Hard Case Crime unveils rare Lawrence Block

Hard Case Crime has done a great service for those of us Lawrence Block completists who have limited income. Since it’s inception, the imprint has issued Block book each year, rescuing some long lost, pseudonymous work and giving it new life. In fact, it started with a Block book, debuting with Grifter’s Game in September 2004.

The Block reissue campaign began with titles that were more easily found — (Grifter’s Game was pretty available before that time as Mona) and The Girl With the Long Green Heart). Then things got interesting. 2007 brought Lucky at Cards, a book that had been out of print for 37 years and which was issued as The Sex Shuffle by Sheldon Lord; while 2008 brought A Diet of Treacle, Block’s take on the heroin-centered beatnik scene in New York. Block told me in an interview a year ago that, “I don’t think there are any others I’d be happy to see reprinted, but greed does have a way of triumphing over principles, so we’ll have to see.”

Greed is triumphant, it seems, as Hard Case now has Killing Castro in the pipeline. Hard Case honcho Charles Ardai reports that “this is by far the rarest of all Block’s books. He wrote it under a pseudonym he never used before or since, it’s never been published under his real name (or this title), and he couldn’t even locate a copy of it himself for 30 years!”

When Block talks about greed trumping principles, that sounds like someone willing to put out sub-par product in the name of profits, but this sounds like a promising book, nonetheless. In the book, published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, five assassins head out on a mission to kill Fidel Castro. The sample chapter on the Hard Case web site shows the book to be classic Block. Some of his earliest work only hints at what was to come, but here his voice seems fully formed, his way with crisp dialogue and no-nonsense scene setting already established.

Now, the only problem is killing the time until January. But with that twofer from Robert Bloch still on my nightstand and titles from Donald Westlake, Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, Max Allan Collins and Ardai himself in the offing, it will be an entertaining wait.