Showing posts with label Don Pendleton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Don Pendleton. Show all posts

Monday, December 4, 2023

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!

Monday, April 24, 2023

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.

Thursday, February 24, 2022

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 Newtons 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(!).

Monday, October 4, 2021

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!

Monday, July 5, 2021

The Executioner #15: Panic In Philly


The Executioner #15: Panic In Philly, by Don Pendleton
March, 1973  Pinnacle Books

Mack Bolan is all business in this fifteenth volume of The Executioner, which opens on the action and stays focused on the action throughout Bolan’s short stay in Philadelphia. There are no pickups from any previous volumes, Bolan at this point a one-man army who roves around the country in his War Wagon, making calculated strikes on various Mafia strongholds. Don Pendleton has his template down pat, with Bolan making initial blitzes before going undercover to really mess with his Mafia prey. 

One thing to note is those looking for a period view of Philadelphia will be disappointed; Bolan spends the entirety of the narrative everywhere but the city, hitting hideouts in the rural surroundings, scoping out residential areas, and spending the last third of the novel in a mansion. Local color is provided by the usual Pendleton staples of one-off characters who helpfully exposit on stuff we’ve already seen happen; in this case it’s some cops and firemen who periodically show up to clean up the Executioner’s messes. Another thing to note is that Gil Cohen’s typically-great cover is misleading; Bolan doesn’t wield a rifle at any point, the action does not take place around any Philly landmarks, and, while there is a curvaceous babe in the book, she only appears on two or three pages and has no real, uh, interraction with Bolan. 

This time we get a few entries from Bolan’s journal; I can’t recall if we’ve had these before, but it’s a bit humorous to imagine Bolan writing in his little diary after a gory hit on the mob. While reclining in his War Wagon, of course. But then escapism is the name of the game with this genre, though as ever Pendleton tries to retain a semblance of reality. Perhaps a bit too much of one; other than Bolan’s superhuman skills (which Pendleton frequently explains away in his narrative digressions), The Exectioner is nowhere in the surreal ballpark of its imitators, a la The Sharpshooter and such…which is one of the reasons I’ve been looking forward to reading the following volume, Sicilian Slaughter, even if it’s written by William Crawford

The opening sequence is an indication of Bolan’s superhumanism; the story opens with Bolan making a few blitzes on various Philly mob fronts, even at one point blowing away some thugs in an auto shop. After this we get hasty setup that the mob here, run by old Don Steffano, has been importing soldiers from Sicily. A group of them are staying in an old whorehouse out in the rural area northwest of the city; we get a bit of background that the place used to be a school at the turn of the century, then the Don’s son, Frank, turned it into a top-notch whorehouse, only to get shutdown when he gave a complimentary ticket to a conservative judge. Now the soldiers are there – complete with foxholes – and Bolan hits them in one of his typical frontal assaults. 

At this point Pendleton has toned way down on the violence; Bolan makes many kills as he storms across the compound, blasting away with his Automag and Beretta, but there’s not much gore on display. But also this is an indication of Bolan being a bit too superhuman, hitting a pseudo-military compound all on his lonesome and making an escape in just a few minutes. He’s even almost bulletproff like Superman; someone fires a friggin’ shotgun at him and Bolan survives it because the person pulling the trigger goofs. This is a quick setup for a later revelation that has more dire repercussions for Bolan. At any rate he gets away with no troubles and moves on to his second phase of attack: infiltrating Don Steffano’s organization and sowing havoc from within. 

Borrowing a plot from previous volumes, Pendleton has Bolan bluffing his way into this, posing as some roving Mafia troubleshooter. In this case Bolan gets wind of a hotshot hitman heading to Steffano’s to help out, Bolan picking up the info thanks to a tap he’s put on the don’s phone. Here Bolan also learns that one of the Talifero brothers has survived Bolan’s attack in #9: Vegas Vendetta, which certainly is setup for a future volume. The top hit man being sent on his way to help Don Steffano is a “Black Ace” or somesuch who is known for changing his face after every job and thus conveniently no one knows what he looks like; Don Steffano is informed that he’ll recognize the Black Ace by the new Maserati he’ll be driving. 

Before that we have a fun bit where Bolan’s almost caught by the cops; as he dangles there on the phone line, listening to his tap, he’s hit by floodlights and a cop tells him on a bullhorn that he’s surrounded. Bolan goes into a quick fantasy where he can see the fallout: he’d be taken in but turned into a celebrity, with even a movie to follow (perhaps Pendleton speaking through his protagonist about the possibility of an Executioner movie in the real world – something the covers always promised but never delivered on). But Bolan knows he wouldn’t survive twenty-four hours in jail; he’d be murdered by some Mafia flunky or other stooge and the death covered up. I can just see the “Bolan didn’t kill himself” bumper stickers now. 

Bolan’s confrontation with the Black Ace guy is memorable; he sneaks onto Don Steffano’s grounds and is able to get the guy alone as soon as he’s arrived. From here Bolan becomes the Black Ace, bluffing his way into Don Steffano’s world and bossing people around. At this point the action slackens off and Panic In Philly becomes more of a suspense tale, with Bolan trying to maintain his cover while sowing dissent – he maneuvers it so that Don Steffano’s people think that the don’s son, “Frank the Fuckup,” is orchestrating a takeover, while also maneuvering it so that the don’s men kill a delegation of hoods who have been shipped in from another family – Bolan having fooled Don Steffano’s men into thinking this delegation has come here to harm the don, whereas in reality they’re here to provide backup. 

