Killing Castro, by Lawrence Block

A large piece of the Hard Case Crime series has been reprints of older, “lost” stories written by famous authors. They have almost always been entertaining reads, even if the quality hasn’t been consistent with the writers’ better-known works. The several Lawrence Block reprints in particular have ranged from Borderline on the bad side to Lucky at Cards and The Girl With the Long Green Heart on the very good side.

Killing Castro (1961) is another pseudonymous early book that Block wrote at an editor’s request: Chris Heckelmann of Monarch Books wanted a title featuring a crew of Americans who travel into Cuba to assassinate its dictator. Heckelmann had anticipated Castro’s imminent demise and wanted Block to rush a product to take advantage. He did something similar with a certain Donald Westlake, hiring that unproven writer to make a biography of an at-the-time frequently ill Elizabeth Taylor.

Monarch Books edition. yellowedandcreased.com

So while the inspiration behind KC may not have been totally altruistic, Block managed to put together a professional adventure yarn. A crew of five men are recruited by Cuban expatriates to infiltrate the island and assassinate Castro. Block spends the early chapters differentiating the characters, and their motivations for joining such a desperate mission:

• Mike Turner, a wandering laborer, is evading the law after committing a double-murder, a crime of passion, in South Carolina.
• Jim Hines, a Cornell student with no relevant experience, is out to avenge his older brother, an idealist who joined the revolution but was executed by Castro afterward. The recollections of Jim’s older brother seem to be inspired by the story of William Alexander Morgan.
• Matt Garth, a large ex-convict, is a simple-minded thug who doesn’t pay much mind to the danger of the mission. He’s clearly the bad apple at the beginning of the mission, crudely harassing, and then assaulting, the female revolutionary he meets after landing in Cuba.
• Earl Fenton, a single bank teller who looks like an accountant, is looking to earn a big payday before his lung cancer diagnosis catches up to him.
• Ray Garrison, an ex-marine and “take-charge type” who relies on his own methods to get into Cuba, is a hardened killer for-hire and considers the plot a routine payday.

The target of Garth’s aggression (he also beats up Fenton to get him out of the way), a Castro torture victim named Maria, is featured on the Hard Case Crime edition. However, she is a short-lived character whose fate is decided soon after a succession of several sex scenes between some of the American mercenaries and various Cubans. If one were to read a purpose into the scenes (besides filling out a salacious and violent pulp novel), it would be the readiness of any foreign interest — especially American — to exploit Cuba at the nearest opportunity.

Sharif Tarbay cover for Hard Case Crime. hardcasecrime.com

After reading the first third of KC, I made a list of which of the five would-be assassins would be alive at the end of the story, and which one would ultimately kill Castro (or come the closest). I was wrong about the former — although I guessed right about who would be the first to go — but correct about the latter, so Block managed to surprise me some of the time. He did use the characters of Garrison and Turner to confound the gun-for-hire archetype rather effectively, and allows his readers to get a sense of each major character in a small amount of space.

The main action scene, a raid on Castro’s motorcade as it passes through a jungle highway, is the centerpiece of the book:

The Lincoln was in range now. Fenton looked directly at it, looking at the gleaming metal, the drawn curtains. He steadied himself and his gun, pointing the barrel at one of the windows in the rear. At any moment Garth and Jimenez would start shooting. That would be the cue.

Damn it all, go on!

His heart stopped beating for those two seconds. He had an awful premonition of disaster and death that refused to leave his mind. His hands gripped the Sten gun shakily.

Then a shot rang out.

The firefight that follows is well done, but in general the urban and jungle settings of Cuba were not particularly evocative, and the actions of the locals felt generic. This is mostly likely an outcome of writing the book with help of library research (there a several passages describing Castro’s rise to power), rather than interactions with Cubans or Cuban-American exiles.

KC is a short read, professionally done with a cast of unambiguous, if not very interesting, characters. The “history” chapters that interleave the adventure story are an evenhanded perspective and hold up well, given the subsequent political evolution of Cuba. The 1962 missile crisis allowed Castro to openly turn to Communism and the Soviet Union. He never did get deposed or assassinated, as anticipated by so many Americans, but after many years he was succeeded by another dictator in his mold. 5/10.

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NOTE: I forgot to mention this review, which finds more to appreciate in the non-Castro chapters of KC.