A Trio of Mack Bolan

A few months ago I read the trilogy that killed Colonel John Phoenix and brought Mack Bolan back to the world. I had meant to write a detailed review when I read these, but time (a lack of it) conspired against me. The trilogy includes two Executioner novels, 62, Day of Mourning and 64, Dead Man Running, both written by Stephen Mertz and the Super Bolan title, Terminal Velocity written by Alan Bomack. Alan Bomack is a pseudonym and a snazzy anagram (with a little cheating) of Mack Bolan. The books were published between February and April 1984.

Day of Mourning is the best non-Don Pendleton Mack Bolan books I’ve read. It is a straight ahead thriller with a terse, hard-boiled style, matching the originals very well. It chronicles the murder of April Rose and a grave threat to Stony Man Farm.

The story continues with Terminal Velocity, which has the feeling of two separate novels smashed together. Its purpose in the story arc is to introduce Greb Strakhov, and the reason for Strakhov's grudge against Bolan. Its style is less hard-boiled than DOM, but in its own right an entertaining and very readable thriller. 

The trilogy finds its conclusion with Dead Man Running, which is a fine finale. It is a slight step down from DOM, but it admirably chronicles Mack’s journey from Colonel Phoenix back to Mack Bolan. All done while hunting the mole who gave up Stony Man to the Soviets and indirectly caused the death of April Rose.

These, especially the two written by Stephen Mertz, are really terrific action thrillers.

This review, in slightly different form, originally appeared on Gravetapping’s Facebook page. If you don’t follow Gravetapping on FB, you should, and here is the link.

The Evolving Cover Art of Mack Bolan

I started reading Don Pendleton’s adventure series The Executioner in middle school and it was (somewhat embarrassingly) the staple of my reading for two or three years.  I even belonged to the “book club” and received the newest edition of The Executioner, and its two offshoots Able Team, and Phoenix Force every month.  A new one every month!  Those were good days.  Go to school for six hours, come home and read a little Mack Bolan.

I read online somewhere the cover art for the series, which is somewhere around 425 titles as I type this, is being updated.  The most recent cover style has featured an embarrassing—embarrassing because I would be shamed if I took it to the counter for purchase—“live action” artwork featuring a model posing with guns, grenades, knives, bazookas, and god knows what else.

The change made me reminisce about the cover styles I read as a teenager, and as I looked back at some of the older covers many gave me something like the thrill I used to feel when that book club package arrived each month.  So much action.  So little responsibility.  I made a brief survey of the Internet and identified 12 variations of style, and each of them, particularly those published pre-1990 really spoke to me. 

Variation 1.  This is a little disingenuous because the first two novels—War Against the Mafia and Death Squad—were published with their own unique covers, but I’m going to ignore them and focus on the first “standard” cover style.  The first 38 novels were published by Pinnacle Books, and, mostly, actually written by Don Pendleton.  The cover art is terrifically lurid with weaponry and violence. These titles were published between 1969 and March 1980.

Variation 2.  Mack Bolan’s publisher changed—from the old Pinnacle to Gold Eagle—his war changed, and so did the design of his books.  These titles were published between April 1981 and May 1983—entry numbers 39 – 53.

Variation 3.  A small change to the original Gold Eagle covers.  The overall design did not change, but “Don Pendleton’s” was added above the large block letter “Mack Bolan”.  These titles were published between June and December 1983—entry numbers 54 – 60.

Variation 4.  Not a big change, but a change nonetheless.  “Mack Bolan” was moved to one line, and “Don Pendleton’s Executioner” was added.  The artwork remained consistent; however the quality of the cover art improved over the run.  These titles were published between January 1984 and July 1984—entry numbers 61 – 67.

Variation 5.  Another minor change here.  The “Executioner” tag was removed from above “Mack Bolan” and it was replaced with “The Executioner” and the book number in a circle in the top right corner.  This is the first style I remember reading as a kid, and I still get a little excited when I run across one.  These titles were published between August 1984 and June 1986—entry numbers 68 – 90.