The curvaceous babe mentioned above is Philippa, aka “Philippa the Bitch,” Don Steffano’s 32 year-old daughter who still lives at home and resents the old man. She makes no real impact on the narrative – at least not on-page – and only shares two brief scenes with Bolan, who basically tells her to leave. As with many of the volumes the events of Panic In Philly occur over the span of several hours, leading to a definite sense of urgency to Bolan’s schemes. We also get an appearance from Leo Turrin, Bolan’s inside man on the mob who has appeared in previous volumes; Leo shows up per Don Steffano’s request, as a guy who has seen Bolan and lived, and is only saved from the firing squad Bolan’s set up for the delegation thanks to Bolan himself. 

But it’s Don Steffano whom Pendleton most brings to life; he’s a King Lear type who is falling apart just as quickly as his kingdom is. Pendleton nicely brings to life the old mobster, who sits in shadows in his study and relunctantly leaves the decisions to the Black Ace. The climax between Bolan and Steffano is another highlight of the book; the revelations mentioned above come into play and Steffano’s given a hot tip. But Pendleton plays it more on the suspense angle, and a darkly humorous one at that; Bolan has stuffed the corpse of the real Black Ace in the trunk of the Maserati and has shown it to a few of Steffano’s men, claiming the body is Bolan’s. The highlight of this sequence is that he manages to sell the corpse to Frank for a whopping $110k…so Frank can high-tail it for New York to show off his booty to the Mafia overlords! The part where Don Steffano finds out about this is another highlight. 

As expected Pendleton ends the novel on the action; a new delegation shows up unexpectedly, these ones a cohort of the Taliferi, and Bolan knows he won’t be able to maintain his cover. So as usual he goes out via a frontal assault, hitting them hard with his Automag again. Here he actually takes some damage, getting hit in the calf and with a bullet lodged between his ribs and his skin – only deflected by a shoulder holster. In his Maserati it appears Bolan is headed directly for the next installment, but as it turns out he’d have a slight detour thanks to Crawford penning the next volume. 

According to his interview with William H. Young in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, at this point Pendleton was in litigation with Pinnacle. The Executioner was doing very well for the imprint but Pendleton was not receiving his fair share of the royalties. To keep the series going, Pinnacle hired William Crawford to write the following installment, Sicilian Slaughter, as “Jim Peterson.” What’s interesting is that the one-page epilogue of Panic In Philly sets up Sicilian Slaughter, with an injured Bolan thinking about heading to Sicily for a frontal assault. I suspect this epilogue was written by series editor Andy Ettinger; it doesn’t have the same ring as Pendleton’s prose, and also we know from Pendleton’s interview with Young that Pendleton himself never even read Crawford’s novel – thus the entire “Sicily assault” was a creation of Pinnacle’s, and likely the setup for it here was written by Ettinger.

Monday, February 8, 2021

The Executioner #14: San Diego Siege


The Executioner #14: San Diego Siege, by Don Pendleton
November, 1972  Pinnacle Books

It’s old home week for The Executioner; this installment sees Mack Bolan back in California, where he hooks up with former Death Squad members Gadgets Schwarz and Pol Blancanales. Los Angeles cop Carl Lyons also appears, making this sort of an unintentional prefigure of the later Able Team series, which featured the three characters. However Lyons does not share a scene with Gadgets or Pol, and barely even interracts with Bolan – he walks right by him, late in the novel, but Bolan’s in costume and Lyons doesn’t recognize him. 

At the end of San Diego Siege Bolan reveals that he was on his way to Phildelphia when he got the call from Gadgets and Pol which brought him here. The two surviving members of the Death Squad have called in Bolan because their old ‘Nam commanding officer, Howlin’ Harlan Winters, may be in deep with the Mafia, and only the Executioner could sort things out. This is a fary cry from the future days of Able Team, where Pol and Gadgets would handle things themselves. Bolan is reticent to step foot in San Diego, claiming that the rot runs too deep and the Mafia is too embedded in the city; one would have to destroy most of the place to save it. This is mostly due to the naval presence in the city, the Mafia taking advantage of the continnuous sea traffic to transport illegal wares. 

Gadgets and Pol aren’t certain Winters is involved with the mob, but they’ve got their suspicions. A Colonel in ‘Nam, he was essentially kicked out of field duty due to his colorful presence and bucked up to General. Now he’s living above his means and the two men suspect he may be engaged in some illegal chicanery. Bolan thinks of Winters as the Patton of Vietnam, but the unfortunate thing is we’ve never heard of him before…and don’t even get to meet him. Because, and spoiler alert but it happens real early in the book, Winters is already dead when Bolan goes to see him. Props to Pendleton for including a busty blonde in a see-through robe when Bolan comes upon Winters’s corpse; she’s the man’s niece, we’re informed, and she’s just standing there staring at the gory ruin that was her uncle. It looks like he’s blown his head off in his own study, but Bolan isn’t sure if it was murder or assassination. 

That’s it for the busty blonde, though; San Diego Slaughter is very tame on the babe front, and Bolan goes nookieless. As if to compensate for this, though, Pendleton later delivers yet another topless babe, a redhead Bolan comes upon while she’s sunbathing. Presumably she’s the one Gil Cohen has illustrated on the cover, as she’s the closest we get to a female protagonist in the book…but even she only appears on a scant few pages. It’s very much a man’s world in this volume of The Executioner, with Bolan determined to undergo a “rescue mission” for Winters, even though Winters is already dead. What Bolan intends to rescue is Winters’s honor – that is, if he still had any. The question remains whether he was in bed with the Mafia. 

