Executioner #17, "Death Stalk"

DEATH STALK was Executioner creator Don Pendleton's return to the character after a brief contractual tiff with publisher Pinnacle. That led to 1973's SICILIAN SLAUGHTER, the series' 16th book, being written by William Crawford using the pseudonym Jim Peterson.

When Pendleton put out #17, 1974's JERSEY GUNS, he chose to ignore SICILIAN SLAUGHTER completely--it is said that he never even read it--and picked up where #15 left off. Unfortunately, that meant we never got an adventure involving Mr. Molto, the intriguing villain who popped up in the epilogue of SICILIAN SLAUGHTER.

A wounded Mack Bolan ends up in New Jersey, where he is found passed out and near death in a stream bed by Bruno, a medic who served under Bolan in Vietnam, and his younger sister Sara, nineteen years old and a widow, thanks to that damned war.

Despite their knowledge of what will happen to them if the mobsters searching for Bolan find him in their barn, the siblings are good people and nurse him back to health. Of course, both are eventually captured by gunsels working for Mike Talifero, returning from earlier Bolan adventures, and Bruno is turned into "turkey meat" (you don't want to know).

As he was wont to do, Pendleton often goes off-subject with ramblings about war and humanity that allowed him to express his worldview without having to mess with his characters (as opposed to Joseph Rosenberger, whose Death Merchant was just as crazy and racist as he was). Skip those chapters and enjoy the pages where Bolan mows down dozens of bad, bad guys without compunction. If nothing else, Pendleton knew how to tell an action story, and JERSEY GUNS does it as well as ever.

School For Assassins

SICILIAN SLAUGHTER is the infamous sixteenth book in the long-running (to this day) Executioner series. Don Pendleton, who created the Executioner in 1969, wrote the first 38 novels in the series. Except one.

Pendleton got into a tiff with Pinnacle Books, the publisher of the paperback series, around 1973 and refused to write any more books for them. Undeterred, Pinnacle commissioned an Executioner adventure from William Crawford, the writer of the Stryker books, and published SICILIAN SLAUGHTER under the generic name Jim Peterson.

What readers thought of this development in 1973, who knows. Did readers care that Pendleton's name wasn't on the cover or that the book was clearly written in another style? The Executioner books were enormously successful, but was anyone really paying close attention to junky men's paperbacks then?

Perhaps someone was, because Pendleton quickly came to terms with Pinnacle and churned out many more Executioners over the next few years. Today, fans of Mafia killer Mack Bolan appear outraged with SICILIAN SLAUGHTER. And it's true that it roams off-model. Bolan threatens the lives of innocents a few times, which he had never done--had, in fact, sworn not to do--in previous books, and he seduces a teenage girl who doesn't even speak English and leaves her behind to be brutalized by the hardmen chasing him.

Still, Crawford was a pro and a decent writer, and SICILIAN SLAUGHTER--character inconsistencies aside--is a decent page-turner.

It takes awhile for the plot to get moving, as Crawford opens the book by cleaning up some loose ends from PANIC IN PHILLY. He really accentuates the "man on the run" quality of the Mack Bolan character by sending him to a Mob doctor to get patched up. Some of Bolan's escapes border on Bond territory, eschewing Pendleton's more realistic spin on the character, as Bolan makes a hasty exit from a hospital and from an airplane by blasting the stewardess (actually on the Mafia's payroll) through the window!

Eventually, Mack gets to Sicily to cut the snake apart at the head. He finds that one of the Dons has built a training facility for soldiers whose sole purpose is to destroy Mack Bolan, who is estimated to have killed over a thousand mobsters! Crawford handles the action scenes fairly well, and if you can ignore that it isn't Pendleton, SICILIAN SLAUGHTER is effective.

