Havana Punch

By John Skow

Elmore Leonard doesn't spend a lot of effort word-painting backgrounds for his hard-guy capers. You know you're in Detroit or Miami or Hollywood because one of Leonard's sterling villains or slightly bent heroes tells you so. It's a jolt, nevertheless, to find that his latest thriller, Cuba Libre (Delacorte; 343 pages; $23.95), steams into Havana harbor on its first page, and that the shattered mast visible above the water is that of the U.S. battleship Maine, sunk three days earlier. On Feb. 15, 1898.

Yes, Leonard (Get Shorty, Rum Punch) has written what could be called a historical novel. If all its characters seem so turn-of-the-millennium contemporary that you half expect one of them to pull out a cell phone, this could mean that the author has utterly failed to counterfeit the past. Or--take your choice--that he has so successfully blown the dust off history that it reads like tomorrow's front page. At any rate, the hero is a respectable Arizona cowboy and bank robber named Ben Tyler, who is caught running a freighter into Havana with saddle horses on the manifest and weapons for anti-Spanish guerrillas hidden in the hold.

What follows, as is proper with such a tale, is as traditional as Kabuki drama. There are arrogant Spaniards who need shooting and a 20-year-old American beauty named Amelia, a professional mistress, who needs career counseling. But Theodore Roosevelt, it should be said, does not make an appearance--a sign of restraint that justifies the author's high reputation.

--By John Skow