Showing posts with label Stephen Mertz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Mertz. Show all posts

Thursday, September 12, 2019

MIA Hunter #9: Invasion U.S.S.R.


MIA Hunter #9: Invasion U.S.S.R., by Jack Buchanan
April, 1988  Jove Books

MIA Hunter ventures into uncharted territory with this ninth installment, which sees a return of the same authors from the previous volume: Arthur Moore and Stephen Mertz. But in many ways Invasion U.S.S.R. seems to be from another series entirely, replacing the Southeast Asian POW-rescuing adventures of the earlier volumes with a sort of sub-Ludlum Cold War thriller. I found the results decidedly mixed.

For one, there is a bit of continuity, which makes me assume series editor Stephen Mertz was taking a firmer hand; the early volumes rarely if ever referred to each other. Here we have a reminder that Stone and team (Texan Hog Wiley and Brit Terrence Loughlin) are now employed by the government, thanks to the efforts of Senator Harler. Rather than illegally going into ‘Nam and neighborhood to rescue American POWs, they now go around the world to rescue captured American notables. Not technically MIAs, then, which makes Hog’s announcement, “We’re the MIA hunters” late in the novel sound a bit forced.

This time an American journalist who moonlights for the CIA is captured in Moscow. His name is Lee Daniels and the authors pad some of the pages with cutovers to his plight; this is another hallmark of previous volumes but Daniels seems to get a lot more attention. Unfortunately I found his story, which has him shuffled around this or that Russian sanitarium and grilled by this or that Russian flunkie, to be a bit tiresome.

I wanted action, baby – and shockingly, for a series known for big action scenes – Invasion U.S.S.R. is a bit lackluster in that department. It is for the most part a slow-moving thriller in which Stone and team are relegated to using pistols instead of their customary assault rifles. That being said, the author(s) do a better job of bringing the main characters to life, especially Loughlin; whereas he was a terse cipher previously, now he has a gift for sarcastic retorts. (And I still think there’s buried subtext that the dude’s gay – just sayin.’)

Stone, Hog, and Loughlin are called in by Harler to accompany him as “security” on a trip to Moscow. Their real goal will be to secretly find Daniels and exfiltrate him from whatever secret location the damn commies have him stashed away in. We get a bit of humor here with wily Hog (clever pun alert) chafing at the attempts to make him look respectable, complete with haircut, suit, and tie. The result, per Stone, “looks like a wrestler on his day off.” After this though, other than the occasional Hog-Loughlin banter, it’s a mostly humorless and dry affair.

It’s all very, uh, different, as Stone is suddenly meeting with embassy personnel and in-country CIA agents. As stated it just seems like a completely different series. The random action scenes still appear, a little less frequently, but they aren’t as overdone as the ones in the ‘Nam adventures. In fact it seems like Loughlin is forever stealing a car and the trio are sneaking away on the darkened streets after some random firefight with their appropriated pistols. It’s like the author(s) wanted to do a fairly realistic Cold War spy story while at the same time accomodating the action quotient required by the men’s adventure genre. For example, soon enough Hog is shooting helicopters out of the sky, something we’re told he’s quite good at.

The team gets in action posthaste, going off to meet with their CIA contact but walking into an ambush. This is just the first of many following sequences in which the boys get in a firefight, Loughlin hotwires a car, and they get away from the encroaching KGB. This happens so many times I started to suspect it was a subtle attempt at humor, and possibly it was. Stone and team don’t really integrate well into the shadow war mindset; they make cursory attempts at maintaining secrecy but keep getting in brief skirmishes with roving KGB patrols, making their getaway in stolen cars. Strangely neither Senator Harler nor the embassy folks get much frustrated by this, and just meet the team’s frequent requests for info, contacts, or more guns.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the lack of sexual material – in the men’s adventure of the ‘80s, only the protagonists of  post-nuke pulps got laid. The protagonists of regular men’s adventure were too busy checking their guns and stuff to mess around with womenfolk. But we at least get the promise of it – first Stone’s put in contact with a pretty female agent based in Moscow named Rima…who doesn’t do anything but cook for them. Later when the action moves to Moscow they’re put in line with Anna, a hotstuff Swedish agent whose ample charms are much admired by Stone and team…but there’s absolutely nothing in the way of sexual hijinks. The idea is so remote that it isn’t even mentioned.

For the most part Invasion U.S.S.R. concerns “the MIA hunters” going around Moscow, trying to find leads on Daniels, and always being one step behind the KGB force that has him. Late in the game the action moves to Leningrad, but even here it continues in the same pace as the Moscow material: they meet up with some local CIA agents, sneak around the city, get in brief skirmishes, hotwire a car, and make their getaway. The action promises to expand when the team is captured by the cunning KGB officer who has Daniels, Stone and team walking into yet another ambush, but Anna manages to free them within a few pages.

The big fireworks are saved for the finale, in which Daniels is finally located inside a sanitarium-fortress near Leningrad. But whereas the previous books would feature Stone and team hitting the base with some native soldiers backing them up, this time they follow a goofy, pseudo-Mission: Impossible scenario: they let themselves get arrested so that they’re put in the sanitarium’s jail, and then they try to figure out a way to break both themselves and Daniels out. What’s worse, there isn’t even a final comeuppance for the KGB officer who has taken up so much of the narrative.

Despite being 180-some pages, Invasion U.S.S.R. seems to be longer. Even though the writing is fine, with a clear attempt at conveying suspense and tension, the book just seems sluggish at times. I’m assuming this one was just a misfire and the series will get back on track, but I do feel that this new angle with Stone’s team being a rescue unit isn’t panning out very well. I mean there has to be at least a few POWs they could look for in ‘Nam…

Monday, November 12, 2018

Jimi After Dark


Jimi After Dark, by Stephen Mertz
November, 2018  Wolfpack Publishing

First published by Perfect Crime in 2017 (with an atrocious cover), now brought out in a new edition by Wolfpack Publishing (with a much better cover), Jimi After Dark is an action-filled yarn that combines Ennis Willie with Swinging London; Stephen Mertz even dedicates the novel to Willie, so the tone is unmistakable. The book also comes off like Don Pendleton at times – and let’s not forget Pendleton sent his own two-fisted hero to Swinging London, in Assault On Soho.

Regardless, this is a fun, inventive mixing of influences: psychedelic rock meets hardboiled action. And there certainly is more action here than you’d find in something by Hard Case Crime, evidence of Stephen’s history with Gold Eagle Books (not to mention his sort of apprenticeship with Pendleton himself). It seems as if our hero, the anonymous “Soldier,” is constantly either getting shot at, knocked out, beaten up, threatened, chased, or just in general mistreated. He does though manage to pick up one of those infamous English “birds,” though. Actually she’s a Houston transplant, so maybe she doesn’t count as an English bird after all.