This certainly isn’t the most slam-bang action entry in the series, but that’s not to say San Diego Siege is boring. For me its greatest failing is that the reader has no investment in Howlin’ Harlan, and we’re robbed of the chance of him making an impression on us. I thought it would be interesting to see Bolan’s mentor – but then, Winters isn’t really even presented that way. Pendleton is intent upon the hero-mythologizing of his protagonist at this point. Winters, we learn, wasn’t so much a mentor of Bolan’s as a colleague, as Bolan was already a hardened jungle warfare expert when he was put in-line with Winters back in the ‘Nam hellzones. Indeed, Gadgets and Pol look up to Bolan so much that you wonder what sort of awe they ever even had for Howlin’ Harlan Winters. 

What I mean to say is, the revenge which fuels these three guys is not felt by the reader. But then it’s the 14th installment of a long-running series, so you can only expect so much emotional investment. It’s all very by the numbers, Pendleton faithfully following his constant template – the mandatory opening action scene followed by a long simmer, occasional “yeah, this will be hell” asides, parts where the local mobsters rant and rave, periodic plot recaps by one-off cop characters, lots of Bolan-worshipping from hero and enemy alike, and an action climax. But it’s all done so well! At this point it’s not so much the template as how Pendleton subtly changes things around. Like the lack of a female this time, or how Bolan has two assisstants; this latter element is humorously worked into the story when a San Diego mobster doesn’t believe the Executioner is really in town, because Bolan always works alone. 

Big Ben Lucasi is the name of that San Diego mobster; he’s a shorstuff prick who serves (poorly) as this novel’s villain. He lacks any menace and comes off more like a character Danny DeVito would’ve played in the ‘80s. He’s also lost in the mire of the narrative. The question is whether Winters was killed by Lucasi’s mobsters, and if so why. To determine this Bolan acts more like a private eye than a lone wolf vigilante. For one he plants a bug Gadgets has devised in Lucasi’s house; this is another of those scenes Pendleton does well (yet another template staple) where we’re introduced to the latest Mafia thug, who rants and raves that the Executioner is in town – and then literally finds himself face-to-face with the Executioner himself. However Bolan just puts the fear in Lucasi and leaves, covering for the fact that he’s planted a bug in his place. I forgot to mention, but Pendleton cagily sneaks yet another topless female into the scene, this being Lucasi’s floozy wife, who promptly thereafter disappears from the novel. 

There’s a proto-Baroness vibe to San Diego Slaughter in the spy-fy descriptions of Gadgets’s various radio and monitoring devices. I always like stuff like this because it’s clear Pendleton did some research or checked with some people. I mean it could all be completely made-up so far as the workings go, but it’s all described so well in the narrative and dialog that you take it all as fact. One of the elements here I’m certain appeared in at least a few Baroness volumes: the tiny spool of wire that can record four hours of audio in a few-seconds’s burst of static, and when you play it back slow you can hear it all at normal speed. Pendleton weaves all this stuff into the novel so that Gadgets has more to contribue to the tale than just being a sidekick, but at the same time it detracts from the usual action quotient. 

That being said, the collecting of the recorded material leads to one of the novel’s few action scenes; Bolan, Gadgets, and Pol get in a shootout on the grounds of Lucasi’s house. It’s not overly violent or even that long, really, and seems to be there just because Pendleton realized he wasn’t meeting his action quota. There are other scenes which promise action but don’t deliver, like when Bolan, just bullshitting his way through it, commandeers a Mafia drugdealing boat, pretending to be a stand-in for the usual guy. This part makes Bolan seem kind of dumb, as he just gets on the boat with no clear plan. At least it has a memorable conclusion; they get to the waterborne drug meet and Bolan blows away the dealer on the other side. He lies to the crew that the guy was selling them “trash,” dumping what is in reality high-grade heroin into the sea. Humorously enough, even the crew starts to idolize Bolan after this…even after they learn that it was really the Executioner and that he dumped real heroin into the sea! 

Through this sequence Bolan poses as “Frankie Lambretta,” his cover identity he’s used a few times now. Surely there must be a shelf life on such things. The crew members take him at face value, but Lucasi and his main henchman Tony Danger instantly recognize the name, which is already being tied to the Executioner. Oh and I forgot. Speaking of “face value,” Gadgets and Pol make passing reference to Bolan’s “new face,” which he got in the third volume, one volume after the duo briefly joined Bolan in the Death Squad. But anyway, Bolan continues to fumble and bamboozle his way into the ranks of the Mafia, fooling them with ease into thinking he’s some high-ranking member of the family, and while this is yet more hero-stuff from Pendleton, it also does the disservice of making the bad guys seem like easily-fooled losers. 

But wait, I was talking about a topless redhead. Her appearance is one of the more notable scenes in the book. And not just because of the toplessness! Her name – though Pendleton is slow about informing us this – is Marsha Thornton, and she’s the easy-lay wife of a San Diego bigwig named Thornton who is in deep with the Mafia. Bolan comes across her while she’s sunbathing. She is known for screwing all of her husband’s mobster pals, and I guess Bolan’s here to get info from her. Whatever; the thing of importance is that she has a big guard dog which she sics on Bolan. Now we’re told that only a rare man could stand up to a raging guard dog – but Bolan, you won’t be surprised to learn, is a rare man. And he punches the dog in the throat as it’s leaping at him. This of course gets Marsha hot and bothered, but Bolan goes for more of a “you’re not just a whore, you’re special” sort of approach, and Marsha decides to tame her usual “hunger,” dammit all to hell. I mean I never undersand why Pendleton never goes full fantasy in his novels, but whatever. 

