The Crook Factory

Based on the real-life story of Ernest Hemingway's amateur spy ring in Cuba during the Second World War, The Crook Factory is Dan Simmons' fictionalized version of the events that took place in 1942-43 in and around Hemingway's Cuban villa.

]It is meticulously researched and a good story, but it fell flat for me in a couple of ways. First, there are a few too many winks at the reader, statements made by characters of the mid-20th century that any reader in the 21st century would know to be wrong. One particularly clunky example:

“‘Rather more [J Edgar Hoover's] style to haul you up in front of a Senate committee investigating Communist infiltration and discredit you or send you to jail'
‘There's no such thing as a witch-hunt committee like that,' said Hemingway.”

Second, it felt at times that nothing of what Simmons found in the archives was left out of the book. The story is fascinating, but the way it is presented, it is overburdened by detail and research. As he has Hemingway state at one point, “Only you have to avoid showing off... parading all the things you know like marching captured soldiers through the capitol.”

In his other historical fictions, Drood and The Terror, Simmons does an excellent job of not letting his research get in the way. The Crook Factory was originally published in 1999 (this is a re-release by Mulholland Books), and maybe, by the time he wrote the later novels, Simmons learned how to incorporate his research more naturally into the narrative.

Perhaps the best review is done by the narrator himself. At the end of the book, he is reflecting on his time with Hemingway, and the best way to write about it. “In later years, Hemingway was quoted as saying that a novel was like an iceberg–seven-eighths of it should be invisible.... I knew that I would never be good enough as a writer to tell the story that way.”