The novel is an effective mystery thriller, and takes place in the very last days of Jimi Hendrix – I mean like the last three or so days before he died, on September 18, 1970. Stephen wisely keeps Jimi as a supporting character; only the prologue and a few other brief sequences, all of which are in third-person, feature him in the sole spotlight. Otherwise he is a supporting character, usually off-page, with Soldier carrying the brunt of the tale, and narrating it for us. As mentioned Soldier wishes to be anonymous; he tells no one his name, and Jimi, who knows what it is, doesn’t tell anyone, either. Eventually I pretended that Soldier was just Mark Stone…or maybe even John Cody.

All we do know is that Soldier’s the same age as Jimi, 27, and he sports a facial scar. (So if my Stone/Cody theory is valid, we’ll just have to discount that!) He’s just rotated out of ‘Nam and is on his way to Germany when we meet him. But first he’s making a brief stopover in London to help out his old pal, none other than Jimi Hendrix – the two were stationed together during Jimi’s ultra-brief Army career and became fast friends. We know from the outset that Soldier owes Jimi his life; later in flashback we see that Jimi prevented Soldier’s brains from getting blown out at a black bar, near their base.

But that was a few years ago; the Jimi of late 1970 is in some ways a different person. Withdrawn at times, worn out from years of incessant touring, a little bitter. He wants to be back in America, in the new studio he just opened in Manhattan: Electric Lady, but he’s stuck here in Europe on this tour his manager, Mike Jeffrey, insisted he do so as to pay all the mounting bills. Jimi’s also in hock to some underworld types for money he borrowed. But now there seems to be a new element to it all, and Jimi is paranoid that someone’s out to do him in. Soldier’s here because he received a note from Jimi – they’re penpals of sorts – asking Soldier to stop by when he flies into London, because Jimi needs some help.

Soldier for his part doesn’t tell us much about himself. He’s fresh out of the shit in ‘Nam and he’s old buddies with Jimi. Soldier not only doesn’t want to tell us his name, he also doesn’t want anyone he meets to know his name. Even when his ID is confiscated, his name is not mentioned. Of course, the heaviest Pendletonisms are courtesy Soldier’s narration; not just in how he periodically flashes back to stuff in Vietnam, usually when he’s knocked out (and folks Soldier gets knocked out a whole bunch), but in how he uses his jungle warfare background to frame his experiences in London. Just as Pendleton would introduce a concept or theme early in a volume of The Executioner and then reinforce it throughout the narrative (sometimes relentlessly), so too does Soldier compare and contrast his ‘Nam background with this current caper in London as he tries to figure out who means Jimi harm.

And so just who is trying to kill Jimi Hendrix?? Everyone, that’s who! Humorously, it appears that everyone’s out to get poor Jimi – in this book he’s not only abducted but also dangled from a rooftop, and just in general is threatened with bodily harm throughout. It appears that Stephen has personified Jimi’s various personal and business problems into real-life foes; even his manager, Mike Jeffrey (whose name has really been dragged through the mud since he died in ’73), is presented as a thug-employing crime kingpin. I almost expected Noel Redding to show up wielding a meat cleaver. Seriously though, Stephen doesn’t bother too much with the music side of Jimi’s life; the opening sequence takes place at Jimi’s last official concert, at the Isle of Fehmarn in Germany, and Jimi’s band members (Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell) aren’t even named.

Speaking of which, Stephen has whittled down the cast of characters who surrounded Jimi in his final days, removing some and adding others of his own creation. Of the missing ones, Devon Wilson would be first and foremost. Anyone who knows about Jimi’s life will know of Devon, the super-groupie who inspired the track “Dolly Dagger.” Her outrageously complex relationship with Jimi entailed everything from being his live-in girlfriend in New York to acting as a female pimp for him. She was in London these final days, in fact had a mysterious encounter with him the night of his death, but she’s not to be found in Jimi After Dark.

However, Jimi’s other girlfriend of the day, Monika Dannemann, is here, and Stephen successfully captures this needy, domineering woman who appears to have implanted herself like a parasite on Jimi in his final days. Soldier meets her early on and forms an instant dislike for her, and it’s hard not to blame him. Jimi for his part excuses the clingy German blonde, saying she’s a sweetheart or whatever. Meanwhile little does Jimi know that Monika has inadvertently brought even more problems upon him: Soldier soon takes on a group of German crooks who have come here to London to harm Jimi, so as to make themselves look good to Monika’s ultra-wealthy family, as none of them like the idea of Monika running around with a black man.

Upon his arrival at Heathrow, Soldier meets the first of the fictional characters Stephen has placed in Jimi’s life: her name is Syndney Blanchard, and she’s a pretty redheaded Londoner who comes from a wealthy family but likes to mingle with the rock stars of the day. She approaches Soldier seeming to know where Jimi is, but not giving him any info – later we’ll learn she’s trying to protect Jimi. And anyway we promptly learn why, as Stephen presents us with the first of many such action scenes that will ensue: Soldier, still in his uniform, is accosted by a couple punks and makes short work of them, seriously injuring one of them.

When Soldier tracks down Jimi, who is staying at a crash pad, it’s to Stephen’s credit that he doesn’t sap it up. Jimi comes here to hang out with Angel, an American expat hippie babe from Houston (she’s another of the fictional characters), and to get away from the heavy shit going on in his life. Stephen presents us with a haggard and stressed-out Jimi who is nothing like the ultra-mellow guy more familiar to those who love him so much. And by all accounts Jimi was seriously stressed in his final days; it’s hard not to feel bad for the guy and the miserable fate he suffered.

But Jimi at times doesn’t come off very well in the novel, not very bright on what’s going on, who is after him, or how in deep he is. Soldier also doesn’t like all the drugs Jimi takes – there’s a curious anti-drug stance in Jimi After Dark, given that it takes place in 1970 – and the drugs only serve to make Jimi seem even more addled and clueless. He also doesn’t play as much music as you’d expect, though again the novel only occurs over a few days. But as mentioned, Stephen wisely keeps Jimi off-page for most of the novel, only occasionally featuring him in his own scenes.

Soldier is the star of the show, and he’s very much in the Mack Bolan/Mark Stone mold. He storms his way through London trying to find out who is hassling Jimi, finding the time along the way to almost hook up with Syndey and ultimately to hook up with Angel. He’s also framed for the murder of a female character, and this proves to be the central mystery of Jimi After Dark, which makes sense; I mean the whole world knows that Jimi himself is dead, so there’s no mystery there. This frame makes Soldier a wanted man, so along with the other sundry characters he goes up against while protecting Jimi, there’s also a bulldog of a cop after him.

As for Jimi, at one point he’s abducted and strapped to a chair for a day or so; in the Afterword, Stephen says this was inspired by a comment the real Jimi once made, in 1969, about being briefly abducted. No one knows if he was being serious or not, but Stephen took this ball and ran with it, just changing up the dates a little. Jimi we learn has been captured by a group of thugs he borrowed money from, one of the thugs being Angel’s ex-husband. But then there’s the question of who hired these thugs to capture Jimi, and why they want him dead. Jimi actually takes his captivity pretty well, even attempting an escape at one point. That being said, he sort of gets over it a little too quickly in the finale, casually heading off to a nightclub for what will be his last gig.