Meanwhile Carl Lyons is called in by the San Diego cops to help nail the Executioner, but Lyons makes it clear that he respects the dude – not that he won’t do his job. Then he goes straight into some Bolan idolizing for his fellow cops, to the point that you start to wonder if Lyons is decorating the precinct locker room with pinups of the Executioner. Humorously though as mentioned Bolan walks right by him and Lyons doesn’t even realize it, given that Bolan has appropriated an officer’s uniform and is brazenly walking through a police station. His target is recently-arrested Tony Dancer, whom Bolan springs in another memorable scene. But we’ll remember that Bolan is squarely a good guy, thus he even calls the cops and tells ‘em he’ll be bringing Danger back. Well anyway, through Danger Bolan finally learns the whole sad story – Howlin’ Harlan Winters and Thornton both were hoodwinked by the mob, the latter in particular blackmailed into helping them via some porno flicks the mobsters secretly shot of Marsha. Thornton himself is unable to have sex, for unstated reasons, and while he understands his wife’s many infidelities, he still is willing to protect her honor. 

Anyway, long story short, it all ends somewhat unspectacularly. It develops that the Mafia was using Winters so as to get high-grade military radio technology, which I guess they intended to use for betting on horse racing or somesuch. Not the most dastardly of villain plans, but we’ll take it. Bolan, in an appropriated Ferrari, shadows Lucasi’s convoy out into the California desert, Gadgets and Pol following in Bolan’s war wagon. The goal is to find the radio tech or something, but it all ends as expected: with a massive gunfight. But it’s not nearly as massive as previous ones, and indeed Bolan leaves much of the shooting and stuff to his two comrades, saving his own justice-dispensing for Lucasi. But Lucasi has been presented as such a non-threat that Bolan’s cold delivery of justice almost comes off as too harsh. I mean just imagine Arnold blowing off Danny DeVito’s head at the end of Twins; it pretty much has the same vibe. 

Well, that’s it for this volume of The Executioner. Bolan tells Gadgets he can keep the war wagon, and what’s more he lets the duo keep the winnings they stole from the Mafia so they can open up their own business. Little do the three of them realize that in eleven years Gadgets, Pol, and Lyons will be hacking up zombie punks.

Thursday, September 17, 2020

The Executioner #13: Washington I.O.U.


The Executioner #13: Washington I.O.U., by Don Pendleton
September, 1972  Pinnacle Books

I get the feeling Don Pendleton was a little worn out when he wrote this installment of The Executioner. Maybe he just invested too much of himself in the previous volume, which per his own comments was one of his favorites of the entire series. I don’t think anyone could say that about Washington I.O.U., though; this one’s a bit of a mess, with too big a story for too few pages, with a rushed narrative (the “telling instead of showing” is especially rampant this time) that ultimately dispenses with the grander storyline and climaxes with a bizarre finale that would’ve been more at home in a 1930s pulp.

I do appreciate how Pendleton picks up from the previous yarn, which ended with Bolan blowing away some random Mafia dude and taking some papers from him, papers which would tell the Executioner where to go next in his endless blitz on the mob. So it’s now about a week later and Bolan’s in DC; when we meet him, he’s trailing a beautiful gal named Claudia Vitale; in her day job she’s the secretary for an over-the-hill Congressman, but in her night job she’s a “Mafia whore.” Claudia will be the main female character in this one, but despite the sleazy setup – we’ll learn Claudia is used as a honey trap by the mob, baiting and snaring Washington VIPs, getting them in the sack so their photos can be secretly taken, and then blackmailing them – there will be no hanky-panky for Bolan himself. This of course results in several demerits from me.

The opening definitely promises a more gripping story than we’ll ultimately get; Bolan happens to witness an attempted hit on Claudia, a pair of Mafia thugs pulling her off the street and into her apartment. Bolan takes out the guy waiting in the car and the two sadists in Claudia’s apartment without even breaking a sweat; he’s totally in superhero mode at this point in the series, but Pendleton’s such a gifted author that it all still has a realistic vibe to it. And speaking of which, Bolan solely uses his sidearms this time, either the big Automag .44 or the Beretta Belle, which he picked up many volumes ago. The second one is used a little more, as Bolan goes for a lot of quiet kills with the silencer on the Beretta. Otherwise there’s none of the heavy autofire of other Executioner yarns. 

Bolan was put onto Claudia because “Vitale” was mentioned in those papers he got in Boston; Claudia is the widow of a young Mafia exec who was one of those “college types” rebuilding the organization, to the jealousy of the old “moustache Pete” types. This ultimately got him killed, and per Claudia’s sob story she was soon “forced into prostitution” (to quote Senshi in the greatest-ever kung-fu movie, Chinese Super Ninjas) for the mob, used as a honey trap for Washington notables. The plot seems ripped from the many sleazy “Washington tell-all” books of the day, so Pendleton was clearly abreast of what was going on in the paperback market. But the sleaze isn’t nearly as focused on, with Claudia calling herself a “whore” and actually thinking that it might’ve been better if those mobsters had killed her: not only does she consider her life without value, but she also recently pulled the stunt of informing one of her marks that the Mafia was setting him up.