Variation 6.  The same format as all of the Gold Eagle titles to date; however the yellow line at the top is gone.  These titles were published between July 1986 and January 1988—entry numbers 91 – 109.

Variation 7.  This represents the biggest change since the Pinnacle novels.  The “Mack Bolan” shrinks (and is consistently yellow or white), the title font changes significantly, and the cover art becomes less of a cohesive scene and more of a montage with something approaching a posing Mack Bolan.  A blurb from the San Francisco Examiner is also added—“The biggest of all adventure series.”  These titles were published between February 1988 and August 1989—entry numbers 110 – 128.

Variation 8.  This is the big change.  It is one I think of as the all-American Bolan.  The background is consistently white.  “The Executioner” is in red white and blue; including three stars in the “E”, and “Featuring Mack Bolan” is added just below.  The blurb also changed to a rolling format between three of four different.  This is the cover style I received once a month with my book club subscription.  These titles were published between September 1989 and December 1994—entry numbers 129 – 192.

Variation 9. Another big change.  This one happened well after I stopped reading the series, but I remember seeing these in the bookstore and thinking, “They don’t even look like Bolan books.”  “The Executioner” is flipped vertical on the left side.  These titles were published between January 1995 and January 1999—entry numbers 193 – 241.

Variation 10.  Not much of a change, but a change nonetheless.  “The Executioner” in the title is emptied and the artwork behind can be seen.  Starting with No. 258 “Featuring Mack Bolan” is removed from the cover.  These titles were published between February 1999 and April 2000—entry numbers 242 – 299.

Variation 11.  The live action—think posing model(s)—era starts with No. 300, and it runs an impressive 128 books.  This is my least favorite incarnation of Mack Bolan.  It keeps with the montage effect, but rather than artwork it is photography.  These titles were published between May 2000 and July 2014—entry numbers 300 – 428.

Variation 12.  The newest variation is something of a mixture of the most recent and the older titles.  It appears to be art rather than photography.  The montage effect is gone, and the title is nice and clean.  Conspicuously missing is the Series Book No. on the cover.  These titles will begin arriving in August 2014.

   

Mack Bolan Convention

I stumbled across a cool video on YouTube. It is a news feature about the Mack Bolan convention held in San Francisco in 1985. The film is low quality, but the audio is great. There are some interesting comments by Don Pendleton and more than one or two shots of bookcovers and hairstyles that made me smile.

BOSTON BLITZ by Don Pendleton

I’ve “rediscovered” The Executioner over the last year. I voraciously read this series as a teenager and somewhere between eighteen and twenty I completely lost track of the older titles as well as the current books in the series. I viewed them as nothing more than fond memories solidly in the rearview mirror of my reading, but like much of what I read Mack Bolan has cycled back into my reading pile. The most recent title I read is the twelfth in the series: Boston Blitz.

Boston Blitz is one of the original Mack Bolan novels; it was written by Don Pendleton and published by the old Pinnacle Books in 1972. I have it on good authority that Boston Blitz was Pendleton’s favorite executioner title and after reading it I can understand why. It is exactly what this type of novel is supposed to be: fast, lean, hard and very rough.

As the title suggests Bolan’s twelfth war ground is Boston, but this time it’s a little more personal than a few of the earlier hits. The Boston mob has kidnapped Mack’s kid brother—Johnny—and girlfriend Valentina Querente.

The novel opens at a mob hangout with Bolan blasting a low-level mob boss named Julio LaRocca. When the audience is properly attentive he tells them to spread the word he is in town and ends it with:

“Tell them! I’m here. Tell them someone knows why! Tell them.”

The plot moves quickly and without a hitch. The action is explosive and exciting, but there isn’t nearly as much action as you would expect. It is paced expertly and the action is used moderately to emphasize and catapult the story from one twist to another. Bolan is a super-hero; more comic book hero than anything else, but Mr Pendleton clutters the narrative with a visually tired, worn out and burdened Mack Bolan. Not so much that it gets tiresome, but rather just enough to make the guy likable and human.

