The Executioner #20: New Orleans Knockout

The Executioner #20: New Orleans Knockout, by Don Pendleton

November, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Don Pendleton has his template for The Executioner now and he’s sticking to it: New Orleans Knockout covers all the staples, from Mack “The Executioner” Bolan announcing his presence to the local mob via an introductory ambush, to lots of surveillance and head-games with said mob, to the local cops who secretly root for Bolan…even the now-standard phonecalls between Bolan and undercover Federal cop Leo Turrin, who provides Bolan with insider Mafia info. We even get the new-to-the-template staple of Bolan about to get laid at story’s end. But this time Bolan’s got a motor vehicle that fires rockets, man! 

Really, I enjoyed New Orleans Knockout a lot, even though Pendleton still pulls the same copout as in previous books – another recurring staple, now that I think of it – where we are constantly teased with this big, climactic action scene that never happens. To wit, this is the umpteenth book in a row where Bolan finds out a ton of Mafia hardmen are converging on the titular city he happens to be in…but the huge battle never happens. I guess this is Pendleton’s way of showing us how Bolan gets by with his wits rather than his firepower, but this too is getting to be a bit much; at this point in The Executioner, one gets the impression that taking down the mob is as simple as making a few threatening phone calls and impersonating an enforcer. And having a motor home that fires rockets. 

As ever we open with a preemptory hit as Bolan makes his presence known in New Orleans; a cool opening in which Bolan, clad in black and his skin painted black, infiltrates the grounds of fashion-forward capo Carlotti. Again Bolan is presented as almost superhuman; the sequence is told from Carlotti’s point of view, and Bolan just appears in the man’s home, holding a gun to his head, despite there being armed guards everywhere. This leads to a crazed part that prefigures the ‘90s flick Speed where Carlotti drives into the compound of another New Orleans capo, but Carlotti can’t take his foot off the accelerator, or the bomb Bolan has wired there will go off. Pendleton well relays, mostly via dialog, how painful this is for Carlotti, who has not been able to move his leg for so long that it’s gone numb; I started massaging my own leg muscles in sympathy. 

We get the usual stuff with a local cop who soon learns the Executioner is afoot in his city, and receives random phone calls from the man himself, secretly offering this most wanted “criminal” assistance. In other words, the usual thing; I almost wonder if we’ll ever have a future installment with a Sheriff Buford T. Justice-type who is determined to bring Bolan down no matter what. Otherwise what’s interesting this time is the cop is named Jack Petro, and so of course I just assumed he was related to Kathy Petro. 

The biggest news in New Orleans Knockout is that Bolan has now acquired a massive GM motor home that he’s spent over $300k in mob money on, $100k of which was dedicated to outfitting the “war wagon” in state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, as well as the aforementioned rocket-firing system, which comes out of the rooftop with the press of a button. Curiously, we learn the motor home is not armored, and the windows aren’t bulletproof. Also, I didn’t get a good mental image of how the vehicle operates, particularly some of the weapons stuff. For example, we’re told Bolan doesn’t even use his hand to fire the rockets, and does it all with his leg, moving the sighting system and whatnot and then “slamming” his own leg with his fist to fire the rocket. Honestly this gave the entire scene some unintentional humor, as I just pictured his madman sitting in his huge motor home, watching a viewcreen and then randomly hitting his own leg. 

Another notable development in New Orleans Knockout is the return of future Able Team members Pol Balancales and Gadgets Schwartz. However they really aren’t in the book that much, and are just an extra plot Maguffin; in reality, Bolan spends more time with Pol’s sexy “kid” sister, Toni Balancales, in her early 20s and spectacularly built, though Pendleton as ever doesn’t dwell much on naughty stuff. It is nice though that he’s finally decided to cater to genre norms and give us a willing babe each volume. Toni too falls into the template, as she has the plucky, “I’m tough but I’m still a woman” demeanor as most other Pendleton gals. 

Speaking of unintentional humor, there’s a lot of it with Toni and Bolan. As we all know, Mack Bolan’s trademark phrase is “Stay hard,” and, well…Bolan keeps telling Toni to “stay hard,” leading to Toni to respond, “I’ve got to get hard…you stay hard!” It’s all quite goofy and funny, and it’s clear Pendleton doesn’t realize this (but then, maybe he did). But also, what with this plucky girl saying she needs to “get hard,” it all has a bit of a postmodern ring in our “gender is fluid” modern day. 

I got the impression Pendleton had recently read – or watched – The Anderson Tapes, as quite a bit of New Orleans Knockout concerns bugging and surveilling mobsters, with Bolan often sitting in the “command chair” of his motor home and listening to people talk far away, Pendleton delivering it all like a transcript much as Lawrence Sanders did in his best-seller. But Pendleton has certainly done his homework on surveillance. Toni informs Bolan that Pol and Gadgets started up “Able Group,” a private eye outfit that specializes in bugging places, typically working for companies that want to surveil other companies, and we get a lot of detail on the hardware they use. Recently the two were approached by a “Mr. Kirk,” who claimed to be a fed and tasked them with bugging one of the New Orleans Mafia bigwigs. Now Pol and Gadgets are missing, and Toni is close to panic as it’s been a week. Bolan quickly deduces that “Mr. Kirk” was none other than mobster Carlotti, looking to bug a rival don. 

Not to worry, though, as taking down the Mafia is essentially a cakewalk. It’s such a breeze for Bolan that there is no moment where he seems out of sorts or caught unawares. He slips in and out of Mafia hardsites pretending to be a troubleshooter from the organization, once again falling on that “Ace of Spades” gambit where he flips a poker card over as a sign of who he “really” is, and of course the mobsters blab freely, not knowing it’s the Executioner himself standing before them. Bolan at this point is toying with them; his goal seems to be to get all the families to kill each other, and to do so he plays mental tricks – like using a sniper rifle to blow apart a golf ball just as a mob chieftan is about to swing at it, and then calling him later to taunt him. 

Gil Cohen’s typically-great cover is both accurate and misleading. Accurate because the climax does take place during Mardis Gras, but misleading because neither Bolan’s prey nor the girl he’s holding at gunpoint are wearing costumes. Bolan however is wearing his blacksuit, so Cohen got that part correct. Getting to the climax, though, there really isn’t much in the way of action. Really, at this point Bolan takes down the mob mostly via phone calls and listening in on conversations. We’re often told of enemy forces encamped around the area, but Bolan slips in and out of their base camps with no problem; Pendleton is so focused on suspense over action that he even casually informs us that Bolan hits a couple places during his travels around the area, leaving these action scenes entirely off-page. 

Instead, Pendleton saves the fireworks for the finale, as Bolan takes his motor home onto the insanely-crowded streets of New Orleans just as Mardis Gras begins. This part alone is the most unbelievable element in the entirety of New Orleans Knockout, but Pendleton spends enough time on it that he makes it seem believable: Bolan, his motor home disguised as a mobile TV news station, creeping along the streets while engulfed by a human tide of partiers. Cohen’s cover art illustrates a scene that occurs here, as Bolan goes out into the crowd to rescue Toni, who has briefly been taken captive – even this happens and is resolved so quickly that, again, it all seems to be so easy for our hero. I mean Bolan just blows the mobster’s brains out, even though the guy’s holding a gun to Toni’s head and his twitching nerves might cause his finger to jerk on the trigger. 

Anton Chekhov would have been well pleased, as Pendleton follows the “gun on the mantleplace” dictum of Chekhov, or whatever it Chekhov called it; after teasing us about the rockets on the motor home throughout the narrative, Pendleton does indeed have Bolan employ them in the novel’s climax. This is on an assault of a fortified mob hardsite, Bolan blasting the shit out of the place with three rockets and then dispensing mercy shots to the flaming, screaming victims of his assault. For once Bolan comes close to the murderous, cipher-like vibe of imitators Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan, in an ending scene that has him gunning down a defenseless old man…and then briefly feeling bad about it, but brushing it off because the old man was a Mafia boss, so he deserved it. 

Pol and Gadgets stay off-page, and instead it’s up to Toni Balancales to see Bolan off…another humorous bit where she calls Bolan on his motor home’s mobile phone and demands that Bolan pick her up so she can give him some good lovin’ before he leaves town. And Bolan keeps trying to talk her out of it! Again though, Pendleton has finally decided to acquiesce to the genre and has Bolan ultimately decide to pick Toni up so he can bang her brains out…off-page, of course, as the novel ends here. 

