Havana: An Earl Swagger Novel

It's 1953 and Earl Swagger, now a sergeant in the Arkansas State Police, is persuaded to hire on as a bodyguard for Congressman "Boss" Harry Etheridge on a visit to Cuba, but unknown to him he is being lured to the island to assassinate the young and troublesome Fidel Castro, who is going about making speeches about Cuba for Cubans. This is bad for the CIA, the Mafia, Big Sugar and Big Rum, all who want to maintain the status quo. The Russians decide to send a man to cozy up to Fidel, to give the young man advice, to teach him and to protect him. And the Castro painted in this story, a guy who never baths, who smells, who is referred to as "Greaseball," who flies of the handle, who is impulsive and stupid to boot, needs all the advice and protection he can get. Speshnev, Castro's Russian advisor, was pulled from an Artic Gulag for the job. He's a battle hardened veteran of Germany and Spain, but he's also an ironic wisecracker who goes his own way, lives by his own code, much like Swagger. And Earl, in addition to pulling the Congressman's fat out of the fire over a misunderstanding with a lady of the evening, also defends a woman against a drunken Earnest Hemingway, has a gunfight in a porno theater and has to deal with a deadly scalpel wielding torturer. It seems to me that Mr. Hunter has written an espionage novel ala the kind I used to read thirty years ago, only he's taken the genre to a whole 'nother level. HAVANA is a terrific book, a great story and a worthy addition to the Swagger legacy.

If, like me, you've been following the Swaggers, father and son, then you have been eagerly awaiting HAVANA. I couldn't wait to set eyes on pages, because I have to admit that I like the way Stephen Hunter serves up his violence. Straight forward and justly deserved. The Swaggers are no nonsense guys who are firmly rooted with a morel code that brooks no nonsense. Mess with them and bad things happen to you. I grabbed a Carib (Caribbean beer), pretzels and a cigar, then went out on my girlfriend's patio to wile away a Sunday with old friend Earl. However before I'd finished the first page I knew I was delving into a different kind of Earl Swagger story. At first the book seemed kind of choppy, jumping between a botched mob hit in New York, a Siberian gulag, a tennis court in Cuba and Swagger's home in Arkansas. And the characters seemed to be more defined. I read slowly, wondering what was happening, what was Hunter doing to me. But by the time Earl got to Cuba I'd been sucked deep into the story and was reveling in the kooky and kinky characters. There is absolutely no other living author that could have made me buy into the Russian hit man Speshnev, or the stupid, idiotic Castro pictured in the novel, but Hunter makes you believe. And even though Earl shares more of the pages with others than in past Swagger stories, I didn't mind, because when we got Earl, we got the guy we know and love. Hunter may be evolving, but thankfully, Earl is still Earl and HAVANA, though different, is I believe, the best Swagger story yet.

Stephen Hunter has come a long way since he wrote (and I read) The Master Sniper, perhaps two decades ago. I have to say I wasn't very impressed with that book, and it was some years before I picked up another of Hunter's books, Point of Impact as it happened. I still think that's his best book, though Time to Hunt is also very good, and the rest of his books since then are an improvement over his earlier works. Point of Impact's hero was a retired Marine sniper named Bob Lee Swagger. After writing several books with him in them, Hunter did several involving Bob Lee's father, Earl Swagger, who's a Medal of Honor recipient Marine who returned to the states and became an Arkansas state trooper. The elder Swagger has been the subject of three novels: Hot Springs, Pale Horse Coming, and Havana, the subject of this review. In all three, Hunter does a decent job of putting Earl Swagger into interesting situations, and then having him shoot his way out of them, but frankly I think Havana to be the best of the three. It spends more time dealing with his character, what makes him tick, and why he is built the way he is, mentally and psychologically. Swagger is a killer, a fighter who enjoys the finality of a gunshot as a way to solve problems and fix disagreements he has with killers and criminals. In the current entry, he's convinced to trundle along to Cuba with the entourage of a local Congressman who's a wheel in the House of Representatives. Earl of course has to keep him out of trouble in a whorehouse, and when the mob figures out why the Congressman's in town (he's investigating whether mob influence is polluting the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo) Earl has to thwart an assassination attempt. Those fans of Point of Impact, however, will realize that Swagger's not on the island just to protect the Congressman: instead, powerful figures in the CIA want a certain young fiery revolutionary named Fidel Castro killed, and they figure Earl's just the guy for the job. This scenario sets the stage for what's best about the book: a romp through 50s Cuba with Earl and company. There's an improbably erudite Soviet spy (who sounds much more British than Russian, to me), a clumsy Mafia hitman, several annoying CIA types, and a couple of single ladies for Earl to interact with. All of the plot involving those people plays out in the streets of Havana and Santiago, and in the jungles of rural Cuba, each recreated wonderfully by Hunter. In case you couldn't tell, I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would recommend it to anyone interested in the era, or to those who want a good suspense novel.

This is a good one. Besides Hunter's continuation of the Swagger family history, a plus in itself, it is also replete with historical and semi-historical material which brought back memories. In one incident, Gunter sort of "took a shot" at Papa Hemingway--made him out to be a drunken boor--and maybe he was, but I loved Hemingway's writing, and thought better of him. It reminded me a little of what Steinbeck did to the memory of Doc Ricketts, in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Ir made Steinbeck very unpopular with the people in the MOnterey area that I knew who knew and admired Ricketts. But, all this is really beside the point: if you are writing about that period in Cuba, and you leave out Castro and Trujillo, you may as well have written about Long Island. He works them in nicely--especially Fidel. So, this is another great novel from the mind of Stephen Hunter. It is well-written, as are they all, and entertaining, exciting, suspensefull, and makes you come back for more. Very good. even if he does knock the Navy from time to time. Joseph (Joe) Pierre, USN (Ret)

Cuba in 1953 is wide open, appealing to rich Americans who want to revel in wine, women and gambling. The Mob, the CIA and Big Sugar want it to stay that way. Castro and the Soviets want change.Earl Swagger has been brought to the country under false pretenses. He thinks he's there to bodyguard a congressman, but the CIA puts him on the hunt for Castro's head. The Russians however have their own version of Swagger, a guy fresh out of a Siberian gulag named Speshnev who've they've sent to nurture, train and protect Fidel and the relationship that develops between the two old soldiers, Swagger and Speshnev is the best part of the story.Assassins, spies, slovenly soldiers, an evil torturer, Meyer Lansky, Ernest Hemingway, and a crazy, stupid mob killer are just a sampling of the characters that people the pages of HAVANA, which is a five star thriller, espionage novel that you won't be able to put down.Reviewed by Vesta Irene