The Young Man and the Spree

A tantalizing pronouncement appears at the start of We Were the Bullfighters: “This is a work of fiction, except for the parts that are true.” A debut novelist and a member of the Hemingway Society, Marianne Miller draws upon the lives of Ernest Hemingway and a man known as the “Jesse James of Canada,” the notorious bank robber Norman “Red” Ryan. She crafts an adventurous and unexpected work of historical fiction that opens a window into the brief time Papa spent working for the Toronto Daily Star in the early 1920s.

The immersive first chapter describes a dramatic prison break from Kingston Penitentiary in September 1923. Five inmates — led by Ryan — torch a barn inside the complex. Under the cover of billowing black smoke and chaos, they scale the prison’s twenty-foot stone wall. After commandeering a car on the other side, the escapees are chased through the downtown by armed guards. They disappear into the bush on the outskirts of the city and...