All told, I enjoyed New Orleans Knockout quite a bit, but at this point The Executioner is almost becoming cartoonish with its breezy disregard for reality. Not that I have a problem with that, it’s just that Pendleton’s overly-serious narratorial voice clearly indicates that he himself doesn’t see it all as cartoonish, which is kind of crazy. I mean, at least the uncredited ghostwriters of The Sharpshooter and The Marksman knew their protagonists were psychopaths.

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast, by Warren Murphy

October, 1979  Pinnacle Books

I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Destroyer, but I’ve been aware of this particular installment for years, as it features Remo and Chiun taking on spoofy parodies of the protagonists of other Pinnacle series: namely, The Executioner, The Butcher, and Death Merchant. But as ever Warren Murphy (writing solo this time, without early series co-writer Richard Sapir) is more focused on the “spoofy” nature, with hardly any focus on action. Despite the trappings, The Destroyer is a comedy series, and one must admit that Bay City Blast is occasionally very funny, even if it isn’t the “Pinnacle All-Stars” novel one might have preferred. (It still surprises me that Pinnacle editor Andy Ettinger never conceived of a one-shot that would’ve united all of the series protagonists in a big story, like a prefigure of Gold Eagle’s later Stony Man books.) 

First of all, I want to note that the long-limbed black beauty in a bikini with the submachine gun on Hector Garrido’s cover art does not exist in the actual novel. This of course is a bummer. But then, girls don’t much exist in The Destroyer. They are for the most part cipher-like, and never exploited as they would be in the typical men’s adventure novel, due to the sad fact that hero Remo Williams has zero in the way of a sex drive. As I’ve complained before, Remo’s more robot than man; Bay City Blast even features a “pretty” secretary (“pretty” being the extent of what Warren Murphy gives you in the exploitative goods) who constantly throws herself at Remo, and he remains disinterested – and also Remo goes without a woman for the entire book. Some men’s adventure progatonist! 

My assumption is the gal with the gun on the cover might be Garrido’s interpretation of Ruby Gonzales, who appears briefly in Bay City Blast and reports to Smitty, the boss of CURE. But she is fully clothed throughout and for the most part breaks into a building to check its security level; I get the impression Ruby has been in other volumes, but I’m by no means an expert on The Destroyer. So I could be wrong, but it just seemed to me that Ruby was an already-established character, and all told she’s only in the book for a few pages. 

I always rant and rave about The Destroyer and what I wish it was, but truth be told Warren Murphy is a good writer, and clearly has a good sense of humor – one that he’s able to convey via the narrative. We already know Bay City Blast will be funny from the start, when a mobbed-up “businessman” named Rocco Nobile moves into slummy Bay City, New Jersey, and promptly takes it over by blackmailing various dirty politicians. The humor comes in the recurring image of Rocco’s bodyguard constantly putting his hand in his pocket, and the dialog throughout is, as ever, pretty humorous. 

The biggest humor comes via The Eraser and The Rubout Squad, a subplot that comes out of nowhere but ultimately overtakes the narrative: this is the name of Murphy’s pseudo-Pinnacle squad. First there’s Sam Gregory, a gun manufacturer with dreams of taking on the Mafia and wiping it out with his own squad. To this end he recruits three men: Mark Tolan, a psychopath who was court martialed in ‘Nam for gunning down a village of women and children (the Mack Bolan parody); Al Baker, a guy with delusions of being a torpedo who has decided to go against the Syndicate, but in reality is just some loser who’s seen The Godfather too many times (the Butcher parody); and finally Nicholas Lizzard, a six-foot-five failed actor who is now a full-time drunk and whose biggest talent is dressing up in drag so that he can make himself look like “a six-foot-four woman” (the Richard Camellion parody, and the one Murphy seems to have the most fun with). 

Meanwhile Sam Gregory dubs himself “The Eraser,” and it is he who has the trademark bit of dropping broken pencils at scenes, a la Bolan’s marksman medals or The Penetrator’s arrow heads. My assumption is Gregory is intended as Murphy’s spoof of The Penetrator Mark Hardin, but other than the name and the broken pencils bit…the character seems to more be a parody of Don Pendleton. This is mostly because he is the one who plans the hits and also comes up with alliterative titles for them: first is “Bay City Blast,” and later the Eraser plans on others with similar, Pendleton-esque titles, like “Salinas Slaughter.” 

Murphy also has a lot of fun spoofing Mack Bolan via his psycho duplicate Mark Tolan; in Tolan’s scenes, Murphy recreates Don Pendleton’s style, down to the recurring “Yeahs” that punctuate the narrative. He even gets double bang for his spoofing buck with Tolan often vowing to “Live Huge,” parodying Bolan’s “Live Large.” I seem to recall Warren Murphy saying years ago in a Paperback Fanatic interview that he felt Pendleton’s ego was getting a little too large at the time, hence he had some fun mocking him in Bay City Blast. One can well imagine Don Pendleton being unsettled at how psychopathic his character is made to seem: Tolan, who names himself “The Exeterminator,” is a nutjob who is ready to explode at any moment, and indeed gleefully guns down children in Bay City Blast. 

But as mentioned it’s Nicholas Lizzard, the Richard Camellion spoof, who draws the most laughs. Curiously, Lizzard is presented as a roaring drunk who lives off vodka, making one wonder if Murphy was making any insinuations about Camellion’s creator, Joseph Rosenberger. Speaking of whom, Murphy does not mimic Rosenberger’s style in the Lizzard sections (but then, not many could), but he certainly makes Lizzard just as psycho as Tolan. The recurring humor here is very un-PC in today’s era, as Lizzard often dresses like a woman, but isn’t fooling anyone. This though is the extent of Lizzard’s schtick, other than the heavy drinking, so he isn’t a “cosmic lord of death” or whatever Richard Camellion was. 

As for The Baker, he’s nothing at all like the character he’s spoofing. Whereas Bucher the Butcher is a terse, cipher-like death machine, Al Baker is at heart a good-natured sort who is only in it for the money, and in fact harbors a lot of concern about the increasingly-violent nature of the Rubout Squad. Not that this subplot goes anywhere. Baker still takes part in the Squads raids on Bay City’s “underworld,” ie gunning down innocent men, women, and children. The latter I think is where Murphy goes a little too far in his black humor; the Rubout Squad shooting down prepubescent Chinese children in a “heroin factor” (really a fortune cookie bakery) doesn’t really elicit many chuckles. 

Remo and Chiun are often lost in the shuffle, but on the positive side Remo is treated with less scorn in this one. His opening sequence is pretty cool, and another indication of the comedy nature of the series, as he takes out a house filled with recently-freed criminals, killers and rapists who’d been put away but released by shady lawyers; humorously, all of them have hyphenated, Joe-Bob type names. But unlike The Executioner or any other Pinnacle series, it’s all played for laughs, with Remo easily and casually killing each of them off one by one, and becoming more concerned with where to put their cars after killing them. 

And that again brings me to my central issue with The Destroyer. Everything is so easy for Remo and Chiun that there’s no tension or drama or anything. Killing is simple for Remo. Along with the lack of sex drive, this makes Remo Williams an altogether poor men’s adventure protagonist, because you can’t really feel anything for him. Perhaps this is why Murphy and Sapir grafted on the “treat Remo like a fool” subtext, to try to make Remo more relatable. And also again the action scenes are not presented the way I prefer; as ever they are relayed via the impressions of the person about to be killed by Remo, with the reader never getting a good idea of what Remo is actually doing. 

So it’s the comedy that carries the story, with every sequence always devolving into satire or parody. Like when Remo and Chiun go fishing for vacation, and a great white shark chases them – Remo even referring to Jaws while it happens – and Chiun merely “calls” the shark with his fingers in the water and then kills it with a single blow. The climactic faceoff with the Rubout Squad is also fairly anticlimactic, with Murphy again returning to his standard trick of killing villains off-page, which is a big letdown. And even here Remo dispatches his enemies with such ease that the reader who actually wanted to see a pseudo “Pinnacle All-Stars” square-off will be mightily underwhelmed. Only Tolan really goes face-to-face with Remo, Murphy apparently wise enough to know his readers would expect a little more from him for his Bolan parody, at least. But even here it’s more for laughs, with Remo almost like a god up against Tolan. 

