The Executioner originated the wave (that amazingly still
continues today) of what I like to call "men's action
series." Pendleton and Pinnacle (his publisher) took the Matt
Helm/James Bond formula, replaced cold war villians with
home-grown Mafia heavies, added a liberal dollop of
gratuitous violence, and in a brilliant marketing ploy, put
numbers on the cover. In no time at all, the drugstore
bookracks (remember those) were filled with with countless
knock-offs and rip-offs.
The few Executioners I've read have been as advertised:
solid, competant commercial adventure fiction. Nothing to get
excited about perhaps, but may be worth reading before
donating to the thrift store. Unfortunately, few of the other
series I've sampled live up to Pendleton's high standards.
Try reading the Butcher (Avallone's contirbution to the form,
I believe) and marvel at characters which aren't even two
dimensional. And this is far from the worst; I am keenly
anticipating reading The Hitman, reputed to be as bad as it
got.
Luckily, the '70s action sub-genre has more to offer for fans
of non-alternative mystery fiction than the Executioner.
Jonathan Messman's The Revenger was a well-done, if brief
series faithful to the Executioner mold that may have
surpassed the original. As Bill mentioned elsewhere, Mike
Barry's (aka Barry Malzberg's) Lone Wolf series is pretty
berserk; the writing may be crude, but are the books! Sadly,
Ralph Dennis's Hardman series was packaged as a men's action
series, numbers and all. It's actually a series of pretty
good '70s hardboiled detective novels distressingly short on
the wholesale slaughts fans of real action fiction expect
every chapter.
But my favorite (and pretty much everyone else I've ever
talked to) is Sapir and Murphy's Destroyer series. I think it
says something about a sub-genre when the best books are
satires of the sub-genre. The Destroyer himself is
refreshingly free of Messiahanic impulses, his mentor acts
like a Jewish grandmother, and his adventures are loaded with
satire. Goodthing there was no shortage of bad guys getting
disemboweled otherwise they would have never sold. And while
the satire may be heavy handed, it's also quite funny and
frequently pointed (check out Bay City Blast and its ersatz
Executioner,
"The Eraser"). The NY Times wasn't off-base when they lauded
the series for winnining fans "among the literate."
--Scott
The best series is The Destroyer
>From: "Graham Powell" <
bleekerbooks@hotmail.com>
>
>Back a few years ago, when I was younger and less
"mature" in my tastes, I
>used to read the series THE EXECUTIONER religiously.
Anybody have any
>thoughts about this series? I haven't read it in a
long time, but I
>understand Dennis Lynds did a couple of books (or his
wife? or
>collaborating?). I would place this series as an
outgrowth of the
>paperback
>originals and "men's adventure" series, and in a way
a descendant of the
>Matt Helm books, although they started only 10 or 12
years later. Anybody
>else have any thoughts about these books?
>
>Graham
>------------
>http://www.BleekerBooks.com
>Hardboiled and Noir
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Feb 2002 EST