Shaun Harris
In the rollicking style of crime novelist Carl Hiaasen — and with confident knowledge of pop culture and literary license — Sauk County author Shaun Harris has penned The Hemingway Thief (Seventh Street Books), a debut novel about four misfits on an epic road trip through northern Mexico’s drug cartel country.
Novelist Henry “Coop” Cooper’s agent sends him to a shoddy tourist motel in Baja, Mexico, for inspiration. Under the silly pseudonym Toulouse Velour, Cooper has written several romance bestsellers about a Scottish vampire detective named Alasdair MacMerkin, but he wants to retire the character and write something more literary. That origin story alone makes for worthwhile reading.
But Harris, who lives in the village of La Valle, northwest of Reedsburg, is just getting started.
One night, after two thugs beat up the hotel bar’s only other patron, a young drunk exquisitely named Ebbie Milch, Coop and hotel owner Grady Doyle are launched into the middle of one of literature’s most enduring mysteries.
In December 1922, while Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, was traveling by train from Paris to Geneva to join her husband, someone pilfered a brown valise containing the only copies of the author’s works in progress.
In The Hemingway Thief, Milch, a small-time grifter, is on the run with a stolen first-draft manuscript of Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast. That manuscript contains clues to the location of the missing valise, and Coop, Doyle, Milch and the hotel’s stoned handyman Digby pursue the literary holy grail. The only hitch: Other treasure hunters are on the trail, too, and they’re willing to kill for the prize.
Filled with plot turns on almost every page, the book is loaded with references to Mufasa and Obi Wan Kenobi, Styx, Romancing the Stone, SpongeBob SquarePants, Nicholas Sparks, The Brady Bunch and — hilariously so — “John Fucking Grisham.”
At turns witty, smart, violent and poignant, The Hemingway Thief becomes an adventure story in which the four main characters share a common mission while also seeking their own fresh starts.
In the end, narrator Coop winds up with one hell of a story that makes his vampire tales read like The Bobbsey Twins series, and Harris emerges with a memorable hardboiled caper that should establish him as one of the genre’s most-promising new writers.
Shaun Harris will discuss The Hemingway Thief at Mystery to Me, 1863 Monroe St., on Friday, Aug. 5, at 7 p.m.