. 

“The taxi to the Gare de Lyon on the night of September 25th was driven by a drunken chauffeur who hurled Ernest’s suitcase out of the cab with such exuberance that the Corona typewriter inside was useless to him all through the long trip south. “