I Killed Hemingway

Was Ernest Hemingway a plagiarist? Did he thirst after the blood of matadors? Was there more to his relationship with Gertrude Stein than he let on? What really happened to the suitcase full of irreplaceable manuscripts that Hadley lost at the train station? And was Hemingway's suicide, in fact, a cold-blooded murder?These are only a few of the scandalous questions raised by one "Pappy" Markham of Key West, an irascible old derelict with a sixty-year grudge against his alleged pal and larcenous protege, Ernest Hemingway. Eager for his story, publisher Warren & Dudge dispatches literary hack Elliot McGuire to edit the manuscript. When Elliot, a none-too-stable ex-Hemingway scholar himself, discovers there's nothing on paper, he agrees to a scam - in exchange for Pappy's advance, he'll ghost a manuscript. It's an ill-fated entry into the snake pit of Pappy's bizarre world, and Elliot barely makes it back to New York with his mind and soul intact after a rough ride through the fantasy landscape of Hemingway's Paris and beyond. When Pappy's "memoir" I Killed Hemingway is an instant best-seller and Pappy a riotous hit on the talk-show circuit, a remorseful Elliot must try to turn back the forces he helped unleash - as a hungry national media turns scandal into history revised.William McCranor Henderson has written a masterfully comic, inventive, and provocative novel.