Behind the Missing Mss. : THE HEMINGWAY HOAX : A Short Comic Novel of Existential Terror <i> by Joe Haldeman (William Morrow: $16.95; 155 pp.)</i>

A bright, short science fiction novel, Joe Haldeman’s quirky effort offers a unique solution to one of the enduring literary mysteries of our time: Just what DID happen to Ernest Hemingway’s missing manuscripts, lost in 1922 at the Gare de Lyon in Paris?

For Hemingway fans, Haldeman’s answer is a hoot, and as different a theory as you can find.

Historically, in 1922 Hadley Hemingway agreed to join Ernest skiing in Lausane. For some reason, she brought along a suitcase full of Hemingway maunscripts, finished and unfinished, and representing three years of work. She left the suitcase near her seat on a train at the Gare de Lyon in Paris to get a bottle of water. When she returned a short time later, the suitcase was gone. And to this day, has not resurfaced.

Haldeman posits this: A Hemingway scholar named John Baird, down on his luck in Key West, is persuaded by a slippery con man named Sylvestor Castlemaine, to do a Hemingway pastiche by reconstructing a novel that was/is supposedly/possibly in the missing suitcase. With the help of a specially altered 1921 Corona typewriter and correctly aged paper, Baird will then produce a manuscript to fool scholars--and consequently, make himself and his wife, and Castlemanine, a fortune.

But of course, being that Haldeman’s slim novel is a mystery, nothing is as simple as it seems.

An entity representing an aptly mysterious regulatory force in the Omniverse (where many temporalities exist concurrently with each other, including our day and age) appears to Baird, and tries several times, on several different time lines, to get Baird to cease and desist in his literary fakery. Usually, by killing off Baird. But Baird just reappears in another time line, one which is just slightly askew from the previous one.

To add icing to the mystery, this entity appears to Baird as Ernest Hemingway, at various ages in his life. And though the entity is pretty knowledgeable historically, he hasn’t a clue as to the real relationship between Baird and Hemingway.

And therein lies Haldeman’s tale.

Haldeman, to keep the tone properly Hemingwayesque, writes in a short, sparse style. He’s liberal with color, tension, graphic sex and violence, all of which move the story at a no-nonsense clip. Even his chapter titles are borrowed from Papa. And it all provides a swift and entertaining read, even though we don’t really know the mysterious entity’s reasons for wanting to stop the production of the fake novel. Nevertheless, Haldeman has, to say the least, created an interesting conjecture as to the culprit behind the still-missing Hemingway manuscripts.