To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway

I don't believe I'd read this one before. I've seen the movie, an enjoyable sort of Casablanca ripoff, but the book isn't like that. The movie was more about a guy setting aside his cynicism, and letting the honorable man inside out, whether he really wanted to or not. The book is about what hard times will drive a man to do.

It still prominently features Harry Morgan, and for the start of the book, he does own a charter fishing boat that he sometimes lets his rummy pal Eddy crew on. But when he turns to smuggling people, it's Chinese laborers, not resistance members. And, figuring a double cross, he kills the man he made the deal with, and dumps the laborers off back on Cuba, rather than delivering them to their destination. Things go downhill from there. The economic situation isn't getting any better, so he starts running liquor, then he agrees to ferry some bank robbers to Cuba. He feels he has no choice. He's almost broke, he has a family to support, and he sees this as his best option.

There's some other threads about a writer who didn't realize he was losing his wife, and some reflection on how the wealthy are generally indifferent to the suffering of the less fortunate, and if they bother to think of them at all, they don't understand them. It feels tacked on near the end, and only serves to dilute the book.

One thing that kept jarring me was the sheer number of times he used the word "nigger". He's used it in the other books, but not so frequently that it disrupts the flow of the book for me. So that didn't help, and then you throw in all the stuff about the wealthy right at the end, and that throws things off some more. The idea of all these people sleeping soundly in their yachts, worrying about their comparatively small problems, oblivious to the guy who's nearly dead because he felt he had to throw in with thieves, it isn't a bad one. He needed to do a better job threading it in earlier in the book, so it didn't just appear, poof!, at the last moment.