This has put Claudia in the cross-hairs of “Lupo,” aka the Wolf, the mysterious, never-seen man behind the DC Mafia. This makes for I don’t recall how many volumes in a row in which Pendleton’s injected this theme of a mysterious, behind-the-scenes Mafia bigwig with a cutsey name, with Bolan pondering over who the guy could be…it almost gives the impression that Pendleton didn’t think a pulp-action focus was sufficient to fuel an entire narrative, and thus gussied it up with a “mystery” angle. But at this point it’s getting ridiculous, and is about on the level of the lame “surprise villain reveals” of The Spider. Also it’s been frustrating because none of these secret mob bosses with cutsey names have yet justified the expense of prose devoted to them; they’re finally trotted out onto the page in the very end and dispensed with almost perfunctorily by Bolan. The same holds true here, with Lupo revealed in the final few pages – Bolan having already figured out who he is without the reader being informed of it – and quickly blown to hell.

We’re treated to another action scene immediately after Bolan saves Claudia – a cool setup with “The Wolf Squad,” a five-man Mafia assault group composed of former GIs. This promises so much, Bolan finally going up against a group with the same military experience he has. But ultimately it turns out to just be another ball Pendleton briefly tosses in the air. The Wolf Squad, despite an inordinate amount of time given over to their internal squabbles and thoughts – Bolan’s perspective disappears from pages 36 to 113, with Pendleton dipping into the thoughts of his sundry supporting characters, making the Executioner seem like a guest star in his own book – is wiped out in this initial skirmish. That sentence was hamfistedly complex so let me write it in more simple terms: this is the only time we see the Wolf Squad in action, Pendleton blowing the potential of “Bolan vs fellow soldiers.” What’s worse, the Wolf Squad isn’t even taken out in a pitched firefight or somesuch; Bolan causes them to wreck and then shoots each individually with his Automag as they stumble out of their burning car. At least Gil Cohen does a nice job of illustrating this part.

As mentioned Bolan disappears for a long stretch of the book; when he does briefly appear, it’s filtered through the impressions of other characters. Thus we get a lot of the customary hero-worship, which comes off as incredibly egregious this time, with so many characters marvelling over Bolan’s he-man nature. There’s also a lot of skimmable stuff about various one-off Mafia characters, and even worse news dispatches, including verbatim TV reports, informing us of the action scenes we’ve already read about. Pendleton’s goal is ostensibly to show how Bolan has become a mythical figure at this point, with even regular people aware of his one-man war on the mob, thus the TV is filled with panicked reports of his “rampage” here in DC. I mean that’s the goal, but the reality is it seems more like Pendleton’s filling up the pages because he’s got another damn book to write and it seems like just yesterday that he turned in the last one.

And Bolan’s DC blitz is rendered almost entirely in these pseudo-dispatches; the book has become so cluttered at this point with arbitrary digressions on one-off mobsters and “who is Lupo?” ponderings that Pendleton actually has to summarize Bolan’s many and frequent hits on various DC-area Mafia strongholds. Along the way Bolan also picks up a few mobster allies, including Ripper Dan Aliotto, a wheelman for a DC underboss (who himself is heavily built up with chapters devoted to his impressions, before being unceremoniously dropped from the narrative) who develops a sort of friendship with “the big guy in black.” Through Ripper Dan we also get a lot more of that “what a man!” stuff, with the wheelman looking at Bolan in the rearview mirror and pondering over his larger than life qualities and whatnot. I did a Google search on “Ripper Dan Aliotto,” to see if he ever returned to the series, and it looks like he did, sort of, over ten years later, in the tenth installment of Able Team, Royal Flush – long enough to get blown away, at least. No idea if he appeared before that, though, but so far as that Able Team book goes, it seems to have been the one and only contribution of someone credited as “Flavel Ballam.” So I guess Ripper Dan must’ve made an impression on ol’ Flavel. Or at least enough of an impression that he felt the need to bring him back, twelve years later, so he could kill him off.

The pulpish mystery takes more predominance as the narrative progresses. Bolan ponders over the Boston connection with this DC power grab, ultimately coming to the goofy conclusion that Boston fits in the puzzle because it doesn’t fit…! What this means is that Bolan’s figured out Lupo is really from Boston, and at this point in the narrative the reader has more than a strong certainty who the mysterious figure actually is. I won’t spoil the reveal, but I will say it isn’t Claudia, which I think would’ve made for an even better reveal. But this is still the early ‘70s and thus really is a man’s world, so Claudia’s nothing more than the “Mafia whore” she claims to be. She is though “devastating in hot pants and a hip-length cape” in one sequence, not that Bolan’s pressured to take advantage of the situation – indeed, he merely gives her a kiss at novel’s end.

As mentioned, the finale wouldn’t seem out of place in The Shadow. Bolan determines that Lupo’s group, comprised of intelligence-world types, operates out of a headquarters hidden beneath a building, accessible via an underground tunnel. Bolan slips down there, silently kills a few guards, and then ends up saving Claudia again, as she’s once more been captured by Lupo’s men and escorted off to her own doom. Oh and I forgot to mention, right before this Pendleton’s introduced yet another ball in the air – a Mafia with thespian skills whom Lupo’s made to look like Bolan, having him run roughshod around DC and killing various people, even attempting to kill the President! This part is bonkers, particularly because it’s so incidental to anything else, and a clear sign that Pendleton was winging it as he went along.

But anyway, this pseudo-Bolan, who only gets like a single line of text, is also hanging out down here in Lupo’s secret headquarters, and Bolan merely sends Claudia in to confront the mysterious Lupo…who turns out to be exactly who Bolan suspected it was. After this our hero waltzes in and shoots everyone, save for the imposter Bolan, who we’re to understand we’ll be properly charged so the public at large will understand that the real Mack Bolan didn’t just kill a bunch of innocent people. Not that this matters, as the pseudo-Bolan subplot is so harried and poorly developed that you couldn’t see any repercussions from it, anyway. What’s worse is that this plot to take over the US is overseen by Lupo and like two other guys, and by blowing them away Bolan’s stopped this massive plot…a plot which in reality could’ve taken up several more volumes, instead of the single, rushed volume we got.