The sad part: Crawford, perhaps not knowing whether he'd be writing the next entry too, sets up Executioner #17 by introducing a promising antagonist in the prologue. A mysterious figure referred to only as Mr. Molto is notified of Bolan's arrival in Algiers and expects him to come to Seattle. Molto is plugged in to some sort of heavy network, perhaps of a military bent. It isn't clear whether Mr. Molto is part of the Mafia, but he definitely is a guy who can take care of himself and looks forward to killing Bolan in Seattle. Of course, Pendleton chose to ignore SICILIAN SLAUGHTER in his books, so Mr. Molto was never referred to again, which is a shame.

Executioner In Paris

CONTINENTAL CONTRACT is notable for taking Mack Bolan international for the first time. It's entirely accidental, however. Pinned down by an army of Mafia hoods at Dulles Airport, the Executioner's only escape is to grab the first airliner out, which happens to be to Paris.

Through a wild coincidence, Bolan happens to be seated next to an almost exact double! He's Gil Martin, a movie star. Mack uses his resemblance to Martin to slip through a waiting Mafia gauntlet in Paris, but has to come to the actor's rescue when Gil is kidnapped and tortured by those same hoods.

While in Paris, Bolan decides to take out a few baddies, which lures New York gangster Tony Lavagni to Paris to collect the $100,000 bounty on the Executioner. Hoping for some inside intel, Lavagni brings along Harlem numbers runner Wilson Brown, who served alongside Bolan in Vietnam and has a working knowledge of Mack's killing methods.

Not only does Bolan get Gil Martin messed up, but his interference into a whorehouse causes the Mob to kidnap its girls with plans to sell them into slavery in Africa. The Executioner's plan: to kill one mobster every hour until the women are safely returned.

It seems like this 1971 Pinnacle novel has a lot going on, and I guess it does. It's still not one of Don Pendleton's best efforts. I noted that Bolan bumbles a few times, which is uncharacteristic of him, as is his mistake in letting Lavagni live at one point just so the killer can come at him again near the end.

Pendleton also creates a French starlet for Bolan to woo, Cici, who is annoying because zee Peendletone writes 'er dialogue een reedeeculous French accent, how 'u say?

CONTINENTAL CONTRACT is still entertaining, just not one of Pendleton's best. Mack Bolan, as we know, made his way to London before returning to New York.

Mack Bolan the Executioner: Panic in Philly by Don Pendleton

March 1973 saw Pinnacle publishing PANIC IN PHILLY, the fifteenth Executioner novel written by Don Pendleton. It isn't anything special with its simple story and formulaic violence, but it's a good way to kill two hours.

For no real reason given in the narrative, Mack Bolan heads to Philadelphia to tackle Stefano Angeletti's crime family. Don Stefano wants to pass the family business along to his weak son Frank, but all the major capos know the wimp just isn't up to the job. While all this internal strife is going on, Bolan drops into town, blows up the Angeletti compound, then disguises himself as his own assassin to infiltrate the gang!

Like in VEGAS VENDETTA, the Executioner spends much of the novel as someone else: this time, Johnny Cavaretta, a hitman hired to take Bolan out. However, Mack gets to him first, kills him, disguises him as the Executioner, and then starts ordering the Angeletti gang around as Cavaretta.

Good action and some humor mark PANIC IN PHILLY is a decent timewaster in the Executioner series.

Wanted: Mack Bolan

Something I find funny about Pinnacle's paperback series about Mack Bolan, the Executioner, is that I was exposed to them all the time when I was a kid, but never read them. The reason I was exposed to them (this is the funny part) is because my mother read them. She was a voracious reader, often staying up well into the night to munch sunflower seeds and read. A lot of what she read were Harlequin romances, which she would store in brown paper grocery bags and trade with her friends, but I also remember her reading Mack Bolan novels, and I have no idea why I never did, since I was also (and have always been) a huge reader.

But I have many of them now, and there are few better ways to entertain yourself alone for two hours or so. Author Don Pendleton, who quit the series after #38, knew how to tell a tough, quick, violent yarn, and without spending very many words on it, managed to give his characters some personality.