The prose is very hardboiled:

“Yeah, all too familiar. Bolan threw off a tremor of revulsion—for himself, for the world he adopted—then he steeled himself and dropped into the reality of War Everlasting.”

And it—the prose—matches the action and mood of the novel perfectly. There is no humor. There is only sorrow and sadness in the manner of the outsider, very much like the hero of a traditional Western that saves a society that cannot tolerate him or his actions.

Boston Blitz is the best The Executioner novel I have read and if you think you know the work of Don Pendleton and you haven’t read it you should. You might be surprised how good these novels can be. And you might be surprised that Don Pendelton was a pretty fair storyteller who not only created a genre, but worked that genre better than anyone else ever has.

Other Don Pendleton reviews:

COPP FOR HIRE
COPP ON FIRE

Reviews for Executioner Novles not written by Don Pendleton:

#63 DAY OF MOURNING by Stephen Mertz
"Early Fire" by Stephen Mertz

Don Pendelton's New York Times Obituary

It’s probably not a secret to my regular readers, but I enjoy the work of Don Pendelton— his original The Executioner novels as well as his Joe Copp series—and I’ve been “rediscovering” his work over the past few months and I have enjoyed every minute of it.

While I was cruising around Google a few days ago I came across his obituary in the New York Times. The author credits DP with the creation of a genre (a notion I share) and goes on to say that without Don Pendelton there would be no Rambo, or any of the other super hero types from 1980s film and literature.

The Rambo comparison intrigued me because the film and novel are very different. I can see a clear correlation with the Stallone film, but the David Morrell novel is less clear. The hero does not fit the super hero mold, and the novel, while firmly in the action thriller category, is much darker and more realistic (than the Mack Bolan books) with both emotion and turmoil.

The obituary is interesting, and mostly spot-on. Here it is, at least part of it…

You’ll notice the paper misspelled the last name of Mack Bolan.

Don Pendleton, 67, Writer Who Spawned a Genre
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.
Published: October 28, 1995

Don Pendleton, whose "Executioner" series featuring Mack Boland spawned the paperback genre of men's action-adventure novels, died on Monday at his home in Sedona, Ariz. He was 67.
His wife, Linda, said the cause was a heart attack.

In the beginning there were westerns, mysteries and science fiction. But until Mr. Pendleton, a onetime air traffic controller, brought Mack Boland to unlikely literary life in 1969, there was no action-adventure category, in which a lone, well-armed fantasy hero wreaks unremitting havoc on the forces of evil in modern society.

Within a decade of Boland's first appearance, the action-adventure genre was a publishing phenomenon, for a while rivaling if not eclipsing its women's counterpart, romance novels.
As surely as Owen Wister's "Virginian," gave the world William S. Hart, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and the rest, Mr. Pendleton brought forth Rambo, and scores of other copycat heroes. (Curiously, although there have been two projects, "The Executioner" has never made it to the screen.)

Indeed, a 1988 survey found a total of 66 separate action-adventure series in print. But the genre has been in a sharp decline recently, and only a half-dozen or so survive, "The Executioner" among them.

To read the rest of the obituary go Here

Mack Bolan Website

I stumbled across a pretty cool website this afternoon while I was avoiding a textbook--Operations Management. Oy! It really is as boring as it sounds. Anyway, I found a great site dedicated to The Executioner series created by Don Pendleton. I read these books voraciously as a teenager, and while I haven't read one in a few years, this site made me think I should pull one off the bookshelf.

They have a complete listing of titles and authors for The Mack Bolan related lines--Able Team, Phoenix Force, Super Bolan, etc. They even have a rating system set up where readers can rate and review their favorite titles--as of now, Doom Prophecy written by Douglas P. Wojtowicz and Eternal Triangle written by Mike Newton are in the lead with a respectful 9.73 rating. Cool.

Plus, now I know who really wrote that sucker! Super cool.

The site: MackBolan.com
Or, go Here to click straight through.