That said, Pendleton is certainly prescient, even if it’s unintentional. Claudia’s boss is a Congressman in his 80s who is so senile that “he doesn’t know what day it is,” and thus willingly acts as a “puppet” for his mob controllers. And if that isn’t “ripped from today’s headlines” enough for you, check this out: the bad guys (former intelligence agents, remember) operate out of a front company called IMAGE, a “civil rights outfit for ethnic minorities,” which they use to sow division in the country.

Monday, February 17, 2020

The Executioner #12: Boston Blitz


The Executioner #12: Boston Blitz, by Don Pendleton
July, 1972  Pinnacle Books

In his interview in A Study Of Action-Adventure FictionDon Pendleton stated that Boston Blitz was his personal favorite Executioner novel, and it would appear clear from the outset, given that he dedicates the book to faithful readers of the series. To cue the old cliché, “this time it’s personal” for Mack “The Executioner” Bolan, as the Mafia has kidnapped Bolan’s little brother Johnny and Bolan’s girlfriend Val.

Now I kept asking myself “Val who?,” but of course we are talking about the young lady Bolan became intimate with way back in the first volume. We’ve not heard much about her since – and Bolan’s enjoyed the company of a few other young ladies in the meantime, all of whom I found more interesting as characters – but we’re told that she’s gone into a sort of witness protection program along with Bolan’s “adolescent” brother Johnny. Leo Turrin, Bolan’s informant for both cop stuff and Mafia stuff, beings that he’s a Boston-based undercover cop ingrained into the families, informed our hero at the end of the previous volume that Val and Johnny had been snatched somewhere in Boston.

This installment opens about twelve hours later; Bolan’s arrival in Boston goes down with as much action as most novels finish with. In the first chapter alone he blows away a series of mobsters, leaving one survivor at each stop to spread the word of his arrival in town. Oh and I forgot to mention, but before this we again get that “Uniform Crime Network” faux-bulletin for a prologue which gives Bolan’s background, again reminding us that he’s 30 and a ‘Nam vet. This time Korea’s not mentioned…but then in the second chapter Bolan’s reflecting on how Johnny was just a kid when Bolan went off to the Korean war! Anyway here we get Bolan’s thoughts on Johnny, how he’s the “last Bolan,” and also lots of stuff on how Val is the love of his life and whatnot, which again is comical because she’s hardly been mentioned since that first volume.

Bolan’s gamble is to keep running roughshod over the Boston Mafia until someone comes forward with info on where Johnny and Val are, and whether they’re even still alive. He meets up with Leo Turrin, who provides intel from the ground, and also apologizes for the mysterious slip-up which even allowed the two to be snatched. Turrin believes a couple patsies took the two, as a pair of hoods were just found dead in a car with a marksman medal sitting between their corpses. In other words someone killed the kidnappers and tried to pin the kill on Bolan, however all this happened while the real Bolan was tearing up the San Francisco mob in the previous volume.

There are so many action scenes that the unfortunate effect is too many of them are rendered via summary. This especially holds true toward the end, but here in the opening we’re treated to a nice running sequence in which Bolan hits a mob convoy with a mortar and then mops up the survivors with a submachine gun. Here he takes along one of the few survivors, a Mafia lawyer named Books Figarone. Bolan only allows him to live in exchange for figuring out who took Val and Johnny. It’s a little unintentionally goofy then that Books finds the snatcher with only a single telephone call! It’s a minor hood named Harold “the Skipper” Sicilia, and for some inexplicable reason Pendleton keeps him off-page for the entire novel…and even more inexplicably delivers his comeuppance off-page as well.

Pendleton skillfully weaves the concern over Val and Johnny becoming “turkeys” thanks to those Mafia sadists…turkeys being mutilated torture victims who are only capable of squawking unintelligibly, as our author helpfully reminds us. We readers learn that Val and Johnny haven’t been harmed yet thanks to a brief scene from Valerie’s point of view; per Gene Cohen’s cover she and Johnny are bound back to back, but they’re lying on the floor of some dank holding area. We get some lurid stuff with one of the captors feeling Val up and considering hopping on her for a free ride, only to be reprimanded by the other captor that “the Skipper” has warned against any such stuff.

But the most inexplicable thing about Boston Blitz is we never learn what motivates Skipper Sicilia…Books calls him, finding the kidnapper of Bolan’s loved ones on his first call, and Sicilia grudgingly admits that he did indeed kidnap the two and that he might’ve made a mistake. Presumably Sicilia thought he could bring the Executioner to heel, but at this point Bolan’s mystique has approached Butcher levels of bad-assery, capable of making hardbitten Mafia goons shit their pants in fear. Books is thus able to talk Sicilia into getting rid of the two – not killing them, just letting them go so the Executioner will call off his war of atrocity on the Boston families.

This leads to one of the more memorable scenes in the book, as Bolan and Books make a late night run upstate to where Sicilia keeps his boat, which he claims is near where Val and Johnny are being held. Only here Pendleton delivers on the “turkey” promise with a car driving by long enough to deposit a bundled pacakge. Wrapped inside are the fresh corpses of a woman and an adolescent boy, their heads seared off via blowtorch. Pendleton gets even more lurid with details on how the woman’s breasts and nether regions have also been blowtorched, with a sickened and enraged Bolan further imagining how the sadistic torture-murder was carried out.

