“Wrestling with Demons: In Search of the Real Ernest Hemingway”

Retired Chico State business professor Curt DeBerg, now living in Miami and Hendaye, France, is obsessed with unraveling a mystery about Ernest Hemingway.

“Hemingway went through four wives,” he writes, “alienated his three sons, and betrayed more friends than you can count on two hands. The winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature saw the killing of bulls at the corridas in Spain; he gaffed marlin and bluefin tuna off the coasts of Havana and Key West, and he slayed big-game animals in Africa and grizzly bears in Montana. He was self-absorbed, and narcissistic. He told great yarns in the bars of Paris, Pamplona and Havana.”

Hemingway was driven to be seen as a hero’s hero whose own exploits fed his novels. The truth is more complicated. As a young man, Hemingway, working for the Red Cross, was wounded when a mortar shell exploded in a frontline trench during World War I; his fellow soldier, Fedele Temperini, died next to him. 

Hemingway made much of his own (relatively minor) wounds and concocted a story of how he tried to save Temperini, when in reality Temperini, the true hero, shielded Hemingway from the blast. 

In “Wrestling with Demons: In Search of the Real Ernest Hemingway” (publication information available on DeBerg’s website, curtdeberg.com) the author identifies five “demons” that shaped Hemingway: “his parents’ disapproval, remorse, chronic pain, anguish, and a deep-seated sense of rivalry with other writers and war combatants.” Fear of being found a fake pushed him on.

The book is unique. Each section begins with a letter to Hemingway as DeBerg explores Hemingway’s favorite haunts; that’s followed by a fictional conversation with MDH (“modern day Hemingway”), a biographical essay and finally a warts-and-all memoir in which DeBerg draws out similarities with Hemingway (DeBerg survived a debilitating light plane crash; Hemingway survived two).

This is Hemingway: “Safaris, deep-sea fishing, booze, Europe, women, sex, adultery, plane crashes, betrayals, injuries, illnesses and, finally, suicide.” For DeBerg, “This book has allowed me to address, and even exorcise, some of my own demons as I refer to a famous, larger-than-life man who is, in a very personal way, my kindred spirit.”

“The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations”

Anthony (Tony) Colburn, who ran track and field under coach Larry Burleson at Chico State, graduated in 1974. Now living in North Carolina, Colburn has turned his love of the Bay Area, Lake Tahoe and the old goldfields of Nevada into a historical novel focusing at first on San Francisco around the start of the twentieth century.

But that’s not the end of the story. His characters, intertwined with real events, leave a legacy that is only realized very much later. “The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations” ($14.95 in paperback from Luminare Press; also for Amazon Kindle) refers not only to San Francisco but to a massive ferryboat. 

As Matthew and Julia discover in our own time, “There were a number of boats built right in the city along the water front south of where the Bay Bridge is now. The ‘Golden City’ was one of those vessels; a classic double ender with a coal fired steam engine, side paddle wheels, with a large ‘walking I beam’ transferring power to the wheels via a huge single piston.”

Our hero, Matthew Donohue, is born in Carson City, Nevada, in 1885, of an Irish immigrant father and a mother who is a housekeeper to a womanizing US Senator. Matthew has periodic visions of horrific scenes yet to come but, after working as a ferryman at Lake Tahoe, decides to make his fortune in San Francisco. There he meets Julia, the young daughter of parents who own a music store. 

The first part of the book seems sweetness and light, as Matthew is determined to impress Julia’s parents (who hold working-class Matthew, part of the Golden City’s crew, in low esteem) and ask for Julia’s hand in marriage, planned, it turns out, on the day of the big quake.

The novel turns dark in its description of the subsequent fires and the loss of life, and there’s a mystery about the fate of a gold bar Matthew possessed, with many more hidden aboard the ferry. Only a hundred years later is the truth revealed—by another Matthew and Julia. 

It’s 24-carat fun.