As for the plot, it moves quickly, and Murphy spends more time with the Rubout Squad bickering and bantering with each other before gunning down innocents in their war to “cleanse” Bay City. Meanwhile Remo and Chiun are called into act as bodyguards for Mayor Rocco Nobile, the mobbed-up bigwig who showed up in the opening pages; this subplot I thought was pretty cool, ie Nobile’s real intent in Bay City, but again Murphy sort of loses site of it as the book progresses. Even here it’s comedy, with Remo and Chiun just happening to get a hotel room right next door to the Rubout Squad, but neither party realizing it. There’s also comedy in the Eraser’s growing anger that the newspapers, for some mysterious reason, never report on the Rubout Squad’s hits. 

The ”climax” is on us before we realize it, and while it might not be the action spectacular you’d get in a more “straight” men’s adventure novel, it does feature the Eraser in a tank going down Main Street in Bay City. But the confrontation with the Rubout Squad is quick, anticlimactic, and mostly off-page, so I wouldn’t use Bay City Blast as an indication of how Remo Williams would fare against the Death Merchant, the Butcher, or the Executioner. But then, Warren Murphy presents Remo as so omnipotent that he’d probably handle the real deals just as easily as he does the spoofs. 

Murphy does score huge points for somehow seeing through the mists of time and describing what passes for a “journalist” in our miserable modern era. Murphy’s intent apparently is to spoof the hiring standards of The New York Post (this is during the section in which the Rubout Squad is incensed that their hits aren’t making it into the news), but little does Murphy realize that he’s describing what will be the required background for a “journalist” in a few decades: 

Overall though, Bay City Blast is fast-moving and fun, but again The Destroyer just isn’t my kind of men’s adventure series.

The Executioner #19: Detroit Deathwatch

The Executioner #19: Detroit Deathwatch, by Don Pendleton

June, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Don Pendleton hews closely to his template for this 19th volume of The Executioner, but then again if it isn’t broke why fix it? Pendleton’s repetitive structure clearly struck a chord with readers of the day, so he follows it to the letter in Detroit Deathwatch: the opening hit on some Mafia hardsite, the chapters focusing on various one-off characters, the inevitable chapter in which a member of law enforcement recaps everything that’s happened in the novel thus far, the periodic philosophical ruminations courtesy Mack “The Executioner” Bolan, and finally the big action finale. 

But still, it’s becoming increasingly easy for Mr. Bolan. Never does he feel any fear or sense of danger. The possibility of his being hurt or killed never enters the picture – it is others who will suffer at the hands of the Mafia sadists, and Bolan is the hero who must save them. The actual mechanics of waging an ongoing war against the mob come so naturally to Bolan that there is no strategy nor planning required; he shows up, he makes his various hits, he slips away into the night. He’s more a supernatural figure at this point than a flesh-and-blood human, despite Pendleton’s frequent claims that Mack Bolan was “just a man.” Bolan’s also kind of weird by this point, but I’ll get to that in a bit. 

First of all, there’s no pickup from the previous volume. No mention of the busty nurse Bolan essentially pressured into shacking up with him at the very end of the novel. Bolan when we meet him this time is already on the scene in Detroit, launching a waterborne strike against a Mafia hardsite. It’s cool if a little unspectacular, Bolan briefly using his boat as a decoy and then donning a wetsuit (quickly dispensed with) so he can go ashore and blow away a few goons with his customary Automag. The violence has been toned down, for the most part, save for a wildly gruesome finale. Otherwise Bolan only shoots a few hapless thugs here; again, there is no possibility of Bolan himself ever being hit in the melee. 

Pendleton throws a curveball in the works with the sudden appearance of Toby Ranger, the busty blonde Federal agent last seen in #9: Vegas Vendetta. She’s undercover as a bimbo in this particular mobster’s villa, but she’s just been outed and is on her way to her last ride when Bolan intervenes. Bolan calls off his hit and takes off with her to his safehouse in the city, presumably so as to keep her safe. But here’s where the weird stuff begins. Bolan, apparently inspired by his own actions at the climax of the previous volume, essentially pressures Toby into having sex with him – they’re both “professionals,” he argues, they have to live for the moment, so let’s do it. Of course it isn’t presented so bluntly, but still that’s kind of how it happens – and once again Pendleton fails to give us any juicy details. 

But man…next morning at the breakfast table it just gets stranger. Bolan starts talking about “the cosmic sprawl” and ruminating to himself how woman was referred to as a “helpmeet” in the King James Bible, and hey, Toby could be his helpmeet for now. I mean he just comes off as an odd guy. Later in the book he’s even quoting Emerson to himself (the poet, not the prog-rock keyboardist), and keeps referring back to the “cosmic sprawl” (whatever the hell that is) and the helpmeet thing – again, another part of Pendleton’s template is introducing a concept or theme and frequently referring back to it. But it’s all just so weird…I mean Toby’s even like, “What?” when Bolan breaks out his first “cosmic sprawl” utterance, and you’ve gotta figure she might be wondering if she made a mistake last night. I mean, at least Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan had the decency to know they were nuts. Bolan is completely on the level…and you know Pendleton is, too. 

But then, Toby herself is an oddball – another recurring gimmick, one that quickly grates, is her constant referral to Bolan as “Captain” something or other: Captain Virile, Captain Wonderful, Captain Granite; she’s got a name for every occasion, and it gets old. According to my review for Vegas Vendetta, it sounds like Bolan and Toby had more of a sparring relationship in that volume, but this time Pendleton presents them almost as soul mates. Toby Ranger is the type of woman who could bring a men’s adventure series to a halt: she’s such a perfect match for the hero that you wonder why he doesn’t say to hell with the whole mob-busting game and just marry her. And indeed, Toby tries to put her hooks in Bolan throughout the book, even begging that they go off to some “green pastures” to be together after this latest mission is done. 

And as for this particular mission: what starts as a typical Executioner strike turns into something a little more seamy, and along the lines of a plot in one of the Imitiation Executioners that proliferated on the bookstore shelves at this time: beautiful women being abducted and forced into prostitution by the mob. But whereas one of those Imitation Executioners would be a lot more explicit in this regard – see, for example, The Marksman #18, which concerned this very same subject – Pendleton keeps the subject mostly in the background. As ever, this stuff is just the MacGuffin that is used to link together the action scenes and the philosophical asides. 

In fact the prostitution ring angle only enters the narrative via long “morning after” dialog from Toby, who explains that she’s been working undercover in an unofficial capacity, trying to track down her missing colleague Georgette – the “Canuck” member of Toby’s Rangers, also briefly seen in that earlier Vegas-based installment. Georgette was looking into a rash of disappearances concering super-beautiful women (Toby clarifies that these aren’t just gorgeous women…but “super” gorgeous ones!), and of course this being an Executioner novel the trail ultimately led her to the Mafia. But Toby thinks she was made and has been taken off somewhere, or maybe even killed. And she thinks it all happened in that very Detroit hardsite Bolan was hitting at the start of the book. 

Meanwhile we have the expected cutaways to one-off characters. We’ve got stuff from the perspectives of the mobsters themselves, none of whom will have much of an impact on the narrative. We also have stuff from the perspective of a cop who has been called into Detroit now that the Executioner has been spotted – and also legions of Mafia soldiers have entered the city, for precisely the same reason. This is another of Pendleton’s MacGuffins; we’re often told of these bad-ass killer Mafia hit teams congregating here or there, and when Bolan ultimately confronts them – that is, when he even does, as usually the hit teams are kept off-page – it’s such a cake-walk for him that you wonder why the element was even introduced into the narrative. Nearly 20 volumes in, it doesn’t create any sense of tension at all. At this point only a bored readership poses any threat to Mack Bolan. 

Oh and an interesting factoid for those out there like myself who dig such factoids: Bolan at one point in Detroit Deathwatch waltzes into a police station and pretends to be an agent (presumably Federal, as he isn’t wearing a uniform). It’s the name he gives for himself that’s interesting: Stryker. So, did Pendleton just pull this name out of the air, or did he borrow it from the contemporary Pinnacle series Stryker? A series that was written by William Crawford, ie the guy who served as “Jim Peterson” for The Executioner #16, which Pendleton claimed to never have read – and also stated in his interview in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction that he never even discovered who “Jim Peterson” was. So then, long story short, if Bolan’s “Stryker” name was inspired by Crawford’s series, that would be pretty ironic. I mean if that wouldn’t be an example of the cosmic sprawl, uh, sprawling, I don’t know what would be. 

