The Crook Factory is about the semi-covert intelligence operations which Ernest Hemmingway coordinated in Cuba for the War effort in 1942. The events during this period are recounted by a fictional FBI agent who is assigned by J. Edgar Hoover to keep an eye on Hemmingway and make sure that any 'real' intelligence makes it back to Washington.
As always Dan Simmons employs a very tactile writing style which puts the reader in the center of the action. He does an excellent job of blurring the lines between his artistic embellishment and the actual events which took place during this time. He makes nice use of real people, e.g. J. Edgar Hoover, Ian Fleming, Marlene Dietrich and others, to provide authenticity to the book. Thankfully enough, in his afterword, he lets the reader in on the secret of which parts were fact and which were fiction.
I should mention that Dan Simmons is one of my all-time favorite authors.
Everything he writes I end up reading eventually. Unlike many current-day authors he jumps across genres, Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, in an adroit manner. Like Simmons' The Fires of Eden, a book about Mark Twain's adventures in Hawaii, this book falls into category of Historical Fiction, i.e. real events told in a fictional way to make them more palatable to a modern-day audience.
Compared to others in that genre, of which I must admit some unfamiliarity, I guess The Crook Factory stands quite well. But for me, compared to the best of his other works, it wasn't that exciting. The whole exercise reminded me a research project on Hemmingway gone awry.
Strangely enough I have noticed a recent tendency of some of my favorite authors to broach related subjects. In particular, Ernest Hemmingway (The Hemmingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman) and Cryptography (Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson).
If you want to get a feel for how great a writer Dan Simmons can be this is NOT the place to start. May I suggest Carrion Comfort or Hyperion? I think you will enjoy them much more.
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