"In The Shadow Of The Hanging Tree"

For Portola novelist Michael McLellan (michaelamclellan.com) it started in Chico. "In 2010," he emails, "I bought the house my grandparents had purchased new in 1962 (a stone's throw from lower Bidwell Park) from my grandmother's estate. I wrote a fair portion of my first novel on a picnic table" near the creek. 

McLellan has produced in his third novel a searing tale of the 1860s, intertwining Southern slavery with massacres of Native Americans as white settlers expanded Westward. It is not for the squeamish.

"In The Shadow Of The Hanging Tree" ($15 in paperback from Sweet Candy Press; also for Amazon Kindle) begins in 1861 in Missouri, charting the horrific life of twenty-year-old Henry, a newly freed slave, attempting to escape the roaming militias intent on killing runaways.

Caught by Emmet Dawson and his band, Henry and his companion Eliza face almost certain death. They are taken to a big tree by the road. "There were six people hanging from the tree limb. Even with the blood from his cut face blinding one of his eyes, Henry saw more than he could bear: five men and one small boy, all slaves."

There is a parallel story. In 1865 John Elliot is expelled from West Point at the behest of influential East Coast businessman Jonathon Hanfield. He is shipped off to Fort Laramie in the Dakota Territory to assist Colonel Frank Picton "with the Indian situation." John, in love with Hanfield's daughter Clara, is also the son of Hanfield's rival.

Henry survives, recuperates with the Cheyenne, and becomes a military guide at Fort Laramie. When it becomes clear that Picton has formed a militia intent on fomenting an all-out race war against the indigenous peoples, Henry and John (now reunited with Clara) face stark choices. There is graphic violence (with the N-word used fifty times) in this deeply affecting, gut-punch of a novel.

"The white man only knows desire," Standing Elk tells Henry. "He knows nothing of contentment. ... The white soldiers murder without regard, but themselves are spiritless and go screaming into their own deaths as they were born into life. ... There can be no peace with such men."

"Widow Creek"

"It's a work of historical fiction about Mariah Hardwick Penngrove, a young woman who travels from Missouri to Northern California via wagon train in 1849." That's the straightforward description provided by Westwood writer Sarah Margolis Pearce for her novel "Widow Creek" ($12.99 in paperback from Lucky Bat Books; also for Amazon Kindle). Yet that barely scratches the surface; there are wonders here that transcend the genre.

Mariah keeps a journal, inspired by the writings of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Their own journal entries appear throughout the book as they, like Mariah, explore what is "beyond." 

Bamboozled by one Earl Penngrove into an ill-advised marriage and a long trip to California to collect a non-existent inheritance, Mariah becomes a widow during the journey but she is determined to carry on.

"I wondered about those thousands of miles Lewis and Clark explored," she writes. "What was out there in The Beyond? I did not dwell on the enormous space, the lonely miles, and the empty stretches that made your eyes sore from looking. Not then, at any rate. It was the not knowing what was next around the bend that captured my imagination."

She arrives in Remington River (readers will be reminded of Chester) which is on the path to Red Bluff, overlooked by Hasten Peak. A stage stop called Widow Creek Station plays an outsize role in Mariah's adventures, most notably with the notorious Californio Pajaro Mendonca, a Mexican born in California. 

There's a mutual attraction, though it is not long before Mariah is embroiled in a land dispute with a San Francisco tong leader who is also a prominent madam. Po Fong will stop at nothing to get what she wants—and she wants what Pajaro has hidden.

Mariah's writings are framed by a present-day historical investigation involving, among others, a Chico State University history major in prison for bank robbery. Somehow there's a connection between Mariah and three mysterious rocks discovered near Hasten Peak. Writings on them refer to her and Pajaro.

Pearce captures the joy of historical investigation in determining what's true. Is Pajaro really a bad guy? The answer is complicated--and so is this satisfying, beautifully crafted, and provocative novel.