Action is more sporadic this time around; we have the opening hit, then only a few scuffles here and there. Pendleton brings in a bit of a ‘70s crime-pulp vibe when Bolan and Toby fly to Canada and Bolan strong arms the manager of a stripper joint. But this Canada jaunt is over and done with in a flash and it’s back to Detroit – but again, Pendleton doesn’t much focus on the city or attempt to bring it to life. But then, that’s not really what you want from the book. Most of these installments could take place in the same cultural vacuum: “Detroit Deathwatch” could just as easily be “Dayton Deathwatch.” Especially given that the novel climaxes in the same location it started at: the Mafia hardsite along the lake. 

Here Pendleton gets more ghoulish and lurid than ever before in the series, with the reappearance of a “Turkey Doctor,” ie those Mafia sadists who specialize in torture while also keeping the “patient” alive and aware throughout. Pendleton rolls out all the stops here with a squirm-inducing passage in which Bolan comes across “turkey meat” in the sub-basement of the hardsite, mutilated and mauled but still alive and aware. It’s pretty crazy and not like much anything else in The Executioner, making Pendleton’s version of the Mafia seem almost as sadistic and depraved as the one in James Dockery’s The Butcher. So crazy and depraved that by novel’s end Mack Bolan himself is in tears. 

That said, the “green pastures” finale seems tacked on and hard to swallow after the few pages of nightmarish gore we just read. But the important thing is, Bolan’s about to get some good lovin’ again, which was how the previous book ended – so it’s nice at least to see that Pendleton has, for the moment, decided to add a little spice into the series. Speaking of which: if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go tell an attractive co-worker of mine that we’re both professionals, and the cosmic sprawl demands that she become my helpmeet. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll quote a little Emerson!

The Executioner #18: Texas Storm

The Executioner #18: Texas Storm, by Don Pendleton

March, 1974  Pinnacle Books

By this 18th installment of The Executioner hero Mack Bolan is essentially a superhero; he plows through the Mafia presence in Texas without breaking a sweat, coming off like such a figure of myth that there’s even a bizarre bit where Bolan, in his black commando suit and with grenades and guns and etc dangling from his shoulders, walks into a hotel and starts talking to the receptionist while the hotel guests scramble in fear at the sight of The Executioner himself. I mean no one calls the cops or anything…but then even if they did, the cops would probably pat Bolan on the back. 

I mean that’s the sort of series Don Pendleton is writing at this point. Literally nothing is hard for Mack Bolan anymore, despite the tension Pendleton tries to develop. Hal Brognola, the “head Fed” who is supposed to be bringing Bolan down, is literally chauffered around Dallas by Bolan himself while the two men discuss the Mafia’s latest plan. There’s also a go-nowhere subplot about the “Bolan bunch,” a team of (supposedly) hardbitten Mafia exterminators, who are serving as the new Talifero brothers (ie the previous Mafia killsquad that was after Bolan in earlier volumes), and Bolan constantly makes them look like fools. He’s not even concerned by their presence, seeing them mainly as a nuissance. At this point we’re basically in the same sort of vibe as The Destroyer, but it’s sort of more funny here because you can tell Pendleton doesn’t have his tongue in his cheek. He means it, man. 

There’s no real pickup from the previous volume, but we’re immediately informed that we’re in a new, superhero-esque tone for The Executioner in that Bolan now has his own personal pilot: this would be Jack Grimaldi, a former Mafia pilot who went over to Bolan’s side in a previous volume. The last installment ended with Bolan taking a nap as Grimaldi headed his plane elsewhere; Texas Storm opens some indeterminate time later, with Bolan again in a plane piloted by Grimaldi, but he’s not taking a nap, he’s ready to stage an assault on a Mafia hardsite in the Texas midlands. And the action scenes that ensues follows previous ones, with Bolan all-too-easily wading through superior numbers with his Auto Mag and Beretta pistols, blasting hapless Mafia stooges to hell. 

The thing is, we don’t really get an idea why Bolan is here. He suspects something rotten with the oil business, but it takes almost the entire novel to find out what exactly it is. The main thing is that here Bolan saves a nude and stacked gal (presumably a blonde, per Gil Cohen’s cover) named Judith Klingman, who is being kept drugged and locked away by the Mafia. Judith’s dad is a famous oil baron or somesuch; Pendleton delivers some of his lovably-goofy dialog here, with Bolan and Judith discussing things in the safety of a hotel later on. One thing I’ve noticed is that Pendleton will introduce some gimmick in the narrative or dialog and hammer it past the point of being funny; for example, Judith and Bolan, apropos of nothing, start discussing things in football terms. For like a few pages. 

Another recurring gimmick Pendleton uses throughout Texas Storm is referring to “numbers” Bolan is always up against. “The numbers were running down,” and etc, etc, to the point that it gets annoying. I mean the guy has a template and he’s sticking to it. But unlike Mack Bolan, Don Pendleton was not a superhero, so one can understand his struggling to keep up with the writing pace Pinnacle Books put on him. It’s just that Texas Storm seems to be building and building to something, but various subplots are just dropped (Judith Klingman flat-out disappears from the narrative after this opening scene, only to show up again at the very end), and when climactic events do happen, Bolan waltzes through the situation with nary a concern. 

I mean take that Bolan Bunch deal. So there’s a lot of buildup, these new Mafia killers, coming down to Texas to get Bolan, etc. As soon as the bastards show up, we have one of those series staples where Pendleton writes things from the mobster point of view, and “that bastard Bolan” swoops out of nowhere and ambushes them. But this time it’s particularly goofy. Bolan, hanging on a telephone poll and in a worker uniform, shoots at these guys from half a mile away and they’re all panicking as he blasts apart the house -- but doesn’t kill any of them. I mean seriously. Bolan at this point is like a cat toying with a mouse. Pendleton tries his best to explain away why Bolan doesn’t kill these guys, something about how instilling fear is just as important, etc. It’s kind of lame. It’s also humorous to imagine a guy just hanging on a telephone pole and blasting away at a big house half a mile away and no one even calls the cops on him. But then again, the cops would probably show up and provide cover support for him. 

The plot is pretty prescient, though. Bolan, with his usual omnipotence in regards to the inner workings of the Mafia, eventually gets wind of “Flag Seven,” a plan started by oil man Klingman (apparently), which has something to do with Texas becoming a separate country. There are “extremists” today who are pushing for that very thing, but the irony here is that the Mafia has taken over Klingman’s plan mostly due to the ownership it would give them of Texas oil. It was interesting to read all this from the perspective of our era…though on a side note, I did see something the other week that made me laugh out loud, and I wish I’d taken a photo of it. There was a truck outside of someone’s house, a Tesla-branded truck that was there to set up the electric charging station or whatever in the person’s home…and folks, the Tesla-branded truck was a standard gasoline engine truck. I mean that pretty much said it all, and damn I wish I’d taken a photo. 

Well anyway, that’s the plot of Texas Storm, as exposited for us in the long scene where Bolan drives Brognola around Dallas. Also I have to say, at no point did I get the impression that Pendleton had ever been to Dallas; there was no attempt at bringing the city or its environs to life, and the book could just as easily have taken place anywhere else. Bolan doesn’t even spend any time with many locals; both Klingman senior and his busty daughter are minor presences in the book. The latter as mentioned only returns in the final pages…where Bolan, again apropos of nothing, apparently decides he wants to get laid (because how many volumes has it been?). He then makes insinuating comments to Judith that he needs a “nurse” for some “r&r,” even specifying that he needs this nurse for “three days.” While Judith says she isn’t a nurse, she’s all for the “r&r” point, so I guess we’re to assume there’s some boinkery in the Executioner’s future. Not that Pendleton tells us about it, for the novel ends here. 

The most interesting thing about Texas Storm is how it’s all such a cakewalk for Mack Bolan, even though Pendleton tries his hardest to make it all seem tense. But Pendleton constantly undermines his own tension. Like there’s another part, toward the end, where a big deal is made out of all the “electronic” sensors and stuff the Mafia has set up around a hardsite to keep the Executioner at bay. But Bolan, again dropped off by Grimaldi, blows through all this stuff with such ease that we’re only told about it in passing. Hell, even the majority of the Bolan Bunch is wiped outt off-page. “It was [Bolan’s] kind of fight,” Pendleton states a few times in the narrative. To the point that you wonder what kind of fight isn’t his kind. 