Meanwhile Soldier busts heads and tracks leads as he tries to find Jimi; at one point he runs afoul of the German thugs, and later on he meets a dude who claims to be a former CIA agent who desperately needs to get in touch with Jimi, because the United States government is trying to kill him. Here it’s brought up that Jimi has been making positive comments about the Black Power movement and etc, and thus the uber-evil Nixon administration wants him dead. In reality Jimi Hendrix had ascended beyond race, just one of the bujillion things that were so cool about him. I’ve read my share of Jimi Hendrix interviews, and he rarely talks about being black. He literally cared nothing about race – “no matter what color the eyes or armpits might be,” as he once wonderfully put it. I’ve also seen a few interviews where he claimed the Black Panthers were going about things the wrong way, so I’d guess any such involvement with them would’ve ultimately proved short lived. 

Regardless, this conspiracy theory is a central thread of Jimi After Dark, at least in how it’s one of the main efforts to kill off Jimi. This meeting with the former agent leads to another running action scene, as Soldier and Angel are fired at by a hidden sniper. Ultimately we’ll learn the CIA is involved with Jimi’s abduction, and it’s up to Soldier and Angel to come to his rescue – that is, after a little kinkiness between the two. Stephen gets slightly risque as Angel treats Soldier to a little down-home hospitality; it’s more action than Bolan ever got on page, that’s for sure.

One can also tell that Stephen is more invested in this tale than he was in, say Saigon Slaughter or whatever; the tone is somewhat the same, but there’s more care and craft in the telling. Things are always entertaining, and the characters come off as three-dimensional. I do feel that the mystery angle got a little in the way of the action, particularly the long outing of the true killer in the climax, which is relayed via dialog. I only say this because it comes after the scene in which Soldier rescues Jimi, which features dudes getting their faces blown off. But then this mystery schtick is part of the hardboiled template.

I actually suspected I’d get a different story in Jimi After Dark. There are enough mysteries in Jimi’s death, let alone any CIA hit teams, German thugs, or shady managers. The chief mystery of them all would be what happened in Jimi’s final hours. This is because the last person with him, Monika, changed her story countless times over the years. According to her story (or one of her stories, at least), Jimi took some of her sleeping pills after drinking a lot of wine at a party, and when Monika woke up early in the morning, Jimi was sick, so she called the ambulance, and rode in it with Jimi to the hospital. Monika further claimed that the paramedics improperly strapped Jimi into a sitting position, and when he tried to vomit in his comatose state he was unable to move and thus choked to death on his own vomit, right there in the ambulance. This is the story most early Hendrix bios stick to, among them David Henderson’s phenomenal Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child Of The Aquarian Age (aka ’Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky in its paperback edition), which I intend to review shortly.

The only problem is, the story is bullshit. Many years later the paramedics who arrived on the scene were finally tracked down and interviewed. They each stated that no one was in the apartment when they arrived, and also the door was unlocked. Monika was not there, nor did she ride in the ambulance with them. They also stated that Jimi had clearly been dead for quite a while, given that the inside of his mouth was turning black. However they went through the fruitless motions of reviving him before putting him in the ambulance. The coroner later determined that Jimi had been dead for at least seven hours before the paramedics arrived, placing his death around 4AM. As for who called the ambulance, again, we only have Monika’s dubious word on that. Records of such things weren’t kept back then.

Long story short, it would appear that Jimi’s death is just what it’s seemed to be all along – an unfortunate, easily-avoided mistake. He took too many of Monika’s powerful sleeping pills and choked to death on his vomit, unable to move because of the barbiturates in his system. The question is, why wasn’t anyone there to help him? Or was Monika indeed there, but asleep at the time, and woke to find Jimi’s corpse and freaked out, running out of the apartment, her later stories just a way of repressing her memory of the truth? Part of this must be true, as apparently she called Eric Burdon of War and he and some others cleaned the place of drugs and guitars, steering clear of the corpse on the bed, before they called the ambulance.  (Priorities, people!)  Or was Jimi indeed murdered, waterboarded with wine by Mike Jeffrey and a few cronies as Tappy Wright claimed in his 2009 book Rock Roadie? (Overlooking the fact that Mike Jeffrey was in Spain, not London, on the night Jimi died…not to mention that Tappy later admitted he made it all up to drive book sales!)

But here’s another weird sidenote…on July 30th, 1970, Jimi was in Hawaii, doing a private concert for the film Rainbow Bridge, an occult, New Age-themed hippie movie financed by Mike Jeffrey. Jimi, asked by Jeffrey to appear as “himself” in the film, got drunk for his appearance so as to quell his nerves. I mean he literally stumbles onto the scene chugging from a bottle of wine. In this brief sequence shortly before the end of the film, Jimi engages in a nonsensical stoned rap with the lead female character and a “young guru” type in a goofy headband (none other than director Chuck Wein himself). Jimi describes an out of body experience in which he astrally voyages above the Sphinx and meets Cleopatra. He’s been drinking in the astral trip, too, and he relays that he suddenly feels the need to puke up the wine. But he holds it in because he wants to play it cool for Cleopatra: “The grape chokes me almost. But I can’t let the choke come out.” He then mimics choking on vomit. It’s all very creepy, because this is exactly how Jimi died less than two months later. Was he experiencing a premonition?

Check out this concise but thorough overview of Jimi’s last days, which gives all the pertinent info and also debunks the conspiracy theory that Jimi was waterboarded with wine.  The entire website is a treasure trove of Hendrix info and is highly recommended!

But anyway, none of this is actually in Jimi After Dark, so I apologize for the interminable detour.  And Stephen has written a novel, so he is not beholden to catering to facts or theories. In his book, Jimi’s death happens between chapters and is relayed in mournful backstory by Soldier, who sort of implies that Jimi died by his own hand. Or maybe it was another a backup CIA hit team. Either way, it’s a miserable loss, and Soldier – who as mentioned is telling us this tale years later – has already mourned him, thus doesn’t treat us to histrionics when he and Angel hear that Jimi’s dead on the car radio. Despite which, it is the ultimate in buzzkill to learn that Jimi’s died between chapters, given that the entire book was all about Soldier trying to save his life!

Soldier does tell us that many years later he met Angel again, this time in Texas, thus implying there is another tale to tell. I enjoyed the character and wouldn’t mind reading another story with him, but it won’t be the same without Jimi. Anyway, I definitely recommend Jimi After Dark, and I’m happy to see it’s available again…when I tried to track down the original Perfect Crime edition, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Luckily now it’s available from Wolfpack – and as mentioned with a much more fitting cover.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must be on my way…

Monday, February 20, 2017

Cody’s Army #2: Assault Into Libya


Codys Army #2: Assault Into Libya, by Jim Case
November, 1986  Warner Books

Stephen Mertz handles this second volume of Cody’s Army himself, and he has mentioned to me a few times that he considers this the best installment of the series. I certainly liked it better than the first volume, which was by Chet Cunningham working off an outline by Mertz (who created and edited the series). But I can see why Cody’s Army never took off as strongly as Mertz’s other series, MIA Hunter, did.

