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No picker and chooser of ways and means, he turns a neat trick on a bunch of Chinese by arranging to ferry them over from Cuba to the Keys, accepts their money, then kills their leader and abandons the rest. Then his luck turns bad. A flier at rum-running results in the confiscation of his boat, the loss of an arm. So the way is paved to the last, most desperate venture of all—an attempt to provide a getaway, in a borrowed boat, for a quartet of bank robbers fleeing from a hold-up at Key West. Morgan's previous forays had been characterized by double-dealing on the part of all concerned, but in this one the cards are on the table: he knows that unless he kills them first the four will most certainly kill him, as soon as he has landed them in Cuba and his usefulness to them is ended. He kills them, but not before he has received his own death-wound. In the Coast Guard cutter that has picked him up, half-delirious, dying, he tries to voice the dictum that is the book's real motto: " 'A man,' he said. " 'Sure,' said the "captain. 'Go on.' " 'A man,' said Harry Morgan, very slowly. 'Ain't got no hasn't got any can't really isn't any way out.' He stopped. There had been no expression on his face at all when he spoke . . .
"The captain and the mate both bent over him. Now it was coming. 'Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere ... I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.' He stopped. The captain shook his head at the mate again. Harry Morgan looked at him flatly. The captain wet Harry's lips again. They made a bloody mark on the towel.
" 'A man,' Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. 'One man alone ain't got. No man alone now.' He stopped. 'No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody —* chance.'
"He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all of his life to learn it.''
The major part of the book is given over to Morgan's career. This, with its hard, brisk sea-scenes, its sudden shocks of death, is uniformly convincing. Interspersed in the chronicle, however, are snapshot glimpses of life on its various planes on the Keys: War veterans sent to build the Keys highway, punch-drunk and turbulent, brawling in one of the bars; writers from the artists' colony amorously intriguing; rich yachtsmen, cabdrivers. These candidoes, written too deliberately from the "slice-of-life" point of view, too fortuitously presented in the plot, are not always so fortunate. But most readers will agree that Author Hemingway can rest well content with the knowledge that in Harry Morgan, hard, ruthless, implacable in his lonely struggle, he has created by far his most thoroughly consistent, deeply understandable character.