Hemingway's Killers

Hemingway writes phenomenal dialogue.

I've read his work, I've always known that, but every time I read something by him it still blows me away. It's simple, realistic without being "too real" (nothing feels like fluff, and there's none of the dullness that occurs in spoken conversation, no "ums" or "ehs" or stutters or accents), and reads very quickly.

I like the tone Hemingway establishes. This read like a scene out of Pulp Fiction, with us readers being thrust into the middle of a scene with no exposition whatsoever. We get an idea of what is going on while it's "safe"--something feels off, but at the same time, though something feels ominous, the shit has yet to hit the fan. We aren't surprised when we learn that Al and Max are hitmen--it was given to us in the title, and something about the respective subtleties of their dress, mannerisms, and speech tells us that we are in the midst of a steadily-rising action that is ready to peak at any moment. At the same time, we have three other named male characters who also seem to feel that something is, at least to some degree, off. The use of five male characters served, to me, as a clash with the smooth dialogue. The characters names are given to us at a deliberate pace and Hemingway has them speak in a deliberate order with intentional dialogue tags that make us read and reread the dialogue to figure out who is saying what to whom. I would not be strictly for this method of confusion in all works, but for the tone I felt like it worked, deliberately confusing us enough to amp up the impending sense of foreboding but not fully distracting us from what's going on.

Finally, I enjoyed the pacing of the piece. Again, this is a very Hemingway story. The sentences are short and read quickly, and the dialogue tags rarely, if ever, stray from a simple "he said" or "Max asked." Everything written is in some way compelling, but not in an over the top, information dump kind of way. Most bits of dialogue are no more than a line long; the longest individual "speech" of the entire story is four lines long, when the landlady describes Andreson's lack of movement all day. Everything else is two lines or less. I feel like we can learn a lot from this. I know, personally, that I can agonize over such things as word choice and order for hours on end, trying to "pretty up" a work and give it some type of "literary merit." And while I'm sure Hemingway agonized over his simple words and order, the piece reads as though he were simply a fly on the wall documenting everything in real time. It's something I would like to start emulating more in my own writing.