For one, John Cody himself. The dude’s pretty much a cipher, and two volumes in I still don’t have a clear picture of him. While MIA Hunter hero Mark Stone is driven to find Vietnam POWs, Cody is more of your standard, run-of-the-mill action hero, with no special quirks to bring him to life. About the most we get is that he wants to stop evil and help innocents, but that’s true for practically all men’s adventure heroes. He most brings to mind the Gold Eagle version of Mack Bolan, which is unsurprising given Mertz’s tenure at that imprint.

Like Mark Stone, Cody has a group that is more colorful than he is, in particular Hawkeye Hawkins and Richard Caine, who bicker a la Hog Wiley and Terrence Loughlin in the MIA Hunter books. Not sure if it was made clear last volume, but this time we learn that there’s a bit of a Hard Corps vibe to Cody’s Army; like the Hard Corps, these four ‘Nam vets so loved fightin’ and killin’ that they just couldn’t hack peacetime, and soon enough were pulling assignments for the CIA. Their Agency contact is a man named Peter Lund, who reports directly to the President; Mertz delivers several scenes of Lund in the Oval Office and I had some fun picturing Ronald Reagan fretting over the latest exploits of Cody and team.

Another similarity to those Gold Eagle novels is that Mertz will jump around a small group of characters, not keeping the narrative eye solely on Cody. In true Gold Eagle style we have many sequences featuring Abdul Kamal, the villain of the piece, a PLO terrorist who has masterminded a plot to take the American embassy in Rome hostage. A big problem with Assault Into Libya when reading it in the modern day is that Kamal, despite his evil nature, is almost Mr. Rogers when compared to the radical Muslim terrorists of today.

While the modern terrorist kills all and sundry with impunity, Kamal is more concerned with taking hostages and bartering for demands. Indeed he fears death and doesn’t display the drive to martydom that is so sickeningly common in today’s fucked-up world. That being said, Kamal does kill a little kid, which is as verbotten as you can get in these kinds of books – a shock piece Mertz skillfully employs and uses throughout to give John Cody a little bit of a drive (but nothing too much, as he often shuts off any emotional impulses and goes back to the focus of his military training).

Mertz opens with an action scene, as Cody’s Army, outfitted in black commando suits a la Bolan himself, launch an assault on the just-taken Rome embassy. Rather than send in the Marines, Cody’s Army has been given the job due to the delicate nature of it all and whatnot. In the melee Kamal makes his escape, having killed the ambassador and abducted his preteen daughter. This is the little girl who is later blown away, right in front of Cody, and Cody blames himself because he was unable to save her.

Now it’s a vengeance mission, as Cody’s team is ordered to kill Kamal and stop whatever plan he’s clearly formenting. The helicopter he escaped in was last tracked heading into Bulgaria. Our heroes head to Greece, with the idea to sneak across the border. This part features perhaps my favorite typo of all time: “Cody had allowed himself a catnip” on the flight. I could almost picture a wild-eyed Cody chasing around his own rear like some catnip-hopping cat. Anyway, the Greece sequence culminates in a mostly-arbitrary action scene, as a group of mountain brigands ambush our heroes and are quickly butchered for their menial efforts.

Kamal is backed by the KGB, and we have many sequences devoted to him and his Russian contact plotting more KGB-funded terrorism while bickering with each other. Again Kamal comes off like a harbinger from a kindler, gentler time, despite the fact that he is a psychotic murderer. His terrorist army truly would be considered a “JV team” in today’s world. Mertz further opens up the narrative with the appearance of a female Bulgarian spy: Narda Rykov, a member of her country’s anti-Commie National Freedom Organization. She turns out to be the local contact for Cody’s Army once they make it to Bulgaria, but Mertz doesn’t play up any sexual shenanigans, despite the occasional mention of Narda’s hot-stuffness.

A running action sequence in Bulgaria calls to mind an action movie of the day as Cody’s men and Narda are chased by the Bulgarian army, and our heroes commandeer an armored truck and run roughshod over the countryside in their escape. Mertz shows a very Pendleton-esque flair for action scenes, keeping everything moving and never getting bogged down in firearm detail. He also employs what I consider Pendletonisms, ie occasional one-liner proclamations of Cody’s bad-assery or stoic resolve, etc.

Cody’s Army is a few steps behind throughout the Bulgarian sequence, trying to find Kamal on hardly any solid leads and usually tracking down those Kamal has dealt with when it’s already too late. Meanwhile Kamal himself heads to Libya where he is to open up like a new line of new, improved terrorist training camps or somesuch. While still in Bulgaria, Cody’s Army engages in one of the action highlights of the novel, staging a “soft probe” of a KGB barracks which was really housing Kamal’s Arabic army – a soft probe that quickly goes hard. In the melee Hawkeye is injured and thus doesn’t take part in the final setpiece.

Everything climaxes in Libya, Cody and team finally tracking Kamal there. They chase the “two hairbags” there (ie Kamal and Vronski’s his KGB backer), and we get a brief, sort of arbitrary part where Cody and Caine pose as terrorists who have come down here to join up with this newfangled training camp. I say abritrary because the two are exposed within a page or two. Meanwhile Rafe, the fourth member of Cody’s Army, is flying high above in an F-82 and decides to launch an aerial assault on the camp even though he hasn’t received the proper signal from Cody.

While Cody has spent the novel vowing to kill Kamal for the murder of the little girl, it’s Caine who curiously enough gets the honor of dispatching the terrorist bastard. I found this strange, like the Indian dude popping up in the final seconds to kill the Predator instead of Arnold. But I guess the important thing is that the radical Islamic terrorist is dead. Otherwise, Assault Into Libya was pretty good, and would certainly appeal to fans of the Gold Eagle novels of the era. It’s a fine piece of men’s adventure fiction, but I’m still not warming up to the series as with MIA Hunter. This is no criticism of Mertz, though, who handles the book with craft and skill – I look forward to reading the other volumes of the series he wrote.

On a closing note, I’ve been on paternity leave for the past three weeks (the baby was born on 1/26), so the blog has been running on autopilot; luckily I had several reviews scheduled to post ahead of time. I just checked out my stats and was surprised to see that I’m now at almost 1.1 million page views; over the past few months I’ve noticed the daily page views have jumped significantly. I have no idea where the traffic is coming from (the Traffic Sources is almost humorously unhelpful), but I just want to say thanks to everyone for visiting the blog.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

MIA Hunter #7: Saigon Slaughter


MIA Hunter #7: Saigon Slaughter, by Jack Buchanan
August, 1987  Jove Books

Stephen Mertz and Joe Lansdale team for up a third and final time on the MIA Hunter series, which now features series protagonist’s name “Stone” as part of the title. Mertz and Lansdale last collaborated on #4: Mountain Massacre, and like that one Saigon Slaughter is for the most part about 80% action with around 20% of character and plot development. It’s enjoyable but lacks the charm of their first collaboration, #3: Hanoi Deathgrip, which is still my favorite volume.

