Carl D. Malmgren

There was always a dark and violent underside and an air of unreality to the expatriate scene in Paris in the twenties. Paris Metro explores the place where cosmopolitan café life turns deadly and the lines between fiction and reality blur. Between the pages of this novel, new fictional characters mix and mingle with figures from classic American fiction and real-life expatriate celebrities. Paris Metro depicts the glamour, spirit, and decadence of the “lost generation” and at the same time solves the unsolved murder from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

With a Guggenheim fellowship, Nick Edwards comes to Paris in 1925 to report on the expatriate scene there and to re-connect with romantic interest and Hollywood ingénue, Rosemary Hoyt. He quickly meets and befriends not only Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and their ilk, but also characters out of their novels, most particularly those from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

Rosemary Hoyt arrives in the company of Dick and Nicole Diver, and Nick is pulled into the turbulence, mystery, and violence that beset the entourage. Nick and his friends indulge in a whirlwind of partying and sexual intrigue that only concludes when a murdered body is discovered in Hoyt’s hotel room.
 
Over the next 18 months, Nick consorts with the expatriate crowd, both in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur, sorts out his romantic life, and tries to answer the questions that arise from his experiences in the City of Light: Did Hemingway give him the right advice about his love life? What exactly is going on between Rosemary Hoyt and Dr. Richard Diver? How did a dead body end up in Rosemary Hoyt’s hotel room? Why did he come to Paris in the first place? Returning to Paris in fall of 1926, Nick celebrates the publication of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises with his expatriate cohorts and finally solves the “Diver case.”

Paris in the ‘20s: Cafés. Cosmopolites. Conversation. And Murder.

Here is how he describes the genesis of Paris Metro:

“I have been an avid Europhile all my life, and for the past few years my research interests and teaching assignments have focused on the theme of Americans abroad. I am particularly interested in the life, times, and work of the expatriate writers in the Paris circle in the ‘20s, in no small part because I lived in Paris for a year as a Fulbright scholar. Over time I realized that my attitude towards these writers was profoundly ambivalent. I admired their writings; some of the best American fiction of the 20th century was composed in France in the ‘20s. I liked the writers’ willingness to take chances and their openness to what Europe might offer. I especially liked Hemingway’s treatment of Paris in A Moveable Feast. At the same time I was put off by the coterie aspects of their life style, by their homophobia and misogyny, by their self-indulgence.

I realized that the best way to deal with my complex feelings was to put them on paper, and that one way to do that was to write a novel. So I began Paris Metro, a mystery novel with footnotes, in which my protagonist Nick Edwards goes to Paris in 1925 to report on the expatriate scene there and quickly meets and befriends not only Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein and their ilk, but also characters out of their novels, most particularly those from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Over the next 18 months, Nick consorts with the expatriate crowd, both in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur, sorts out his romantic life, and tries to answer the questions that come from his experiences in the City of Light: Did Hemingway give him the right advice about his love life? What exactly is going on between Rosemary Hoyt and Dr. Richard Diver? How did a dead body end up in Rosemary Hoyt’s hotel room? Why did he come to Paris in the first place? Returning to Paris in fall of 1926, Nick celebrates the publication of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises with his expatriate cohorts and finally solves the “Diver case.”

So why did I put real people in a work of fiction? Hemingway and Fitzgerald were two of the 20th century’s first celebrities and achieved “larger than life” status in their lifetimes. So I incorporated them into the novel in order to explore the ways in which real-life celebrity foregrounds and interrogates the supposedly clear-cut distinction between life and art. The clarity of this distinction is, of course, one of the main themes of the novel.”

Paris Metro is a thoroughly researched historical novel, which relies on numerous footnotes in to establish its factual veracity, to provide appropriate contexts, and to direct readers to other sources. At the same time it is a portrait of café life in the ‘20s, a coming-of-age novel, and a whodunnit.

Paris Metro is part of a planned tetralogy, the remaining volumes to be set in Hollywood in the ‘30s, London near the end of World War II, and Florida in the ‘50s. Malmgren is currently doing research for the second volume, tentatively titled Hollywood Nights, which finds Nick working as a scriptwriter for Warner Brothers during the long hot summer of 1932, as Los Angeles braces for the start of the Summer Olympics and a serial killer stalks the film sound stage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carl D. Malmgren is a Research Professor at the University of New Orleans, where he teaches courses in narrative and literary theory. He has written two other non-fiction books, Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel (Bucknell UP, 1985) and Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction (Indiana UP, 1991)

His debut novel, Paris Metro (Omega Publications, 2010) is a you are there stroll through the streets of Paris in 1925 with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Stearns. City of Light it may be, but Paris brought out secrets and lies from the lost generation, as well as incredible literature. When a murder occurs, our protagonist, Nick Edwards becomes an inadvertent sleuth, digging into things that happened long ago, providing a possible solution to a murder or two. Paris Metro won the 2009 Omega Publications novel contest.