Ole Andreson
A Swedish former heavyweight boxer whom two gunmen come to a small American town to kill in 'The Killers'. He will not run.
Nothing that anyone can do for him. Asked in turn about the police, about leaving town, and about fixing it up some way, he says no to each, and says he is through with all that running around.
The book
At a glance
- A big Swede, formerly a heavyweight prizefighter
- Hirsch's rooming-house, three houses up a side street in Summit
- At Henry's lunch-room at six o'clock, which is how the gunmen know when to wait
- “I got in wrong” is all he says about it
- Nick Adams, sent by George the counterman
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeOle Andreson is the man at the centre of 'The Killers', one of the fourteen stories in Men Without Women, the 1927 collection by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, although he appears in only one scene of it and near the end. Two gunmen sit for two hours in a lunch-room in a small town called Summit, waiting to shoot him when he comes in for supper at six o'clock. He does not come.
Nick Adams, a young man who was at the counter when they arrived and spent the wait tied up in the kitchen, walks over to Hirsch's rooming-house afterwards to warn him. He finds Andreson lying on the bed with all his clothes on, his head on two pillows, facing the wall. He was a heavyweight prizefighter, and he is too long for the bed.
He already knows. He turns down every suggestion Nick makes, without turning round.
How the book draws them
- Too long for the bedThat is nearly the whole physical description the story gives him: a big man lying fully dressed on a rooming-house bed with his head on two pillows, and too long for it. He does not look at his visitor at any point in the conversation.
- He talks to the wallHe answers Nick looking at the wall, then rolls over to face it and keeps talking in the same flat voice. When Nick leaves and shuts the door, he is still lying there with all his clothes on, looking at the wall.
- He does not want the descriptionNick offers to tell him what the two men looked like. “I don't want to know what they were like,” Andreson says, and thanks him for coming to tell him about it.
- The only explanation he givesAsked whether he could fix it up some way, he says: “No. I got in wrong.” That is the entire account of why two men have been paid to kill him. George, back at the lunch-room, guesses that he double-crossed somebody in Chicago, and neither the story nor Andreson confirms it.
- The decision he has not made yet“The only thing is,” he says, talking toward the wall, “I just can't make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day.” A little later he says that after a while he will make up his mind to go out.
- How the woman downstairs describes himMrs. Bell, who looks after the rooming-house for its owner, tells Nick that Mr. Andreson has been in his room all day and she guesses he doesn't feel well, and that she suggested a walk on a nice fall day. “He's an awfully nice man. He was in the ring, you know.” You would never know it, she says, except from the way his face is. He is just as gentle.
The story never shows the killing and never returns to the room. Nick goes back to the lunch-room and reports that the man will not do anything, and George says they will kill him, and Nick says he guesses they will. The last thing the reader knows about Ole Andreson is that he is lying on a bed a few streets away, dressed, facing the wall, waiting until he can make up his mind to go outside.