Hero Mark Stone is already in the ‘Nam when the novel opens, accompanied as ever by erstwhile companions Hog Wiley and Terrance Loughlin. A new character is introduced this volume, though it’s doubtful he’ll become a regular (MIA Hunter lacks much continuity): United States Senator Jerome Harber, who has come to Ho Chi Minh City as part of a delegation looking into the truth behind reported American POWs still in Vietnam. Harber is a believer and has made contact with Stone; as the novel opens Stone sneaks into Harber’s hotel room to tell him he’s going to prove his case that POWs exist.

Stone’s here for three American POWs in particular, though the novel features an arbitrary bit from Stone’s perspective where he reflects on the limited lifespan of his MIA-hunting duties. Once again Stone suspects that eventually he will have to pan out into other aspects of global ass-kicking, no doubt sign from editor Mertz that the series will gradually lose focus on the MIA angle and become more of a typical ‘80s action pulp. I’m looking forward to these later books as the concept behind this series is pretty limited, especially when as with the case with Saigon Slaughter the “plots” are mostly comprised of endless battle sequences.

We also get a rare moment of continuity; Stone briefly reflects on the aftermath of the previous volume, in particular the onetime-fiance he rescued in the course of that novel, and how her presence has thrown his love life into chaos. But nothing else is made of this and indeed the fiance isn’t even named. As usual though much more focus is placed on the mission at hand; when we meet Stone he’s already in ‘Nam and he stays here for the duration, dodging bullets and blowing away Vietnamese soldiers. There’s no time for romance, though Saigon Slaughter features the presence of the best female character in the series yet: Mai, “a fine specimen of Oriental womanhood” who is “small but big-breasted” and a kick-ass commando to boot.

Mai, only in her twenties but a veteran freedomfighter in her native Vietnam, serves as Stone’s main contact in the novel. She meets him in the jungle in a sequence of course reminiscent of Rambo: First Blood Part II and proves her worth on the battlefied…again and again, that is, given the crushing onlsaught of action in Saigon Slaughter. Unlike Co in Rambo, Mai actually survives the tale, and the authors capably build a growing rapport between her and Stone, to the point that by novel’s end Stone figures he and Mai will be getting busy posthaste, even though he knows he’ll never see her again. Why not? Mai is a welcome addition and should have become a series regular.

Mertz went on to pen the two-part series Tunnel Rats, which makes it interesting that Stone’s brief tunnel rat background in the war is given a lot of focus here. When Stone and comrades aren’t blitzing VC they’re burrowing beneath the ground in close-quarter tunnels, one of the few things that Hog Wiley fears. Once again the big Texan is given the spotlight, and no doubt these sequences are written by fellow Texan Lansdale, with Hog’s wild background in East Texas often commented upon. And, as in the previous volumes these two co-wrote, the bickering and banter between Hog and cipher-like Loughlin comes fast and furious. Some of it is funny, but some of it gets to be grating.

But really the endless action is the star of the show. Immediately after meeting Mai (who initially shows up in a “Ninja-type mask”) in the jungle night and hooking up with her branch of freedom fighters, Stone et al are caught up in an ambush that is just the first of many, many such action scenes to follow. The gore is also more prevalent this time out, with copious descriptions of heads juicily exploding and guts bursting out. I think Stone and team kill about a zillion Vietnamese soldiers in this one, and once again you have to wonder why they weren’t so lethal in the actual war itself! Wait, I know – it was those goddamn politicians who kept holding them back!!

Mai is the lone survivor of her team of insurgents after this opening battle (which goes on for about 40 pages), and her dead leader was the only one who knew where the camp with the American POWs is located. But there’s another option: depraved General Le, a Vietnamese official who is meeting with Senator Harber’s delegation. Le knows exactly where the camp is, and given his penchant for a new woman every night, Mai dresses herself up in Western clothing with lots of makeup, just like Le likes ‘em. With General Le the MIA Hunter gets its first taste of sleaze, even if it’s relatively brief and also nondescript – there isn’t a single sex scene in the novel. But Le likes to suffocate women while he screws them, we learn, and indeed plans to do this to sexy Mai.

Here’s where we learn about Mai’s “big breasts,” as she goes to Le’s fortress dressed like a veritable Asian Daisy Duke. Stone, using “Ninja suction cups,” scales the fortress and slips in, stopping the festivities before they can start; Le scrawls down the camp location and Stone promptly blows him away. After this we get, you’ll be surprised to know, yet another action scene. This one too keeps going like a regular Duracell Bunny. But now they know that the camp is near Saigon, aka Ho chi Minh, and the team heads deep into the jungle. We get another long and arbitary action scene as they encounter enemy forces, a scene which sees Hog hiding up in a tree at one point and gunning men down. Once again Hog is practically a force of nature, loving the blood and chaos of constant battle. 

The tunnel rat stuff continues when the anti-communist leader of the village near the POW camp reveals that old tunnels run beneath the place, but the one beneath the actual prison needs to be finished. Stone has him draft a ton of “University aged” kids to help in the all-night dig, which leads us into the homestretch battle, another one that goes on for around 30 or so pages. Stone frees the three bedraggled American POWs without much fuss, and then gets back to the task of killing hordes of Vietnamese. The authors inject a bit more variety in this one, from bulldozers used as battering rams to an escape via chopper, Loughlin piloting it and Hog blasting away with an M-60. We even get a ‘copter chase, with Loughlin successfully psyching out the pursuer so that he flies into a truck.

Saigon Slaughter culminates in a scene suspiciously similar to the finale of Missing In Action, as Stone et al fly their appropriated helicopter right to the building in Laos where Senator Harber’s delegation is meeting with the Vietnamese. Stone pulls out the three corpse-like American prisoners and hands them over to Harber in view of God and everyone so there can no longer be any question that the Vietnamese are indeed still harboring American prisoners.

And that’s that – a weary Stone hops back in the helicopter and they take off before there can be anymore fireworks. As mentioned, here Stone puts his arms around the lovely Mai and figures he and she are about to get close, but really he’s more concerned with how he’s going to sneak out of the country. Not that it much matters, as I assume by the next volume Stone will already be on his next mission when we meet him and the events of Saigon Slaughter will be completely forgotten.

I think I can spot the line of demarcation between the two authors: Lansdale perhaps is responsible for the sardonic vibe and the venmous Hog-Loughlin banter, with Mertz mostly responsible for the action and definitely responsible for the Don Pendleton-esque narratorial asides about Stone’s bad-assery. One can clearly see Mertz’s background with Pendleton thanks to lines like “Yeah, Stone was something.” Much of it is so similar to material in Pendleton’s Executioner novels that it could be an excerpt. But the Pendleton vibe is strong, especially in random moments where Mertz will describe the green hell of the jungle, or when he will focus on Stone’s deadfast resolve to see his mission through, even if he dies in the attempt.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Cody's Army #1


Cody's Army #1, by Jim Case
July, 1986  Warner Books

In the ‘80s Stephen Mertz oversaw two series, but MIA Hunter got all of the attention. However at the same time he also did Cody’s Army, which ran for seven volumes and, like that more popular series, saw a collaboration of various writers working under a house name, with Mertz outlining and editing (and occasionally writing volumes himself).

