The Hemingway Caper

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

The Hemingway Caper is the second Joe Barley Mystery. Barley is the
fourth series sleuth created by Eric Wright, whose 10 novels featuring
Charlie Salter constitute the finest series of police procedurals
Canadian crime fiction has given the world. It is disappointing,
therefore, to report that this new book is far from Wright’s best.

Wright was a professor of English at Ryerson University, then chair of
the department, and finally Dean of Arts; Joe Barley is a part-time
lecturer in English at a Toronto university and part-time employee of a
detective agency. He was introduced in The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn
(2000), a delightful, light, and witty book that nicely balanced Joe’s
relationship with his live-in partner; Carole, and her family, the
sometimes hilarious departmental politics at Joe’s college; and an
intriguing mystery.

The same three elements make up The Hemingway Caper, but the balance
has gone awry. Is the principal part of the story the politicking going
on at the college to choose a new chair of the English department, or
does it just seem that way because these scenes eventually become
tedious? There is more here, too, about his relationship with Carole and
her sister, but the mystery—involving the possible reappearance 20
years after they were allegedly stolen of some early story drafts
written by Ernest Hemingway during his Toronto years and now possibly
worth a million dollars—disappears for too many pages at a time.