Book #14, SAN DIEGO SIEGE, published in 1972, is not structured a whole lot differently than earlier Executioner novels. Once again, Bolan enters a new city, assesses the Mafia's threat to that city, and sets about to cut the cancer out using firepower and guts.

The twist this time is that Bolan has help. Returning from 1969's DEATH SQUAD, in which Bolan reunited with some Vietnam buddies to extinguish a threat in Los Angeles, are the survivors of that adventure: scrounger Politician and electronics expert Gadgets. This time, they reunite to investigate the suspicious suicide of their former commander in 'Nam, Howlin' Harlan Winters, and what looks like his involvement with a San Diego mobster named Little Ben Lucasi.

Pendleton creates something of a mild mystery to go with the flavorful action and brisk pace, making SAN DIEGO SIEGE another entertaining Executioner entry. And, as always, you gotta love the painted cover, which is even semi-accurate for once.

Power Play

I plowed through Don Pendleton's WASHINGTON I.O.U. in a single sitting one late night, which isn't difficult with Pendleton's easy style and rapid pacing. It isn't exactly the most unusual story you'll ever read. Fact of the matter is the Executioner novels all have basically the same plot, but Pendleton's attention to character makes them work. Unlike most other men's adventure series of the 1970s, the Executioner books manage to whip together intriguing supporting characters who may not appear on many pages, but are colorful enough to make a slight impact. They open Mack Bolan's world a bit, adding texture to the typically bombastic shootouts and explosions.

Book thirteen in the Pinnacle series, first published in 1972, brings Bolan to the nation's capital, where he sticks his nose into a blackmail plot involving many prominent politicians, at least one of whom is on the White House staff. The mysterious new boss is codenamed Lupo ("Wolf"), and nobody, not even beautiful Claudia Vitale, the Washington socialite coerced into sleeping with married VIPs in front of cameras, knows who he is. Which is where the Executioner comes in.

I really like the way WASHINGTON I.O.U. ends—a pulpy climax involving a secret tunnel, a twist involving a previously "good" character, and the unmasking of the mysterious Lupo. Obviously, the action scenes are tight, and it's interesting to note the way the Bolan character has begun affecting the underworld. Even (especially?) people who have never met Bolan are aware of his reputation as a sort of Mafia bogeyman. I'm sure his reputation, maybe even more than his actual skills as a killing machine, will continue to play a big factor in his war against the Mafia.

Call Me Jigsaw

It’s no secret that Marvel Comics writer Gerry Conway was thinking of Pinnacle’s hugely popular paperback vigilante Mack Bolan—aka the Executioner—when he created the character of Frank Castle as a foe for Spider-Man in 1974’s THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #129. Rough, taciturn, and intimidating in his all-black threads with ghostly white skull logo, the Punisher soon became one of Marvel’s most popular characters—nearly as popular as Spidey himself. He even made it to the big screen before Spider-Man in 1989’s THE PUNISHER, a reasonably entertaining Dolph Lundgren vehicle that was made with too little money and too little inspiration.

Surprisingly, Lionsgate’s first crack at the material, 2004’s THE PUNISHER, which stayed much closer to Castle’s comic-book pedigree than the New World picture, was not a major hit, despite Thomas Jane’s believable performance and Jonathan Hensleigh’s smart direction that played down CGI mayhem in favor of old-fashioned bloodshed. For the sequel, last year's PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, now out on Blu-ray and DVD, Lionsgate hedged its bets, lowering the budget to ensure some level of profit margin and capitalizing on the surprising success of its ultra-violent RAMBO sequel by ramping the mayhem to an absurd level.

Directed by German karate champion and stuntwoman Lexi Alexander, PUNISHER: WAR ZONE finds both hero and baddie out for revenge. Castle (ROME's Ray Stevenson), of course, despises the Mafia after they were responsible for the murders of his family. Handsome mobster Billy “the Beaut” Russoti (THE WIRE's Dominic West) blames the Punisher for the hideously scarred face he earned in a bloody showdown against him. Now the hideously scarred Jigsaw, Russoti busts his even crazier brother Looney Bin Jim (Doug Hutchison, previously the terrifying Tooms on THE X-FILES) out of prison and lays siege to New York City.