Now Bolan becomes a vengeance-driven force of nature, shutting off all emotions and living only to kill in cold blood. But sadly the method of his vengeance-sating is nowhere as satisfactory as that in, say, Bronson: Blind Rage. He chases down the car that deposited the corpses, causing it to crash and catch on fire. He merely shoots the heavyset freak who did the actual turkey-doctoring, then sends off the driver with a mercy shot, Bolan despite his rage still unable to let someone die by burning to death. I was expecting something a little more prolonged and painful. But this is just a precursor to the unsatisfying vengeage-meting Pendleton delivers throughout.

Because folks at this point The Executioner has lost that mean drive that fueled the first couple volumes; it’s become more streamlined, more refined in a way, at least when compared to truly brutal revenge yarns like Bronson: Blind Rage or even the first couple Vigilante novels. I wanted to read a determined Mack Bolan bashing brains and ripping out guts in his unquenchable thirst for revenge, but really there isn’t much here out of step with any other Executioner novel. I guess we’re to understand that Bolan is even more driven than usual, but as the novel progresses his blitzing is so frequent that it’s rendered in summary, diluting the impact. For example, late in the game we learn, in a single paragraph, that Bolan kills fifty-two mobsters in one hit alone.

Anyway Bolan goes on a nighttime massacre mission (the novel occurs over just a day or two), slaughtering sundry mobsters in his hunt for Sicilia. And again, inexplicably, we never get to see him confront Sicilia! Instead, we get this eleventh hour subplot about an “Al 88,” a mysterious figure who is now running the Boston mob, despite being known as an upstanding citizen in his public identity. Yes, the exact same subplot we saw in previous volumes – “Mr. King” last time in California Hit and “Sir Edward” before that in #10: Caribbean Kill. I guess Pendleton was fascinated by the idea of a well-known public figure secretly being a criminal kingpin, because this is the third time in a row he’s given us the storyline.

And what’s worse, the Al 88 stuff takes precedence over the revenge on Sicilia stuff. Even the revelation that those tortured corpses weren’t actually Val and Johnny is muddled; Leo Turrin somehow finds out and informs Bolan, who takes a while to even inquire who the corpses were. (Leo says the woman was a local hooker and the boy was a local “retarded” kid who’d been reported missing…and after this the matter is dropped.) During a break in the blitz Bolan starts to figure out who Al 88 really is, leading to a memorable discussion with the man’s wife in their large, otherwise typical home. Al 88 we’re to understand is so big in his public persona that he’s got connections in Washington, which seems to be laying seeds for future isntallments. But anyway Bolan, again using Books Figarone, decides to set it up so that Al 88 uses his own resources to track down Sicilia, again leading to a climax where Bolan is to meet his enemy on neutral ground for the handoff of his captured loved ones.

And once again it’s a trap, but as ever Bolan’s several steps ahead of his enemy. But what could’ve been a cool finale is also diluted via too quick of a denoument; Bolan takes out some thugs who have been planted in the darkness, then almost perfunctorily destroys the sanitation truck filled with armed thugs that comes after him. I mean this image alone could’ve been greatly expanded upon – the area’s been closed off, it’s the middle of the night, and a friggin’ garbage truck comes roaring out of the darkness with a bunch of machine gun-wielding mobsters riding on it. But Pendleton’s over and done with it in just a paragraph or two, Bolan destroying the truck with a couple grenades. And what really sucks is we learn, as Bolan briefly views the carnage, that Sicilia himself was on the truck – thus he’s been killed virtually off-page, Pendleton denying us the personal confrontation the plot demanded. 

But at least Val and Johnny are free, however Pendleton isn’t one to spend too much time on this, either; Bolan and Johnny trade a few terse lines in the epilogue, and then Bolan and Valerie have an emotional conversation that occurs entirely off-page. More print is actually spent on Leo Turrin’s comment that Federal agent Hal Brognola wants to talk to Bolan about something; Brognola’s eventually the guy who set Bolan up with the whole post-Pendleton “Stony Man” scenario of Gold Eagle Books, so I’m assuming we’re going to get a precursor of that, but I guess we’ll find out for sure next time.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

The Executioner #11: California Hit


The Executioner #11: California Hit, by Don Pendleton
November, 1972  Pinnacle Books

Picking up shortly after the previous volume, this installment of The Executioner has Mack Bolan in San Francisco, and what I found most impressive about California Hit is how effortless Don Pendleton makes it all seem. I was halfway finished the book and it felt like I’d just started reading it.

And yet, that edgy feel of the early volumes has been lost; one could almost argue that Pendleton is on autopilot at this point. I don’t mean that as a criticism; he’s just so perfected his template that you know exactly what you’re going to get: an opening action scene, a couple arbitrary parts where one-off characters recap everything that’s happened, some Mafia parts where various goombahs argue with one another, perhaps a sexy babe or two, and a final action scene. But Pendleton does it all so well that it comes off as fresh…but then we’re only on the 11th volume. If we’re still reading the same thing in the 30th volume it will be a different story.

Bolan’s already in San Francisco when we meet him, and the cover illustration comes into play immediately. Bolan tosses a satchel charge into a mob bar with an Asian theme and a “real live Chinal doll” runs onto the scene moments before the explosion. Bolan saves her, but this compromises his “numbers;” now his plan has been thrown awry and he’s in danger of being cornered by the mobsters and/or the cops who are quickly gathering on the scene. However I’m sure no reader anywhere was concered about this; as ever Bolan manages to escape both parties.