But at this point, 18 volumes in, you pretty much know what you’re getting with The Executioner. I did feel that Pendleton was a bit “off” with this particular installment, though.

Live Large bumper sticker

From the Glorious Trash archives comes this vintage 1988 Gold Eagle bumper sticker, sporting the “Live Large” slogan the publisher used for Mack Bolan. This bumper sticker was included with the February 1988 letter I received from Gold Eagle – the one which led to another letter, from Phoenix Force author Gar Wilson. 

I thought some of you might appreciate seeing this; I meant to include it with the upload of the letter itself I posted a few years ago. Otherwise there’s no getting around that this is a filler post – things have gotten busy lately so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to finally put up this photo of the bumper sticker…which is still in pristine condition, having been stored in that envelope for the past 34 years. 

 Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Ebay… Just kidding.

The Executioner #17: Jersey Guns

The Executioner #17: Jersey Guns, by Don Pendleton

January, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Don Pendleton returns to The Executioner with a volume that is clearly a sequel to #15: Panic In Philly. It’s as if the previous volume never happened; it’s only mentioned occasionally in the first few pages, and we know from Pendleton’s interview with William H. Young in A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction that the references to Sicilian Slaughter in Jersey Guns were actually written by series editor Andy Ettinger. Pendleton himself never read that “Jim Peterson” installment (actually William Crawford), and thus, per the interview, Ettinger is the one who tied the events of the sixteenth volume into the opening of this seventeeth volume. But really you could take all those references out and not even notice they were missing; Pendleton certainly wrote Jersey Guns shortly after Panic In Philly (not to be confused with David Bowie’s “Panic In Detroit”), but the behind-the-scenes legal wrangling delayed publication. 

Young’s book gives a lot of info on this legal wrangling, so I suggest seeking it out for the full story. (Just get the book via Interlibrary Loan, like I did; it’s really overpriced.) But basically Pendleton and Pinnacle went to court over the rights of the series, and Pendleton won, but part of the settlement was that he allowed Sicilian Slaughter to be published, because Pinnacle had already printed up the book and they would’ve been hit too hard financially to just cancel it. Pinnacle clearly wanted to curry favor with Pendleton at this point, though, as the back cover – for the first time ever in the series, don’tcha know – features a glowing write-up on our author:

In many ways Jersey Guns is a prefigure of Michael Newton’s later Prairie Fire, with an injured Mack “The Executioner” Bolan stuck on a farm with some innocent people as the bad guys set in. Newton exploited the concept more than Pendleton does, but my assumption is Newton might’ve been inspired by this very volume. Bolan gets on the farm after shaking a Mafia tail, a brutal sequence in which he tricks them into running into his abandoned car on a darkened road. After which he passes out, weakened from his wounds – wounds which he actually got in the climax of Panic In Philly, but which Ettinger edits to be the wounds Bolan got at the climax of Sicilian Slaughter. Bolan wakes up on a farm a few miles from where he crashed up the Mafia cars. 

He isn’t among strangers, though: the farm is owned by a guy named Bruno, who briefly encountered Bolan back in ‘Nam. Bolan was there as a soldier, and Bruno was there as a medic. Bruno came back from ‘Nam with his head truly messed up, and now runs this farm away from the world. With him is his sister, a brunette beauty named Sara who is one of the prettiest women Bolan has ever seen, apparently, even though initially he’s under the impression she’s under age. But she is in her early 20s and she too has suffered from ‘Nam, as her husband was killed over there. And as noted her brother Bruno has come back a shadow of what he once was; a battered mental wreck. Pendleton develops a sort of family dynamic here, with these three damaged characters finding redemption in one another. 

It’s a powerful theme for sure, but maybe the seventeeth installment of a mob-busting action series isn’t the best place for it. This is something that needs an entire novel’s worth of development, but Pendleton sort of harries through it in the opening quarter. It’s more emotionally meaty than the standard genre offering, that’s for sure, but at least we aren’t beaten over the head with a bunch of maudlin sap. This was still a masculine era, after all, without the cheap showy sentimentality you would encounter in a similar storyline today. And plus Bolan gets laid. Pendleton was very stingy with sex in The Executioner; he stated in his interview with William H. Young that Bolan wouldn’t have “time” for it, given his focus on mob-busting. So it’s notable that Bolan does get busy with Sara, even though he’s injured, mostly unarmed, and sure to be the prey of mobsters who are no doubt congregating on the farm. 

As with the sex scenes in previous installments, it’s not sleazy or very explicit at all…and, as with those previous sexual scenes, the most notable element is the weird, metaphysical dialog that ensues between Bolan and Sara. First of all, Bolan gives her a post-sex pep talk about how women are the “mothers of the cosmos” or whatnot, and it’s all straight out of the mind who also gave us The Godmakers. Bolan sure as hell doesn’t come off like too many of his men’s adventure brethren, that’s for sure, giving voice to a truly singular philosophy that sounds more like that of an acid-dropping college student than it does a mob-busting vigilante. And it does get to be a little much, like for example later in the novel when Sara is hiding somewhere and Bolan picks her up, calling out, “Let’s go, little mother! Time to build a universe!” What makes it even crazier is that you know Pendleton’s tongue is nowhere in the vicinity of his cheek. 

But, Bolan and Sara’s conjugation happens mostly off-page, and is treated more on an emotional spectrum than a sleazy one, in that finding one another they help heal one another. Regardless, it leads to one of the cooler bits in the series yet. Bolan wakes up from the shenaigans to hear Sara yelling for help. He looks out the window and two mobster thug-types are in the act of pushing her into a car. Bolan quickly grabs his Automag and blows ‘em both away – their brains and whatnot exploding mere inches from Sara’s screaming face. From here Bolan’s in war mode, and accordingly Sara has sewn a new blacksuit for him, complete with hidden pockets to carry his ammo and equipment. (Again with his tongue nowhere near his cheek, Pendleton refers to Bolan as a “black-clad doomsday guy.”) Also unlike Prairie Fire, Bolan quickly re-arms himself, having sent Bruno into the city to pick up a veritable arsenal from a dealer Bolan’s done business with before – another ‘Nam vet who has returned to the world a broken man, in what is a theme that runs throughout Jersey Guns. 

More indication that Pendleton did not write the previous volume comes in the few scenes where Bolan makes his inevitable calls to Leo Turin, his inside man with the mob. Whereas Turin resented Bolan in the Crawford-penned installment, here he has the Pendleton-typical hero worship of “the black-clad doomsday guy.” But then Pendleton’s hero-worshipping is really brought to the fore in Jersey Guns, more so than in any previous volume. As we’ll recall, most every installment of The Executioner follows the same template, with Bolan doing stuff and then ensuing paragraphs where one-off characters recap what we readers just saw Bolan do. Then of course there will be periodic chapters in which Bolan reaffirms his resolve to destroy the mob. This time Pendleton dispenses with the “one-off characters recapping the plot” stuff, but doubles way down on the “mission resolve” stuff. 

In this regard I agree with Marty McKee, who in his review of Jersey Guns noted that “Pendleton often goes off-subject with ramblings about war and humanity.” I see that Stephen Mertz posted a comment to Mary’s review, stating that “those ‘ramblings’ are what the books are about.” Stephen is certainly correct, but I feel that Marty is, too, as in this particular volume the sermonizing is pretty egregious. Damn egregious at that, for it commits the ultimate pulp sin of interfering with the action. It also serves to balloon what is a simple, almost outline-esque installment, to the point that there’s less action here than typical. In the final third especially the narrative often stops so that Pendleton can once again examine what makes Bolan tick. This has been done before, but never so frequently, or to such extent. To the point that I actually missed those arbitrary plot recaps from one-off characters. As an example, this is the sort of thing that constantly bogs down the forward momentum in Jersey Guns:

What makes it frustrating is that otherwise Pendleton has here a lean and mean thriller that shows his Mafia villains at their most depraved. Bolan discovers that the Taliferi brothers, those recurring villains from previous volumes, have gathered together a host of guns and are descending on Jersey to finally get the Executioner. And they’ve brought along a couple “Turkey Doctors,” ie those mob sadists who perform sadistic torture to get their prey to talk. This time, seventeen volumes in(!), we finally get a thorough description of who the turkey doctors are and what they do. Because, of course, one of Bolan’s new friends is captured and put through the turkey-doctoring treatment, leading to a sequence more gruesome and horror-esque than in any previous volume. But at the same time Pendleton undermines the tension he creates, for the mob here is evil enough to hire such sadists…but still dumb enough that Bolan can, once again, bluff his way onto a Mafia “hardsite” and literally escort his captured friend. 