Among Jigsaw’s victims is Angela Donatelli (Julie Benz, also in RAMBO), the sister of an FBI agent accidentally killed by Castle during his raid on Russoti’s lair. Castle contemplates retiring because of his collateral damage, but is forced to reconsider after Jigsaw captures Angela and her daughter.

No question about it. Alexander has delivered a raucous, wild action movie with moments of wry humor reminiscent of the lean programmers Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Norris used to make in the 1980s. Tall, stoic Stevenson is completely believable as Marvel’s two-gun man of action and is a startling counterbalance to the cackling eccentrics played by West and Hutchison, who look and act like leftovers from a Dick Tracy mystery. Stunts, shootouts, and fisticuffs are first-rate. Most surprising is the film’s crisp, colorful production design that complements and doesn’t overwhelm the sharp action scenes.

The Punisher punches right through a guy’s skull, blasts a Parkour killer in mid-air with a bazooka, and shoots about ninety mobsters while twirling upside down from a chandelier. Take those Matt Damon Jason Boredom movies and ram them up your ass. PUNISHER: WAR ZONE is a balls-to-the-wall action flick that makes other comic-book movies look like kiddie matinees.

Bloody Earthquake

By book #11 of his Executioner paperbacks for Pinnacle, Don Pendleton may have been writing them too fast. In the 1972 entry, CALIFORNIA HIT, Mack Bolan is said to have seen combat in both Korea and Vietnam. He's also described by Pendleton as being 30 years old. You do the math.

Outside of the continuity mishaps, CALIFORNIA HIT is a typically solid Executioner entry, a tight mixture of hard action, mature introspection and even a tad of humor. After wiping out some Mafiosi in the Caribbean, Mack Bolan heads to San Francisco to raise some hell. While blowing apart a Mob hideout, Mack makes the acquaintance of Mary Ching, a "China Doll" in with the government, the Mob and the Chinese Communists. Working to bust the baddies from within, Mary becomes both an ally and a lover for Bolan.

Strangely, as in CARIBBEAN KILL, Bolan makes a final strike against a previously unseen Mob boss. Pendleton plays coy as to the identity of "Mr. King," as if the reader is supposed to know who he is. I have no idea.

The novel ends with Bolan receiving news that his teenage brother Johnny and Valentina, a woman who sheltered him in WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA, the first Executioner novel, are missing from their Pittsfield home. Presumably, in the next novel, Mack heads back East to investigate.

Home And The Dead

CARIBBEAN KILL, published by Pinnacle in February 1972, starts right where the previous Executioner novel, VEGAS VENDETTA (#9), left off. Disguised as a mobster, Mack Bolan left a Mob-owned Las Vegas casino called the Gold Duster in ruins, figuratively if not quite literally, and split with a quarter million in dough for the Caribbean on a private plane. Well, during a refueling stop in Nassau, the Mafia figured out Bolan's game and sets a trap for him at a Mob safe house called Glass Bay in Puerto Rico.

Bolan, of course, anticipates the trap and bails out of the plane, but not before aiming it at the estate, causing a giant explosion and many deaths. The first half of CARIBBEAN KILL starts to shape up like a MOST DANGEROUS GAME thing, where Bolan races through the jungle with an army of hoods on his tail. He meets up with a beautiful undercover cop named Evita Aguilar, who helps him escape. Once Bolan reaches safety, he goes on the offensive, picking up an unlikely ally and taking on a suicide mission straight into a Mafia stronghold in Haiti, where he plans to assassinate an important boss named Sir Edward.

Like most early Don Pendleton novels, CARIBBEAN KILL is a terrific action tale with suspense and clean, sometimes witty scenes of violence. The opening setpiece with Bolan diving out of an airplane before smashing it into a mansion filled with gunsels is a perfect attention-getter. The Caribbean setting is a nice change of pace from previous Mack Bolan adventures, which had taken him to Miami, London, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Pendleton also devotes space to developing the supporting players a bit, and Evita Aguilar and a reluctant Mafia chopper pilot named Jack Grimaldi apparently returned in later Executioner books.