Like most other first volumes from the ‘80s, Cody’s Army #1 is focused on setting up the characters and storyline, and thus is longer than the average men’s adventure novel, coming in at 232 pages of smallish print. Also like MIA Hunter, there’s hardly any info on who wrote which volumes, so then a big thanks to Stephen Mertz himself, who told me that, for this first volume:

I wrote the opening chapters introducing Cody in action and him putting the team together. Sidebar: I asked my writer pal Joe Lansdale to please draft me one chapter where a Southern member of the team is busted out of jail. I wanted it racy but from a southern writer's viewpoint so as not to demean, much less alienate, southern readers. So Lansdale delivers a scene with a small town halfwit named Scooter who totes around a skateboard with a dead racoon nailed to it. Sigh. Joe never could write to spec, which probably accounts for his well-deserved success. Chet Cunningham picks up the narrative with the airplane hi-jacking, completing the novel based on my outline.

Interestingly enough, one can barely tell the author switch-up; the whole novel reads like the work of one writer. This is the same for the MIA Hunter books, which also seem to have the same style, even though almost every one of them is written by a different author. My assumption is this is Mertz’s behind-the-scenes editing, making it all come off with the same tone and style. But at any rate, there is little in this novel that reminds the reader of Cunningham’s earlier work; ie, none of the batshit craziness of, say, Hijacking Manhattan.

Anyway, Mertz opens the tale, and it’s all very ‘80s, as hero John Cody, a CIA agent who was in Force Recon in the Marines in ‘Nam, is down in Nicaragua, fighting the Sandanistas. Working with the Contras, Cody’s mission is to rescue a group of nuns who have been kidnapped. What starts off as a fairly routine action scene sees an unexpected twist, as Cody frees the nuns – only for them to be coldly murdered by the Contras he’s working with!

Learning much too late that this was not a rescue mission – the nuns were supposed to die, so that it would look to the media like the Sandanistas butchered them – Cody exacts vengeance on the Contras and his CIA contact, a sadist named Gorman. We then pick up 14 months later, and it’s all very Commando-esque, at least so far as the beginning of that Schwarzengger film went, with Cody living the life of a recluse in a mountain cabin in the wilds of Canada.

Cody has quit the Agency life in disgust, the memory of the nuns still haunting him. However he is of course tracked down, a trio of men showing up one day on his property. They’re lead by Pete Lund, a CIA man Cody has dealt with in the past. Lund offers Cody the opportunity to lead a new, off-the-book team that will be answerable to the President only; there will be no incidents like the fiasco in Nicaragua. Plus, Cody will be able to pick his own men. The operating principle of the outfit will be that it can do things Delta Force and etc cannot, as the outfit will technically not exist, and thus can work in the shadows.

After a page or two of deliberation, Cody agrees. Now he has to put his team together. First up there’s Richard Caine, who is basically Terrance Loughlin of the MIA Hunter series – a stoic Brit who was formerly in the SAS and is an expert in demolitions. I mean, Richard Caine is so similar to Loughlin – even coming off as a vague shadow of Cody, just as Loughlin does to Mark Stone – that I started to figure that maybe the dude is Terrance Loughlin, like maybe polygamist style Loughlin serves in two seprate action groups, and for Stone et al he’s known as Loughlin, but Cody and gang know him as Caine.

Next there’s Hawkeye Hawkins, a southern hellraiser who is similar to Hog Wiley of the MIA Hunter series, but not as bearish or oafish. To tell the truth, Hawkeye doesn’t do much to capture the reader’s attention, though he does blow off a few heads with his .44 Magnum, which is always a memorable thing. Anyway, Hawkeye and Caine are down in East Texas working as bounty hunters, so they’re easy for Cody to wrangle.

The fourth and final member of the team is another story. This is Rufe Murphy, who also comes off a clone of Hog Wiley, only he’s black. However he’s more like Hog than Hawkeye is, as Rufe is the roughian of the group, plus a pilot to boot. Rufe is currently in jail in some small town in Mississippi, having gotten there due to his banging the white mayor’s wife. Cody and team will need to break him out.

This breakout turns out to be the most memorable scene in the novel. Coming off like a redneck version of Mission: Impossible, it sees Cody and gang posing as cops from a neighboring town, who have come over to measure the size of the prisoner’s dicks! Rufe is of course massively endowed – the cops having gotten a good gander of him in the showers – and thus he’s trundled out as a sure-fire winner for this (fictional) contest Cody claims to be running. It all culminates in incriminating photos taken which make it appear that the police chief is giving ol’ Rufe a blowjob, and he’s of course let go in exchange for the negatives never being shown.

Gradually we get around to the storyline of this first volume; namely, that an American airplane, en route to Tel Aviv from Athens, is hijacked by a group of Palestinian terrorists. They’re soon taken to a deslote patch of Lebanon, just outside of West Beirut, where the captors demand various things or, in 48 hours, will start killing the passengers. It’s all very similar to the plot of The Hard Corps #2, which especially gets confusing when you realize that this novel also has a dour and taciturn character named Caine.

The hijacking stuff goes down just past page 80, which would mean, per Stephen’s comments above, that this is where Chet Cunningham takes over the writing duties. But as mentioned, the reader can hardly tell. The only problem is, it’s all so familiar; after some harrowing stuff, the prisoners are taken to a fortress outside of Lebanon, where the terrorists, lead by Farouk Hassan and Abdel Khaled, first murder the pilot, and then threaten to off the rest if their demands aren’t met.

Cody and team head to Beirut, where we’re at first lead to believe that a character named Kelly McConnell, a famous TV reporter, will become important to the story. Kelly provides a lead for Cody behind the Green Line of Beirut, ie the war-torn, Shiite-controlled area…and then she is promptly killed off. This is a typical “pull the rug out” Cunningham trick, and one he’s done successfully in the Penetrator books.

Cunningham does a good job of bringing to life the hellzone that is this quarter of Beirut, with innocents getting killed in the melee; there’s a bizarre subplot about some woman named Ona whose husband is killed in a blast, and she’s taken into sexual captivity by Majed Kaddoumi, a Palestinian leader who lives in a fortress, and who is the lead Kelly McConnel provided Cody. This takes us into our first major action sequence, as “Cody’s Army” stages an assault on Majed’s fortress.

Neither Mertz nor Cunningham much play up on the gore, but the latter does a little more so, with descriptions of heads exploding and guts pouring out. Hawkeye in particular has a knack for shooting people in the head with his .44 Magnum, which always results in showers of skull shards and brain matter. Just as in the MIA Hunter books, Cody is really the star of the show, though, to the point where the supporting characters sort of blur together.

Cunningham finishes the novel with back-to-back action sequences. First there’s the assault on Majed’s place. Immediately thereafter Cody’s Army (after dropping off the captured woman, Ona) attacks the remote fortress outside Beirut in which the captives are being held. Meanwhile, in a prefigure of the subplot Cunningham would write in Stone: MIA Hunter, the captives themselves are revolting, lead by a plucky stewardess named Sharon Adamson.