After this, though, Bolan goes on the warpath, breaking out his new weaponry to hit the Taliferi hardsite, and hit it hard. But the helluva it is, Pendleton has spent so much time with the frequent hero-sermonizing that the climax of Jersey Guns isn’t nearly as spectacular as it was shaping up to be. And once again Bolan so outmatches his opponents – even though they greatly outnumber him – that there’s no tension to any of it. The main issue though is that it’s a relatively smallscale sequence, with Bolan hitting the area with explosives and then “mopping up” a few injured thugs. Even the confrontation with the Taliferi brother himself is anticlimactic, though at least believable in that Bolan, a soldier, wouldn’t dwell on revenge. That said, by novel’s end he declares he has a score to settle with the turkey doctor who so maimed Bolan’s new friend, so hopefully this subplot will eventually pan out. 

All of which is to say that Jersey Guns is on the level with the previous Pendleton volumes. The action is a bit too muddied up with the positive reinforcement detours, but again Pendleton’s outlook is so unusual – particularly when compared to other novels in the genre – that it sort of makes you chuckle. Despite what Pendleton claimed in William Young’s book (or actually maybe it was in the interview Pendleton did with Marvel comics for Marvel Preview Presents: The Punisher, in 1975), Mack Bolan is a superhero, and his easy vanquishing of his foes only undermines what could be a more thrilling tale. The “what a man” stuff only makes his superheroism more grating. 

But then, I still agree with Zwolf that “Pendleton’s still a Cadillac in the parking lot of action-series writers,” and this sort of thing is part of Pendleton’s template. I just personally felt it got in the way this time. But, it’s the series schtick, same as Bolan’s easy infiltration of various mob hardsites…he makes the whole “Executioner” business look ridiculously easy. On that same note, Jersey Guns ends with Bolan easily taking control of a Mafia airplane and having the pilot head south; we’ll learn his destination next volume, it appears, as he uses the flight time to take a well-deserved nap(!).

The Executioner Series Style Guide

In my review of Men's Adventure Quarterly #3 last week I mentioned the issue had inspired me to upload an Executioner curio I picked up some years ago, thanks to a cool guy I used to be in regular contact with named Mike Madonna.  Mike kindly shared with me this style guide for The Executioner that Gold Eagle put together in the early 1980s, when the imprint began publishing the series.  I have been meaning to share this out for several years now, and the newest MAQ inspired me to finally do it.

This 38-page document features an intro by Don Pendleton himself, and then goes on to give potential Gold Eagle ghostwriters the ins and outs of handling the series.  It would appear that the guide was not used for very long; per his comments in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, Pendleton grew quite frustrated with how Gold Eagle ultimately veered away from his suggestions for the character and the series.

Also, I thought it would be fitting to post this now, given that the final Executioner novel was published this past December, courtesy long-time series author Michael Newton (who per a comment Brian Drake left in my recent The Hunter #1 review passed away recently).

Head to this Mega link to download the Executioner Series Style Guide and let me know what you think!

Men‘s Adventure Quarterly #3

Men‘s Adventure Quarterly #3, edited by Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, and Chuck Dixon

September, 2021  Subtropic Productions

It was a definite pleasure to receive this third issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly; while the first issue featured Westerns and the second issue featured spy stories, this one features ‘70s “man vs the mob” stories, with a particular focus on The Executioner. Indeed Mack Bolan is the star of MAQ #3, with not one but two “book bonuses” which condense the first two Executioner novels. In addition we have more detail on Don Pendleton and his work, as well as an essay by his widow Linda. Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham serve up their usual informative intros to whet our appetite, and guest editor Chuck Dixon also fills us in on how The Executioner connected with the latter-day men’s mags. 

What I really like about this third issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly is that each story here is from the 1970s; in just about every other men’s adventure mag anthology, the stories are generally from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The last years of the genre are usually swept under the veritable carpet, often minimized as being nothing more than lurid “adult” rags. While this is mostly true, a lot of those later magazines still featured great stories, and I’ve reviewed some of them here, here, and here. Years ago when I was avidly collecting men’s mags I’d try to find ‘70s issues, mostly because the covers promised such lurid crime stories. However the later ‘70s men’s mags are pretty pricey (not that the earlier ones are cheap!), likely because they had lower print runs. I mean, how many horny men in 1976 would buy Men when they could buy Penthouse instead? Not only less “stories” to get in the way of the nude flesh, but more bush! 

The fun begins with “Blood Feud With The Mafia,” by Don Honig and from the August 1970 True Action. The setup follows Honig’s Western yarn “Shoot-Out At Mad Sadie’s Place,” in MAQ #1: a guy’s brother is killed and he goes out for revenge. But the way it plays out here is much different. For one, as Bob points out in his intro, the storyline is similar to The Executioner formula, but per Honig himself he never read that series, and the story was all the product of his own imagination. As it turns out, “Blood Feud” comes off more like a pseudo-Executioner, as the protagonist doesn’t nearly have the same drive for vengeance as Bolan (or any of Bolan’s imitators, for that matter). 

Honig is very good at succinctly setting up his stories, and that’s evident here with fat Don Carlo tasking his “number one gun” Nick Piano with going to Frisco to take out Dick Malloy. Malloy’s brother was killed by the Don years ago, and Malloy swore revenge. Instead he got shipped off to ‘Nam, and now he’s back; the don wants him killed in case he still has plans. But as mentioned Dick Malloy’s much different than Mack Bolan. When we meet him he’s drunk, coming out of a bar, and has no intentions of following through on his vow anytime soon. Honig takes the story in a different direction when Piano, instead of killing Malloy, offers to run cover for Malloy while he sows havoc on Don Carlo’s various operations. So already we see a much different approach to the formula than typical: Malloy has to be talked into his new role as mob-buster, and heck, later in the story he even states, “I don’t cotton to killing.” 

Regardless Honig turns out a fast-moving crime yarn that covers all the bases, from karate-chop kills to heists (a ‘70s men’s adventure mainstay), to even the mandatory willing female. This would be Trix, the “busty” blonde waitress at Malloy’s motel who makes her interests clear – and when Malloy doesn’t respond she shows up in his room one night. By 1970 such scenes were slightly more risque in men’s adventure magazines, but it’s still a mostly fade-to-black affair. The finale features Malloy sneaking into the don’s villa and trying to figure out how many henchmen are there so he can make his kill and safely escape; even here he proves himself to only be a Bolan pretender, as he bumbles through it. Honig delivers some nicely violent setpieces, capping off an entertaining tale; this was a good first story for MAQ #3. 

“We Wiped Out ‘Brutal Mack’s’ Cyle Killers” by Jack August, from the November 1972 For Men Only, is the longest original piece here; indeed, it seems to just keep going and going. This one’s outside the template of the issue in that the narrator doesn’t go up against the mob per se, but a biker mob. In that regard it’s more of a piece of the glut of biker yarns the men’s mags would publish at this time, as wonderfully documented in Deis and Doyle’s Barbarians On Bikes. The narrator of this one is pulled back into the wild world of biker scum; when word has it that a new gang called The Savages is tearing up other clubs through the midwest, he soon finds himself in a direct confrontation with them. Brual Mack, the herculean ruler of The Savages, gets in the narrator’s crosshairs when he kills his best bud/’Nam pal, and our hero swears revenge. But it’s not a direct action sort of tale; first he infiltrates the gang, gains Brutal Mack’s confidence, and only gradually pulls off his revenge. With its reactionary flavor, “Brutal Mack” has little in common with the true biker tales that would appear around this time in Easyriders; indeed, no makes or models are even mentioned, and the bikes are more of just a prop for the author to hang the story on. 

