Novel Exhumes Hemingway Mystery

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and that is what Chicago native Diane Gilbert Madsen discovered when researching her new novel, "Hunting for Hemingway."

The book follows DD McGil, an insurance investigator in her late-30s, as she hunts down Ernest Hemingway's missing manuscripts, which carry an estimated value in the millions. The story carefully meshes fact with reality, which leads Madsen to draw a comparison to Indiana Jones's cinematic pursuit of the Ark of the Covenant. Think real conquest, real locations, fictional characters.

In December 1922, Madsen explained, Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson, agreed to meet him in Geneva. Richardson was instructed to bring the manuscripts of her husband's early work. Along the way, the valise containing the manuscripts went missing at the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris. The leading theory is the valise was not lost, but stolen, along with the 22 short stories, 20 poems and unfinished novel found inside.

Madsen said her interest in writing the book was piqued by the real-life mystery surrounding the missing manuscripts – a mystery still unsolved nearly 90 years after the fact.

"I was very intrigued by the incident," Madsen said. "It's always traumatic to have something stolen, but you can replace a lot of things. You can't replace what you've written."

The reason the lost valise is of such importance is two-fold, she said; not only because of the author's legacy, but because of how losing something so personal affected Hemingway and his output thereafter.

"Hemingway had to start all over," Madsen said. "It's always interesting to speculate, and many of his friends and critics have speculated for years on what this meant to Hemingway. When he had to start over, was that perhaps better for him? And in a way, I think it might have been."

At the same time, you have a great loss, because he was working on ideas. We don't know whether he ever fulfilled some of the things he had started writing."

While Hemingway inevitably would go on to write revered works such as "A Farewell to Arms" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" after the Paris incident, it is "The Sun Also Rises" that Madsen declares her favorite. His incredible understanding of women, she noted, was a major selling point for her – a point not without irony of its own.

According to Hemingway historians and much of his own writing, he never forgave Richardson, and the manuscripts' disappearance is suspected as the main reason for their separation in 1927. Rediscovering the lost body of work, therefore, would go a long way to understanding Hemingway and maybe redeem Richardson in the process, Madsen said.

"Finding [Hemingway's manuscripts] is kind of like finding an extremely valuable painting – maybe a Michelangelo, or a new Rubens, or a new Rembrandt," she said. "It's something everybody would want to take a look at and read."

Now a resident of western Florida, Madsen hasn't forgotten her roots in the Chicago area. She returns Oct. 1 to launch "Hunting for Hemingway" at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, 200 N. Oak Park Ave.

She hopes the book will satisfy the curiosities of mystery fans and fiction lovers alike and lead into her next DD McGil mystery, covering the life and times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who penned the Sherlock Holmes novels.