“Now, he was going to Cuba to get this Castro. He didn’t know who Castro was, except that he was running Cuba and somebody didn’t want him to keep on with it. He didn’t care about this. He cared about twenty grand, which meant soft living for a long time.
Twenty grand could get you into a lot of big-breasted girls. You could drink a lot of premium beer, sleep in a lot of silk-sheeted beds.
So what the hell.”
Let's jump back into the Hard Case Crime Chronicles with HCC-051:
From the back cover:
There were five of them, each prepared to kill, each with his own reasons for accepting what might well be a suicide mission. The pay? $20,000 apiece. The mission? Find a way into Cuba and kill Castro.
The breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis under a pen name Lawrence Block never used before or since is the rarest of Block’s books – and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later.
We’ll get to the author in a little bit, but this was originally published in 1961, a couple of years before both Cuba and political assassination took different turns of chilling political relevance.
Before we jump in, just a reminder on what these Hard Case Crime Chronicles post are all about: (1) they're an ongoing project where I decide which of the HCCs I've accumulated over the years are worth keeping and which I'll donate to the free libraries around my neighborhood, and (2) intended as breezy, spoiler-free fare. The right analogy, I think, is we're like passengers on the bus and each morning you see me reading a new paperback and we've struck up a friendly conversation, not a deep dive.
Still here? Excellent.
I loved this book. It’s so sleazy. It reminded me of two of my favorite films: Sorcerer and The Killing. The former was of course based on the classic French film The Wages of Fear (1953) which was based on the book Le Salaire de la Peur (1950) by Georges Arnaud. The Killing came out in 1956 and was based on Clean Break (1955) by Lionel White, a prolific author of oft-adapted crime books. I don’t bring any of this up to suggest some kind of cross-pollination, only that some kind of existential state of anxiety was being worked out in all these works. Killing Castro (which first saw print as the below under a pseudonym) was a relative latecomer to a well-established mood.
There are intermittent sections that simply relay the events that swept Castro to power and after. Those chapters are some of the most interesting, just because the events themselves were (and remain) so interesting. My favorite of the Blackford Oakes books was probably for the same reason; the Cuban revolution and its ascension to Cold War Immortality always intrigue me. It's written with relative sympathy for all sides though of course it would be considered "rapidly anti-Castro" these days. I wonder what the author would think about the next sixty years of Cuban history?
Actually is the author still alive? I've of course heard of Lawrence Block but never read him before. Or even looked him up before. Let me do so now.
Okay, I'm back. Just the wiki but holy moley this guy has written an awful lot. And yes, still with us, eighty-two years of age. I've got at least two more Blocks in queue for this project - I think possibly even three. I'll have to look up a few interviews with the guy for next time.
Killing Castro is a great, quick read. Brutal in spots, the proverbial bumpy ride through a shady part of town.