“The Amputee Vengeance Squad’s Mafia Wipeout” is by Jack Tyler and from the August 1975 Men. This I felt was the highlight of the issue, even better than the Executioner yarns. First of all though, kudos to the editors for showing the uncensored cover of the original issue of Men, with no black bars or other digitization blocking out the nudity. I also appreciated Bob’s intro, which discusses how these latter-day men’s mags were mostly Playboy and Penthouse imitators, with much less focus on pulp stories – but at least they featured full-color artwork for the pulp stories they did run. Bob rightly puts a lot of focus on Earl Norem’s fantastic artwork for the story (Norem handles the art for many of the stories here, and he’s always been one of my favorites), but he doesn’t tell us much about author Jack Tyler. No idea if Tyler was real or a house name, but he turns in a very entertaining slice of pulp crime. I rank this with “Blood For The Love Slaves” as another men’s adventure magazine story that I wish had been fleshed out into paperback length. 

As the title would suggest, this story entails a trio of ‘Nam vets who band together to take on the Mafia. Nothing unique about that particular plot, but the difference here is that each of the men lost various limbs in the war…but their army-supplied prosthetics have only made them even more badass. So we have a dude with artificial legs, another with a false arm and mechanical hand (“a thing of wizadry”), and another with a pair of hooks replacing his lost hands. Norem faithfully captures the look of each man, even the “walrus moustache” one of them sports: 

Tyler serves up succinct backgrounds for each of the three men, vividly capturing how they lost their limbs in the war and how they learned to live on without them when they returned home to East Michigan. But when one of their own, one who has served as an “idol” because he was determined to “live normally,” is killed by the mob, the three decide to get revenge. The action never falters, with lots of violent shootouts. Norem’s splashpage illustration also comes into play when a hapless stooge blows off the legless guy’s artificial limbs. Tyler writes the tale in flat, declarative sentences, so that it almost comes off more like a piece of reporting than fiction. He doesn’t get into the thoughts of his protagonists very much, and ultimately he doesn’t make much use of their prosthetics in some novel way, ie an artificial hand that hides a gun or etc. But the idea itself is super cool and Tyler does a great job of playing it straight and delivering a fast-moving and memorable piece of pulpy crime. 

Tyler easily could’ve hussled this into a paperback series to go on the racks along with the other men’s adventure paperbacks in the ‘70s – Pinnacle, Leisure, Manor, even book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel might’ve seen the potential here for a hit. But then, by late ’75 the men’s adventure paperback genre was already dying down, with most series getting cancelled and not many new ones hitting the market at all. Per Michael Newton in his How To Write Action-Adventure Fiction, men’s adventure paperbacks disappeared around this time due to the oil crisis; publishers had to throttle back on their publications, and the low-circulation men’s adventure series were often the first to go. Whatever the reason, perhaps the world is a poorer place for never having had an “Amputee Vengeance Squad” series. 

Next we get into the main portion of the book, which is devoted to two lengthy Executioner reprints; the first, originally published in the October 1969 issue of For Men Only, is a condensed version of #1: War Against The Mafia, and the second, originally published in the September 1971 issue of Men, is a condensed version of #2: Death Squad. As Bob and Linda Pendleton note, these “true booklength” versions might’ve been edited by Pendleton himself, or perhaps by Executioner series editor Andy Ettinger. Their appearance here is nice, but they’re mostly more of a novelty nature, as the actual books themselves are quite common, with about a zillion editions each. But it’s cool to see how they were molded into the template of a men’s adventure magazine, at least, and in this regard War Against The Mafia really stands out as different from the rest of the series with its focus on sex. Per my overly-comprehensive notes in my review of that first volume, these sex scenes were specifically added per Pinnacle’s request. How wonderful it must’ve been to live in an era where “add more graphic sex and violence” was an actual publisher request! 

The Executioner theme continues with an insightful essay from Linda Pendleton, a piece on the mysterious The Executioner Mystery Magazine, and a focus on Gil Cohen’s art for the Pinnacle and Gold Eagle books. Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle did an entire book devoted to this, One Man Army, and that one’s highly recommended. There’s also a study of Cohen’s art in William H. Young’s A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction; there Young describes the cover of every Executioner and tie-in novel from the first volume all the way through the mid-1990s. The one thing I recall from this piece is Young’s note that Bolan on Cohen’s covers becomes increasingly weapons-bound as the novels progress; whereas the earliest volumes have him with a single gun and garbed in his blacksuit, by the latter volumes of the series he’s encumbered by grenades, ammo, and other accessories that dangle from his suit. 

This issue’s “Gall-ery” is devoted to the famous Betty Page, and we get a teaser that MAQ #4 will feature work from a female men’s mag author. There aren’t any reader letters this time, but overall Men’s Adventure Quarterly #3 looks as great as the first two – this is clearly a labor of love from Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham – and it’s highly recommended for anyone into men’s adventure novels or magazines. Also, this issue inspired me to finally get around to posting an Executioner curio I acquired some time ago; it will be up on Monday.

The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter

The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter, by Jim Peterson

June, 1973  Pinnacle Books

I’ve been looking forward to this volume of The Executioner for several years now. Even though it’s hated by hardcore fans of the series, Sicilian Slaughter sounded interesting to me because, for one volume at least, it was as if Bruno Rossi or Frank Scarpetta got hold of the keys to the kingdom: the refined, skilled touch of Don Pendleton is gone, and for once “hero” Mack Bolan comes off as vile and sadistic as the mobsters he’s up against. 

Per his interview with William H. Young in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, Pendleton himself never read Sicilian Slaughter, and never knew who wrote it – however he clarified that he held no ill will toward whoever did write it. Young himself was unable to find out how’d written Sicilian Slaughter, but we know now that it was William Crawford. Young did reveal something I’ve not read anywhere else: That Pinnacle was ready to keep The Executioner going as by “Jim Peterson,” a house name that would be filled by a revolving cast of ghostwriters, and Pinnacle even mocked up covers for the next Peterson volume (which turned out to never be published), Firebase Seattle. This is a mystery I’ve chased for a while, and I have some of the details I discovered below. 

It makes sense that Crawford got the “Peterson” gig first, as at the time he was sort of being groomed as Pinnacle’s flagship author. The imprint published several of his books, even devoting full-page ads to them. And having read a few of Crawford’s novels it was clear to me from the get-go that he was indeed the author of Sicilian Slaughter. Most of Crawford’s hallmarks are at play: an asshole protagonist, rampant misogyny, interminable digressions concerning one-off characters, perspective hopping, periodic sermons to the reader on the shittiness of the world, and an overall dispirited vibe. One Crawfordism that does not appear is the typically-mandatory scene in which a character shits his pants or pukes his guts out. Maybe series editor Andy Ettinger told him to reign that in. 

But then, Ettinger seems to have done some tinkering to Crawford’s manuscript, as it’s more streamlined than most of Crawford’s other bloated books. And also there’s a lot of flashbacks to previous Executioner volumes, so either Crawford did some serious research (which doesn’t seem likely from what I’ve learned about these contract writers) or Ettinger went into the manuscript and added these touches. I suspect the latter, given that Pendleton also told William H. Young that Andy Ettinger wrote the prologue for the following volume, Jersey Guns: this volume saw Pendleton’s return to the series, and given that he refused to read Sicilian Slaughter it was up to Ettinger to pen the prologue. 

And it’s a good thing Pendleton did refuse, as there’s no way he could’ve retconned Sicilian Slaughter into his overall storyline. The one thing we know about William Crawford, thanks to Will Murray’s research in his 1982 article about Nick Carter: Killmaster, is that he was a cop. Thus Crawford sees Mack Bolan as a criminal; he has absolutely none of the heroism Pendleton gave him. In this novel Bolan shoots unarmed people, murders a woman (in a very sadistic manner), gets another woman to take a severe beating for him, threatens a cop, and basically just acts like an asshole throughout. Even established relationships are skewed; Leo Turrin, Bolan’s inside man in the Mafia, basically hero-worships the Executioner in Pendleton’s novels, as evidenced by the various “what a man!” reflections he’ll have when encountering him. Turrin shows up in Sicilian Slaughter as well…and thinks to himself what a “pain” Bolan is, wondering if he should just turn him in to the capos and be done with it! 