This action-packed finale has memorable moments like Rufe Anderson weilding dual Uzis; a total ‘80s action cliché if there ever was one. We can just go ahead and assume he’s wearing a headband. Cunningham opens it up a little with helicopters brought into the mix, including a climax in which Cody, piloting a chopper, chases after the fleeing Farouk Hassan. This part features a total Rambo ripoff, where Cody, crash-landing his chopper, plays dead, and when the other chopper comes in for a closer to look at him, he jumps up and sprays them with his Uzi!

It also looks like Gorman, the CIA sadist who was behind the nun massacre in the beginning of the novel, is to become the series’s recurring villain, much like Alan Coleman in the MIA Hunter books. Humorously enough, despite Pete Lund telling Cody that this new outfit won’t have any problems, Cody arrives in Beirut only to discover that his CIA contact is…none other than Gorman, the man Cody tried to kill in vengeance back in Nicaragua!

However, nothing at all comes of this, and Gorman and Cody don’t even meet; Cunningham writes only one or two scenes with him, cooling his heels outside of Beirut. There is no confrontation between he and Cody, all of which makes me suspect this Gorman stuff is there mostly to set us up to understand that the dude’s still around and still harbors a lot of animosity toward Cody (and vice versa), with the potential that it’ll all eventually blow up.

This first volume, while entertaning for the most part and well written, ultimately comes off as a little too standard. In his interview here on the blog, Stephen Mertz said about Cody’s Army: “Those boys kicked it for several books but they never did catch on like MIA Hunter.” I can sort of see why that is, at least given this first volume, as there’s no unusual hook or memorable quirk, as there was in the other series.

Future installments look to open things up, though; Mertz wrote the next two volumes himself, and the sixth installment, Hellfire In Haiti, sounds especially promising, with a plot about voodoo.

Monday, October 21, 2013

An Interview with Stephen Mertz


A big thanks to Stephen Mertz for doing this interview – Stephen should need no introduction, as he’s had a huge impact on the men’s adventure genre over the years. In this interview he discusses his early days working with Don Pendleton, his years with Gold Eagle, the creation of the MIA Hunter series and others…and the promising tidbit that there might be more Mark Stone adventures on the way!


Tell us about yourself – how did you get into writing, and what were you doing before?

I was born a writer. Started scribbling stories when I was 13 and never stopped. Broke away from the 9-to-5 day job world 40 years ago and have been living by my wits on back roads ever since. I’m a musician, so I’ve fronted blues bands. Managed a resort for a summer, owned a secondhand bookshop in a small mountain town and ran a used record shop in a big city. Spent much of the ‘70s and ‘80s on the road just to see what was around the next bend. Settled in Arizona. Always writing.

What was your first published work?

First pro sale was a short story in 1975. First novel was Some Die Hard, four years later. A private eye story. Rock Dugan's first and only appearance. Funny how many writers of my generation (Reasoner, Lansdale, Randisi, Shiner, etc) first emerged as private eye writers in the tradition handed down from Hammett, Chandler and Spillane. There's just something about that sort of poetic hardboiled stuff that got us, I guess. If you've never read Spillane, you must sample One Lonely Night; the first chapter of that one makes for a brilliant noir short story, and the novel itself vividly shows the literary (?!) roots of action/adventure.

How did you become involved with working with Don Pendleton?

I wrote Don a fan letter out of the blue after discovering the Executioner series in 1973. I received in return a most gracious and down to earth letter that invited a response. I revealed that I was an aspiring writer and Don offered to read the manuscript I was working on, which became Some Die Hard. He kept it for about a month, and then sent back a 6-page single-spaced critique, pointing out trouble areas in character, plot and pacing, and suggestions on how to remedy its considerable shortcomings. When the book appeared, I dedicated it to Don and in fact used a couple of his “suggestions” word-for-word.

What was the working relationship like with Don – what was an average day like working with him?

At first, not long after we connected, Don was looking for someone to help him with his 4-book-per year production schedule, which he found daunting. Don was a craftsman, not a human word machine, and in retrospect there seems in his career to be periods of high productivity and then times when he had to cool down and step back; of course, contractual deadlines have no respect for such artistic foibles. Don paid me to write a draft of Colorado Kill Zone to the best of my then-ability. I was still living in Denver at the time. When the job was done, he dutifully paid me, and then threw away everything I’d written and rewrote an entirely new novel, which is the one that was published, naturally. My only contribution to that book is its first sentence.

A few years later I was on one of my open-ended road trips and took Don up on his invitation to visit and hang out for a spell at Pendle Hill, his home in the rolling hills of Brown Country, Indiana. We got to know each other and became friends. That trip also later took me to Bakersfield, California (I did say those trips were open-ended), where Don had requested that I meet up with Mike Newton, another Bolan fan who had made contact with Don. Mike and I hit it off and not long after that, Don invited us both to resettle in Brown County where the plan was to produce Executioner novels as a team for Pinnacle. Mike and I plotted and wrote a draft of Cleveland Pipeline. We’d have weekly story conferences with Don, then Mike would go and write these scenes and I’d go write those scenes. Don then took what we’d written for the Cleveland book, used it as an outline, holed up in the A-frame he used for an office on Pendle Hill and rewrote the book word-for-word in about a week.

That was the coldest winter in Indiana since God was born, so come the first sign of spring, Mertz hightailed it back out west. Mike stayed on to write Arizona Ambush and Tennessee Smash, after which Don regained his stride and, on his own, wrote the remainder of the Pinnacle Executioner series.

What can you tell us about Don Pendleton the man? I’ve often read that he would “act out” scenes from his manuscripts in an effort to ensure realism; is this true?

Naw, that’s PR guff. He might have paced off positions to block out an action scene now and then, but most writers do that. I’ve heard the term Renaissance man bandied about often but hands down, Don Pendleton is the only true Renaissance man I ever knew. He was my mentor. A warm Arkansas drawl and chuckle offset eyes that glinted with steely Bolan resolve. A thinker of the first magnitude; a dynamic man, embodying all that word implies. A disciplined free spirit who could discuss Copernicus or the craft of writing and marketing commercial fiction with equal ease and enthusiasm. WWII and Korean War veteran, musician, philosopher, metaphysician, lover of life in all its many manifestations, and a gifted writer who created a genre, Don Pendleton was one hell of a guy. Anyone interested in Don or in his work will learn much about both from his book on writing, The Metaphysics of the Novel.

How did you become involved with Gold Eagle?

Don hooked me up with Harlequin’s Bolan program on the ground floor. I wrote 12 Bolan novels and one Mack Bolan short story.

What was it like, working with Gold Eagle?

It was fun at first. In the beginning Gold Eagle was concerned with sustaining the readership Don had built up to that time and so I saw myself in a sort of caretaker status, trying to preserve what Don had created. I worked hard on those Bolan books and one of them, Day of Mourning, is still ranked by the hardcore fans at mackbolan.com as one of the top ten Bolan novels ever written (over the hundreds of other titles), thirty years after I wrote it.

