The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris
Check out today’s featured ThrillerFest 2017 debut author Shaun Harris and his new thriller, The Hemingway Thief! See what he has to say about how he’d kill off his beloved hero, Henry “Coop” Cooper!
BookTrib: If you were on death row, what would be your last read? Why?
Shaun Harris: I suppose the smart-ass answer would be Escape from Alcatraz and the smart answer would be Criminal Law and Its Processes by Kadish, Schulhofer and Barkow. I’ll be nice, however, and take the question as it was intended. So the last book I’ll ever read while sitting in a confined grey and unhappy place? Probably best to leave the Cormac McCarthy alone then less I end up doing the State’s job on my own. I think I’d want to read something new. Years ago when I was working in a bookstore I spotted the cover of Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop The Carnival. It was colorful and intriguing and seemed right up my alley, but I never got around to reading it. Wouk’s a pro so you know you’re not risking a bad book for your last go around and it’s set in the Caribbean which I think would be a nice change of pace from the Green Mile.
BT: If you were going to kill off your protagonist what method would you use? Why?
SH: I would never kill Coop. I just love him too much. That being said it would have to be something comically appropriate as is my wont. It’ll start with Coop winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and it will be presented to him by Harrison Ford wearing his Blade Runner costume. It will be a glorious moment for Coop and a validation of his entire existence, but wait! From the shadows, his heels clicking across the stage like the chitin-covered legs of a scorpion, it’s John “The Hitman” Grisham. Just as Coop is about to touch the golden face of Arthur Nobel Grisham snatches it away and pummels poor Coop to death with it right there in front of Jonathan Franzen and everyone. And as Coop breathes his last dying breath he will hear John Grisham whisper in his ear, “The defense rests, bitch.”
BT: What is the all-time best thriller you have read? Why?
SH: Can I say The Hemingway Thief? No, okay, then I’ll have to go with Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard. Some might say it’s not a thriller, but to those people I say, I hope John Grisham beats you to death with some award that means something to you. I rarely read a book more than once, but I’ve read Get Shorty at least four times. I first read it right after the movie came out. I was still in high school at the time and I hadn’t read a lot crime novels. There was a line in the movie about Chili Palmer’s wife and for whatever reason I wanted to know why she wasn’t in the movie. I picked up the book and it blew me away. The language, and in particular the dialogue, was something I had never seen before and I can’t think of anybody else that gets it quite right. I can say that because Leonard is dead now and no one is going to say they’re as good as him. That’s the rules. You can’t claim to be as good as a dead man.
Head over to Amazon now to purchase Shaun Harris’ The Hemingway Thief!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Novelist Henry “Coop” Cooper is contemplating a new book between sipping rum and lounging on a Baja beach with hotel owner, Grady Doyle. When Grady tries to save a drunk from two thugs, Coop tags along for the sake of a good story. The drunk is Ebbie Milch, a small-time thief on the run in Mexico because he has stolen the never-before seen first draft of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast from a wealthy rare book dealer.
The stolen manuscript is more than just a rare piece of literary history. It reveals clues to an even bigger prize: the location of a suitcase the young, unpublished Hemingway lost in Paris in 1922. A year’s worth of his stories had vanished, never to be seen again. Until now.
But Coop and Grady aren’t the only ones with their eyes on this elusive literary prize, and what starts as a hunt for a legendary writer’s lost works becomes a deadly adventure. For Coop this story could become the book of a lifetime . . . if he lives long enough to write it.
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