The “China Doll” is named Mary Ching, but she isn’t nearly as important to the series as a new item in Bolan’s arsenal: the .44 Auto Mag. This stainless steel automatic magnum is dwelt on for a few pages of proto gun-porn, receiving more coverage than any previous Bolan weapon, even down to the load mixture for the cartridges. What I found most humorous though is we are told this gun is new on the market, yet we’re not told how Bolan acquired it – previously we’ve been informed how he came across all his other weapons. Perhaps he took it from some thug he killed between volumes.

Anyway, Bolan’s come to mess up the San Francisco mob, and also he’s heard of a msyterious “Mr. King” who is behind the scenes and also needs a good killing. This recalls the previous volume, in which Bolan targeted the peons before going after the big bad guy in what came off as an arbitrary finale. However, there’s less action here. Pendleton spends more time with those one-off characters, either cops or Mafioso, fighting with each other or trying to figure out how they can finally bring down “that bastard Bolan.”

Even Mary Ching disappears too abruptly from the text; she drops Bolan off at her apartment and leaves him there. Bolan finds himself alone with two sexy nude young women who are sleeping in Mary’s place. One of them, a blonde, wakes up and starts waltzing around in the buff, asking Bolan if there’s any “organic coffee” in the cabinet. She idtentifies herself as Cynthy, her sleeping friend as Panda Bare, and says they’re both friends of Mary Ching – not to mention they’re both porno actresses. Believe it or not, I once found myself in the same situation! Sure, I didn’t have any organic coffee and the two porn actresses were on a video I was watching, but still!

I found all this reminiscent of Bolan meeting the three cuties in the seventh volume, but Bolan doesn’t seem to, and neither does Pendleton. This time though Bolan doesn’t consort with either babe, though Panda Bare is a “lez” anyway, per Cynthy. Surprisingly, Bolan doesn’t take Cynthy up on her offer for some good lovin’, but instead tells her to scram and to keep her mouth shut at the porn shoot she has that night…even though he’s sure either of the girls will mention him, even unwittingly. Bolan’s aware that the mob runs the porn racket, so it’s only a matter of time before these girls run into trouble – which of course they will before novel’s end.

Bolan does however find the time to get lucky with Mary Ching, later in the book, but the scene is totally off-page. Bolan is more concerned about whether he should trust her. First she comes back to her place with a few Mafia gunners tailing her, and after taking them out Bolan seems to be sure Mary was unaware they were following her. Then after taking her back to his “drop house,” Mary takes off again without any notice, and thus Bolan feels that his secure base has been compromised. He can’t get a handle on which side she’s on; Pendleton initially seems to be working in a Chinese tongs subplot, but apparently changes his mind and drops it before novel’s end. There’s also some red herring stuff about Red Chinese commie cells operating out of the Bay area, but that too doesn’t amount to much. 

As mentioned action is more sporadic. Bolan hits the bar in the opening, then gets in a few quick firefights here and there. The action highlight for me is his blitz on a mob location in which he first hits it with smoke bombs and then storms inside, wearing a gas mask and his customary blacksuit, and blows away goons with his new Auto Mag. Here though we have a return of another element of the template: a cop who is supportive of Bolan’s one-man war on the mob. Pendleton throws in a new twist this time in that the cop, Bill Phillips, was on Bolan’s team in ‘Nam.

Pendleton works in references to previous books, in particular #2: Death Squad; Phillips has kept up with Politician and Gadgets, telling Bolan they’re doing well living lives of anonymity now. Of course these two would later feature in Able Team, but as for Bill Phillips I don’t know if he returned to the franchise; the last time the two face one another Phillips tells Bolan that it will be his duty to arrest him if Bolan ever steps foot in San Francisco again.

The Mr. King subplot is almost surreal in how vague it is. As with the last volume, Pendleton tries to remind us periodically that there’s a big man behind the scenes, one shrouded in mystery. Bolan finds out who it is in the final pages, after having set up the mobsters and orchestrating them into an ambush. Mr. King shows up in a car, and when Bolan spies him from afar he’s blown away by his identity. All we find out is that Mr. King is black, and his name “isn’t really King;” it seems evident that we’re to understand Mr. King is a Martin Luther King type of civil rights figurehead who in reality has “sold out his own people,” per a disgusted Bolan, who of course kills him.

At any rate Pendleton is more concerned with setting up the events of the next volume, which I believe per his interview in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction he claimed as one of his favorites in the series. Bolan gets in phone contact with Leo Turrin, the undercover cop back in Pittsfield, Bolan’s hometown and the location of the first volume. Turrin seems preoccupied about something and at novel’s end (as usual, the book occurs over just a few days) he informs Bolan that Bolan’s kid sister Johnny and Bolan’s old flame Val have gone missing. At the end of the book the Executioner hops in the “Warwagon” and heads back east to find them.

Pendleton’s writing is as skilled and assured as ever, but he seems to have forgotten that Bolan is only thirty years old. Several times in the book Pendleton mentions that Bolan’s not only a ‘Nam vet but he’s also a veteran of the Korean war! First this appears in a “Uniform Crime Network” bulletin which opens the book; it’s stated that Bolan fought in Korea, and I was willing to accept this as just a gaffe on the part of the authorities. But then in the novel Bolan himself is remembering this or that incident in Korea, so Pendleton must’ve forgotten for this installment that his protagonist would’ve been way too young to fight in that particular war.