Get Bolan

It seems surprising that it took Mack Bolan so long to get to Las Vegas, the Mob capital of the U.S. But he finally does in VEGAS VENDETTA, #9 in Pinnacle's long-running series of Executioner paperbacks. At this point, it's superfluous to describe author Don Pendleton's plots, as they're all fairly (to this point) similar. Once again, Bolan, on the run from both the cops and the Mafia, turns up in Vegas, where he adopts a disguise to infiltrate a Mob-owned business, rob it, and destroy it. In this case, it's—what else?—a casino called the Gold Duster.

Pendleton describes a couple of very exciting action pieces, in particular Bolan's one-man assault on a convoy that results in a lot of wiped-out gangsters and a healthy addition to the Executioner's war chest. The 1972 novel also prefigures THE ROCKFORD FILES a bit, in that Bolan puts on a simple disguise and runs an incredibly ballsy con on most of the Vegas organization. I don't know if real mobsters are as stupid as Pendleton's, but the way Bolan takes over the Gold Duster using brains, balls and pure bluster is quite an entertaining feat.

VEGAS VENDETTA also brings back some characters from previous Bolan books, such as policemen Carl Lyons and Hal Brognola and the Talifero brothers, ace Mob hitmen (I don't think we've seen the last of these guys), and introduces others that will return in future entries, notably standup comic Tommy Anders (who's supposed to be America's hottest comic sensation, but whose routine proves Pendleton is no comedy writer) and his backup showgirls, the Ranger Girls. This is a deliciously quick read that stands among the best Executioner novels.

The Executioner Vs. The Assassins

After beating plenty of mobster ass in France and in England, Mack Bolan returns to the U.S.A. in #7, NIGHTMARE IN NEW YORK. No sooner does he step off the damn airplane than hitmen begin circling and have to be eliminated in that gritty Executioner style. However, Bolan suffers serious injury, and is taken by three sexy fashion designers to their apartment to recuperate. Outside of Bolan's new "girlfriends," who appear to be kinda clingy and not terribly bright, even though we're supposed to feel sympathetically toward them, this book follows the Executioner format pretty tightly. Bolan flippantly rips off a Mafia "bank" and, in the well-played climax, invades a lodge where the big Mob families are staging a sit-down meeting. At this point, Bolan is good and pissed after discovering the ravaged body of one of the three girls who befriended him, who had been raped and tortured before her death.

I enjoyed NIGHTMARE IN NEW YORK, but found it less memorable than previous Executioner adventures. While Bolan's bloodlust for the Mafia is what drives him to adventure, it's possible the formula may be becoming repetitious, as opposed to rival Pinnacle heroes like the Penetrator and the Death Merchant, who varied their choice of villain.

Death In The Spot

Kinky sex raises its head for the first time in the Executioner series, as Mack Bolan takes his firearms and fighting skills to Merry Olde England. After an adventure in France (presumably in #5, CONTINENTAL CONTRACT), Bolan stops off in England for a breather in ASSAULT ON SOHO, but is waylaid at the airport by mobsters out to collect the $250,000 bounty on his head. He's rescued by a young woman in a speedy car who somehow knows all about him and that he would be arriving that night.

She takes him back to the Museum de Sade, which appears to be a private club that caters to its members' most extreme sexual kinks and tortures. Disgustedly, Bolan leaves, only to plunge into his second firefight of the night. The Mafia that the Executioner had been pissing off from L.A. to Phoenix to Miami to Paris is now closing in on London with a gunsel named Nick Trigger leading the posse.

As usual, author Don Pendleton gives a healthy dose of sex, violence and sadism with a slight murder mystery thrown in as well, as Bolan looks to discover the killer of an old man tortured to death in one of the museum's more, uh, colorful devices.