Turrin was also in the previous volume, and Crawford tries to pick up the story from directly after. Bolan’s shot up and bleeding and heads to an underground doctor Turrin told him about years ago. Here we quickly see that this isn’t your grandma’s Mack Bolan when our “hero” decides he’s going to have to kill the doctor who just saved him. But as it happens the doctor has ulterior motives of his own and is about to call in some gunsels and collect the bounty on the Executioner. Meanwhile of course our hero has a surprise of his own in store for the good doctor. Bolan is a mean-spirited son of a bitch throughout, almost identical to other s.o.b. Crawford protagonists, like Stryker. But he’s a lot more action-prone than others, carrying along an artillery case of heavy firepower. I’m betting Crawford also had military experience – I know he also published some Vietnam War novels – as evidenced by the firearms and military details sprinkled throughout Sicilian Slaughter. 

Bolan decides to take his war directly to Sicily; this was set up in the previous volume with Bolan getting irked that the American mobsters were starting to import new blood from the mother land. The sequence in which Bolan flies to Italy is like something out of The Marksman or The Sharpshooter; the “Mack Bolan” here could easily be Philip Magellan or Johnny Rock. First he threatens the sleazy private pilot into the job, and then, in the most outrageous moment in the novel, Bolan decides to get rid of the pilot’s busty assistant. She, uh, deserves it, though, given that she’s a former hooker and drug addict and works as a stringer for the Mafia – and plus she’s recognized Bolan and plans to snitch on him. As if it wasn’t enough to show Mack Bolan killing off an unarmed woman, Crawford has it happen in the most vile way possible – the girl’s naked, offering herself to Bolan in the cabin, and Bolan coldly shoots open a window so that she’s sucked out, screaming in terror, thirty thousand feet above ground! 

What’s surprising is that series editor Andy Ettinger even allowed this material to be published. If there’s anyone Pendleton seems pissed at in his intervew in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, it’s Ettinger. And one can see his point. It’s surprising that the series editor and the imprint would even publish Sicilian Slaughter with its sadistic “hero;” it makes it very clear that they just saw The Executioner as product, something they had to get on the book racks at a certain date to keep up the publishing cadence. They couldn’t have cared less about the mythic hero the series creator had painstakingly built over the preceding fifteen volumes. In fact, the editorial embellishments throughout make it clear that Ettinger was indeed involved in Sicilian Slaughter, and one would think he’d be like, “No, Mack Bolan probably wouldn’t blast some nude and unarmed girl out of an airplane.” 

To be sure, though, I like this crazy stuff and always have, and if this had been a volume of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman it would’ve been one of the best installments of either series. What I do mind is Crawford’s typical penchant for undermining himself; his books come off like bloated bores what with the constant background detail on one-off characters, just egregious crap that’s there to meet the word count. Even the buxom victim has several pages devoted to her sad-sack history, which only further undermines Crawford, given that the reader sort of feels sorry for her…and then the “hero” mercilessly kills her. But then perhaps it’s intentional on Crawford’s part, more indication that he saw the Executioner as a villain. But then again, it’s surprising that the sequence even made it into print, given that the guy who’d served as series editor for the past fifteen volumes was involved. Surely someone at Pinnacle must’ve figured that at least some readers might be shocked by all this, but apparently the driving goal was more to get the product in the stores. 

Another annoying penchant of Crawford’s is that he’s never consistent in what he calls his hero in the narrative. It’s either “Mack” or “Bolan” or “the man in black” (which made me think Johnny Cash had suddenly become the Executioner), and it’s never consistent. But then this is one of my pet peeves, and others might not care. I just personally feel that the author should refer to his protagonist by only one name, and one name only; other characters can call the progatonist by various names, but the author should be consistent. And I’m willing to fight for my beliefs! Sorry, lost the thread there. And also Crawford fails to make “Mack” (or “Bolan,” or whatever) likable. Even Magellan, in all his “cutting-the-heads-off-my-victim’s-corpses” insanity was still at least somewhat likable, if only because he was so batshit crazy. But Crawford’s version of Mack Bolan is like all of Crawford’s other progatonists: he’s just a prick. 

Another thing that bugs me about Crawford’s prose is that he uses this half-assed “omniscient” tone, in that he’ll tell us stuff, while otherwise limited to Bolan’s perspective, that Bolan himself doesn’t know. For example, Bolan might shoot somebody, and Crawford will write like, “Bolan blew out Eddie the Champ’s heart,” or somesuch. But the thing is – Bolan doesn’t even know who Eddie the Champ is! For all he knows, it’s just some random mobster thug. Yet we readers know who it is, because Eddie is one of the many one-off characters we’re saddled with in the narrative, a former military dude hired by the Sicilian don to train some troops. And all this stuff here is just lazy retread of the previous volume, with the troops being trained pure military style, with barracks and hiding out in foxholes and whatnot, all of which is sort of ridiculous because it’s like they’re being trained to invade a country or something, not to act as enforcers for dons in American cities. 

And indeed, the climax is basically like a military novel. Bolan, after having blitzed his way through Italy and even posing as a simple country boy to get to Sicily – which entails him hooking up with some busty local babe and having some off-page lovin’ with her – ends up on the training fields of the Mafia recruits and starts mowing them down (in spectacularly bloodless fashion) with heavy weaponry. Here Crawford shows what appears to be some military background, with sidebars on strategy and also the efficacy of the Browning Automatic Rifle. There’s also weird survivalist stuff, like when Bolan’s shot in the back and kicks in a tree, grabs out the “thick spider webs,” and stops the flow of blood with them. Speaking of which Bolan comes off as a brazen, reckless fool in Crawford’s hands, displaying none of the superheroic planning of Pendleton’s original. Several times Bolan will just storm his way into some situation and realize he’s gotten in over his head. 

But one thing I can say about Crawford’s version of Bolan is that he’s mega-tough. Bolan goes through a lot of pain in this one, shot up and beaten and just in general abused, and he just keeps on going. He starts and ends the novel in a half-dead state. Crawford again goes places Pendleton likely wouldn’t when Bolan, late in the novel, shoots up with some morphine to combat the pain. However he’s not a hero by any means; I’ve already mentioned how the poor local girl gets beaten to a pulp for being suspected of having helped Bolan, and all Bolan does is watch from safety and swear to himself he’ll “make it up somehow” to her. But Bolan’s motives are purely driven by sadistic rage; not content to merely kill the Sicilian don, he goes to great lengths to destroy the man’s entire villa so as to prove a point to the rest of the Mafia. 

An interesting element of Sicilian Slaughter is the finale, which cuts to Seattle and features a muscular dude in his 40s with gray hair named Mr. Molto. This guy runs a sort of underground military operation, and has just been hired by the Mafia to kill the Executioner. Molto has an extensive operation, and via computer has deduced that Bolan’s next strike will be in Seattle. This epilogue – which I’m betting was written by Ettinger – clearly sets up the stage for the following volume, same as how Panic In Philly ended with an Ettinger epilogue that set up this Sicilian adventure. However, the Mr. Molto subplot would never be mentioned in any future Executioner novel. 

As mentioned above, William H. Young stated that Pinnacle had done mockup covers for the next “Jim Peterson” novel, Firebase Seattle. Given the title, it was clearly intended to follow up from the climax of Sicilian Slaughter. This Peterson novel was never published, as Pendleton and Pinnacle worked out their legal issues and Pendleton came back to the series for the next volume, which was titled Jersey Guns. Pendleton did eventually turn in a novel titled Firebase Seattle (I assume using the cover originally designed for the unpublished Peterson manuscript of the same title), but obviously it had nothing to do with the events set up in Sicilian Slaughter. 

This means then that the closing material with “Mr. Molto” was never picked up on, and thus the villain remains a mystery in the Executioner universe. I knew that Gil Brewer had written an unpublished volume of The Executioner, and for a long time I suspected that he’d written the unpublished sequel to Sicilian Slaughter. In other words, I had a hunch that Gil Brewer had been hired to be the next “Jim Peterson.” A few years ago I got my confirmation: the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming has Brewer’s unpublished Executioner manuscript in its Gil Brewer bollection, and friends, it’s titled…Firebase Seattle. And for a mere $50.00, you can get a copy! (They charge 20 cents per page for jpeg copies, and it’s a 248-page manuscript.) 

So I wager that Mr. Molto does indeed appear in Brewer’s manuscript, and further I wager Brewer’s manuscript would have more Andy Ettinger embellishments to keep everything simpatico with the series overall. But I’m certainly in no hurry to fork over so much to read it. Gil Brewer was a great writer, but judging from his work on Soldato he wasn’t a great men’s adventure writer. But if anyone out there wins the lottery and decides to check out the manuscript, let me know!