At 12:52 PM 2/13/2002 -0800, you wrote:
These '70s men's action series are something I collect and
read, though not for good literature, just for grins.
>The few Executioners I've read have been as
advertised: solid, competant
>commercial adventure fiction.
I liked the first three Executioners, and the
NYC-Chicago-Vegas story-arc a few books later (#7-9, I
believe), and then the Boston one. Once he gets the RV
Warwagon they go downhill fast. I own the first 140--single
lot on eBay--and a smattering of the later ones, but when I
read them in order I got to the mid-50s and lost heart.
> 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.
Stuart Jason was a pen name of Avallone? I didn't know
that.
>And this is far from the worst; I am keenly
anticipating reading The
>Hitman, reputed to be as bad as it got.
I own a couple of the Hitman, but haven't read them
yet.
It's hard to believe that any writing could be worse than the
Death Merchant. I read the first two as a teen, and on eBay
recently got the first 70 in a lot really cheap. The first
was okay, the second not as good, but they soon degenerated
into writing so bad that it can be wonderful, in small doses.
I think Bill Pronzini used quite a few Death Merchant
excerpts in his Gun in Cheek series. I finally petered out at
#8. Then picked up one of the later ones and found that the
quality continued to decline, as hard as that is to
believe.
>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;
I've read a Revenger, they're pretty good. Another good
one--based on a single issue--is The Marksman. I didn't know
Mazberg wrote Lone Wolf. Do you have any more such gems up
your sleeve?
>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."
While I agree with your high estimate of the Destroyer, up
until Sapir dies, anyway, I think the best-written and
best-conceived of all the series was Alan Caillou's "Private
Army of Colonel Tobin." These were straight military action
novels about a mercenary army for hire and it's missions in
various parts of the world. The plots were realistic--except
for the first one--and the military technology used was only
a slight improvement on the existing technology. No laser
guns or radios that communicate through miles of rock. In the
fourth book is an introduction that gives a very trenchant
description of the problems of gunboat diplomacy, and why
we--the west--are so hated by some of our former
colonials--economic or political. The series was short, only
seven books: Dead Sea Submarine, Terror in Rio, Congo War
Cry, Afghan Assault, Swamp War, Death Charge, and The
Garonsky Missile. The last one is the hardest to find. The
Swamp War takes place in the Everglades, but they're more the
Everglades of popular myth--"Watch out for that mud, 'taint
got no bottom."--than the real 'glades. I was a swamp-tromper
in my youth.
Ray
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