Requiem For A Soldata

Mack be back in MIAMI MASSACRE, which was the fourth Executioner novel within a year for Pinnacle and author Don Pendleton. After rocking Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Los Angeles and Palm Springs in the first three Executioner novels, Mack Bolan opens #4 by blasting the shit out of a bunch of mobsters in Phoenix, which only paves the way for the main storyline. All the big Cosa Nostra top men are assembling in Miami to discuss how to rid the world of the Executioner, and Bolan follows them there, showing no fear.

The most dangerous man in the world is one who doesn't give a shit what happens to him, and that is Mack Bolan. The guy strikes and strikes hard, invading a hotel that the mob has taken over and roaming room to room wasting them all. Although there isn't a solid main villain that the Executioner goes one-on-one with, Pendleton does a nice job of filling in the blanks of the supporting characters, even to the point of carrying some old favorites over from previous novels. Also, since MIAMI MASSACRE was written at the height of U.S. disenchantment with the war in Vietnam, Pendleton doesn't shy away from pointing out the parallels between Bolan's killing in the war and his killing here and now.

True, some of the writing feels repetitious, now that we know the formula for a good Executioner thriller, but the action is crisp and exciting.

Where The Bloodletting Began

WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA is, I suppose, the granddaddy of contemporary action/adventure literature. In this classic Pinnacle Books paperback, a former aerospace engineer, Don Pendleton, created the character of Mack Bolan, a Vietnam War hero whose combat record earned him the nickname "The Executioner." Originally published in 1969, WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA went on to spawn hundreds of sequels, not just under the Executioner umbrella title, but also several spinoffs such as the Able Team and Phoenix Force books. I believe it's the only men's adventure series of the era still being published today, which says a helluva lot about the violent anti-hero Pendleton created nearly forty years ago.

Bolan's origin takes place just before the events of WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA, and is related in the prologue. Bolan receives an emergency leave to return from Vietnam to his hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts for the funerals of his father, mother and teenage sister. Bolan's old-fashioned father, stressed to his emotional limit after his desperate debt to loan sharks has driven 17-year-old Cindy Bolan to prostitution to pay it off, snaps at home one evening, shooting Cindy, his wife, and their 14-year-old youngest son Johnny. Only Johnny survives to tell big brother Mack about the Mafia's influence on Pittsfield and the dope, prostitution, corruption, and greed that has infected the town since Bolan left for 'Nam.

Understanding that the Mafia is a more serious enemy to the American way of life than the Viet Cong ever could be, Bolan becomes a one-man army, infiltrating the local mob scene and using his expertise in all sorts of weaponry and hand-to-hand combat to destroy the scum that destroyed his family. The Executioner slices like a fucking hammer, a blunt instrument that pounds away at all levels from the lowly gun-toting hood to the white-haired Italian patriarch at the top. Using bullets, bombs and the well honed technique that made him one of America's greatest war heroes, Bolan needs only a few days to tear down the Pittsfield mob from the top, staying just a step ahead of the local cops the entire time.

WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA has become one of the most important adventure novels in American history. Less than five years after its original publication, Pinnacle had released it ten more times with at least eight million copies in existence. More importantly, the Executioner books spawned dozens of copycats, some of which were also published by Pinnacle. Long-running series such as the Butcher, the Death Merchant and the Penetrator, as well as books starring the Sharpshooter, the Marksman, the Lone Wolf, and others, would never have existed without the tremendous sales appeal of the Executioner.

Surprisingly, there has never been an Executioner movie, though several have been rumored. In the 1970s, Burt Reynolds reportedly was interested in playing Bolan (he would have been a good choice), and in the '80s, Sylvester Stallone may have had the rights. Today, it appears as though Sony has the film rights to the Executioner. The irony is that, undoubtedly, an Executioner movie would be accused of plagiarism by fans of the Marvel Comics hero The Punisher, who has been the subject of two films (and another on the way). Whether Marvel has ever admitted this, I don't know, but it's fairly clear that writer Gerry Conway, the Punisher's co-creator, was highly influenced by Pendleton's character, right down to the Punisher's origin, his War Wagon and his war journal, all of which came from Executioner novels.