It’s my understanding that Sylvester Stallone bought the rights to The Executioner #43: Return to Vietnam (July, 1982), which you wrote. Three years later, Rambo: First Blood Part II came out, bearing a similar storyline of Rambo freeing American POWs in Vietnam, yet you and Gold Eagle were not credited. Do you have anymore information on this situation, and did you ever hear what drew Stallone to this particular volume of the series?

Ahem, its quality, I would presume. At the time, Stallone owned screen rights to the entire series. At first everyone thought it was because he was going to make a Bolan movie but as it turned out, he just didn’t want anyone else making a Bolan movie that would compete with his Rambo interpretation; screen rights also allowed him to dip into the GE novels for source material. Given my respect for the guy, and especially that second Rambo film which I feel is the best of the movies, I’ve always been proud that they chose one of my novels to draw from.

I’ve heard that when Don Pendleton was having trouble with Gold Eagle, you came to his defense. Could you shed some light on this situation, and what all was going on?

I’m no lawyer and you’re talking 30 years ago but off the top of my head, it went like this. When Don sold the Bolan franchise to Gold Eagle, apparently the contract included a non-competition clause; i.e., Don could not write action adventure novels for anyone else. Well, Don was a writer and writers write, so sometime in the mid 1980s, his agent placed the Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective series with a competing publisher. The pinheads at Harlequin decided this was a breech of the non-competition clause and took Don to court. In truth, for anyone out there who hasn’t read one, the Ashton Ford novels are paranormal New Age allegories involving flying saucers, time travel, metaphysics, and stuff like that. There aren’t even action scenes in the books! But as I recall it, GE’s position was that there are only two types of fiction, romance and adventure, and since the Ford books weren’t romance novels, they were obviously adventure novels and therefore violated the terms of the contract. It was a greedy, nasty thing for a publisher to do. They were basically trying to keep Don from ever writing and selling again. Anyway, he needed a wingman and I was privileged to join the team. I flew back to NYC and testified in court as to the specific elements of action adventure, which clearly did not apply to the Ashton Ford books. Long story short, Don won what was essentially a nuisance suit. Naturally, my participation lowered the curtain on my work for GE but I was glad to go. I’m a restless sort. I’d gone into the program promising myself that I’d write no more than ten of the things and I ended up writing twelve because the money was good. In those days, Mack Bolan authors received a cut of the royalties, unlike today. But I’d grown bored being someone else’s product.

Please share some insight into the origins of the MIA Hunter series. It was always my assumption that it was intended to capitalize on the “POW-rescue” aspect of First Blood Part II, but it would seem that the series was already planned and being written a year or so before that film even came out.

That Bolan novel, Return to Vietnam, pretty much knocked people out when it first appeared. The book was a tremendous success and made several trade bestseller lists. An editor at Berkley saw the potential and asked me to sketch the MIA concept as the basis for a series. They liked Mark Stone, Terrance Loughlin and Hog Wiley, and so The MIA Hunter was born. By the way, those books ended up resonating with a broad audience of readers beyond the general men’s series readership. In the 1980s, there was a genuine concern among many that there were living American MIA/POWs left behind after the end of the Vietnam War. Anecdotal evidence kept filtering out that we’d left men behind who were still alive, though nothing ever materialized to the best of my knowledge. You can still see the black MIA/POW flags flying.

MIA Hunter wrapped up right around the time the genre was dying so ignobly, so I'm curious if Mark Stone's adventures ended or if you got word from the publisher that the series was over and thus never wrote a final volume?

It was the ever-changing marketplace what done in the original MIA Hunter series. This is why I’m so jazzed about the whole ebook revival of Mark Stone. He will remain at the age when he’s in his physical prime, in the time honored tradition of Mack Bolan, Mike Shayne, etc.

While The MIA Hunter was being published you were also writing the Cody’s Army series, correct? What was the background on that series?

That would be John Cody, honcho of a badass commando unit operating with White House sanction; Cody’s men are Richard Caine the Brit and big Rufe Murphy. Those boys kicked it for several books but they never did catch on like The MIA Hunter. I wrote the Cody books as “Jim Case,” and they’re all available under that name as ebooks. Cody’s my second string guy; good, but he’s no Mark Stone. With both series, I brought in co-writers to help when the deadline grind got to be, well, too much of a grind; pretty much for the same reason that Don had originally brought me into the fold. I’ve always admired, and sometimes envied, those prolific writers who seem to effortlessly turn out a dozen or more books every year, but I’ve never been able to do that. For a couple of years there I was as much a book packager as I was a writer. I was buying time, using income from the series work to subsidize development of my first “real” novel, Blood Red Sun (i.e., the first hardcover published under my own name).

What other series fiction did you work on in the ‘80s and ‘90s?

There was a two-book Vietnam deal called The Tunnel Rats, a couple of westerns in the Trailsman series, some ghost work that I can’t cop to. Contract writing paid the bills and, as I say, subsidized more ambitious, less formula-bound work efforts.

What led you to make the decision to leave series fiction/ghostwriting and to write and publish under your own name?

I hooked up with Writers Digest Magazine as an instructor in their on-line writers’ workshop program, which has really been rewarding at several levels. I’m able to share what I know about the craft with new writers, and the income that provides freed me up to get off the series treadmill. I now write mostly without those looming deadlines. This strategy has hardly made me a brand name author, but I have managed to sell everything I’ve written and for the most part I’ve been published to good reviews, so I’ll take that. Not that I’ve in any way lost my affection for pulp fiction. Since leaving the series field I’ve written a couple of short stories that are pure pulp. I mean, does it get any pulpier than “The Lizard Men of Blood River?” With my own work, the intent is to retain the vigor and immediacy of pulp fiction while delivering more than formula cliché in terms of character and plot.

Which of your own novels, both standalone and series, stand out in your own mind, and why?

The Castro Directive, my latest, is available from Crossroad Press in paper and ebook format. I suspect most writers of my generation have a Kennedy book in them and this is mine. It’s about the Bay of Pigs. A reviewer called it, “a kick-ass history lesson.” I like the sound of that. Of the others, Hank & Muddy comes straight from the heart: Hank Williams and Muddy Waters bump into each other one August night in Shreveport in 1952. Misadventures ensue. I guess that’s my favorite so far. Two others that did pretty much what I wanted them to would be Blood Red Sun, a WWII thriller, and Night Wind, a novel of dark suspense. Of the series work, an MIA Hunter novel, L.A. Gang War, is the best.

What projects are you currently working on?

Writing-wise, I’ve just finished a novel about Jimi Hendrix. As for the writing business, I’m busy promoting The Castro Directive and the resurgence of interest in the MIA Hunter, thanks to Crossroad Press republishing the series as ebooks (except for the three I wrote with Joe R. Lansdale, which will be published together as an omnibus from Subterranean Press). I’m enthused about the vibrancy of the ebook market and if the current demand keeps up, there will be new Mark Stone adventures to come. Stay tuned for details…