Closes In For The Kill

1970's BATTLE MASK takes place not long after the events of DEATH SQUAD, the second of Don Pendleton's legendary Executioner series. In that novel, all of Mack Bolan's squad was either captured or killed, and BATTLE MASK opens with the Executioner back at his Santa Monica hideout, awakening with a jolt when his alarm sounds, warning him that Julian DiGeorge's henchmen are on the attack.

Bolan manages to kill or elude "Deej"'s boys and finds himself in the small California town of Palm Village, where he looks up another old Vietnam buddy, plastic surgeon Jim Brantzen, and hits him up for a new face, which he uses to infiltrate DiGeorge's gang as "Franky Lucky," a gunsel whom the capo intends to move up through the ranks in a hurry. The action jumps back and forth between DiGeorge's estate and Palm Village, where much bloodshed occurs, including Bolan's spectacular attack on a carload of six DiGeorge goons.

Bolan, an expert marksman and combat vet who vowed vengeance upon the Mafia upon learning of his family's deaths, is unrelenting in his two-fisted fury, slicing DiGiorgio and his "family" like a fucking hammer. Pendleton really struck a lucrative chord with his readers through this character, which went on very quickly to spawn dozens of imitators. Though many of the imitators are quite entertaining in their own right, the Executioner is the real deal.

Though the surviving members of Bolan's DEATH SQUAD don't appear in BATTLE MASK, another character, police lieutenant Carl Lyons, does. Lyons is the conflicted cop who let Bolan escape arrest in DEATH SQUAD, and returns as part of a task force dedicated to capturing the Executioner, who is, after all, a mass murderer. Lyons is an interesting character and a highly moral one, though he isn't quite sure whose side to take. Ultimately, it isn't hard to guess, as Lyons because a regular in later novels as a member of Bolan's fighting force.

The Bloody Score

Mack Bolan is the daddy of them all. Without the Executioner, there would have been no Penetrator, no Marksman, no Sharpshooter, no Death Merchant, no Expeditor, no Butcher. My copy of Don Pendleton's second Executioner novel, 1969's DEATH SQUAD, is actually Pinnacle's 15th printing, and the cover blurb claims more than 20 million Mack Bolan novels sold (by 1978).

In Bolan's first adventure, WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA, Mack was a Vietnam War hero who returned to the United States to learn that the Mafia had been instrumental in the violent deaths of his parents and brother and had lured his younger sister into prostitution. Out of revenge, he fought back, killing dozens of mobsters in brutal, stylized fashion. Pendleton wrote the first 38 Executioner novels, all of which pitted Bolan against organized crime. Beginning with #39, ghostwriters took over and widened the scale, sending Bolan after all kinds of global villains, usually terrorists. The Executioner is also the only men's adventure hero still out there killing bad guys; including spinoffs, nearly 500 Executioner novels exist.

Bolan continues his vengeful killing spree in DEATH SQUAD, this time recruiting nine former 'Nam buddies to help, all with colorful nicknames like Gadgets, Deadeye, Politician, Boom Boom and Chopper. None of the supporting characters are particularly fleshed out. In 182 action-filled pages, characterization isn't of the utmost importance, and Pendleton's use of nicknames and ethnicities helps the reader draw a bead on each of the cast without expending a lot of pages on backstory. Oddly, Bolan is the biggest cipher of the bunch, though his backstory may have been covered in WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA.

Pendleton's taut pacing and vivid action scenes make DEATH SQUAD a fun read. If all of his Executioner novels are this good, it's no wonder it became "America's best-selling series." For some reason, this is my first Executioner novel, even though I grew up with them. My mother read many of them, and used to trade them with my cousin, who was my age. My brother may also have read some, but I didn't. I guess I got a late start, but better late than never.