QUICK SHOTS: The Executioner #68: Prairie Fire by Don (Mike Newton) Pendleton

It had been a while since I dug into a Mack Bolan, and I figured as the year closed (I read this last week) I might as well ring it out with something I'd been meaning to read for a while. Prairie Fire has a good reputation within the series. Plus, it takes place in my home state of Kansas so, I've always been hankering to check it out. But I don't buy Executioner books online. They are plentiful around my book-buying parts and are often under a dollar, so I scrounge around and eventually come up with the ones I want. 

So, I've had this one on my TBR pile for six months after paying a quarter for it at my local's clearance rack with a stack of other Mack's. I usually just go to the copyright page and check out who actually wrote them and go by that. Picking up mostly the ones by Mike Newton, Stephen Mertz, Chet Cunningham and the like. I knew this one was my next Mack Bolan, but it was just a matter of time. 

I've dug Mike Newton's work in the field for a while, in both fiction and his awesome non-fiction book, How to Write Action Adventure Novels. I got into his stuff from his early work Terror at Boulder Dam from Carousel Books. Newton's a very solid writer of men's adventure and westerns; his stuff is meat and potatoes. Delicious tales that go down easy with some substance to them. This was the first Bolan I've read from him, and it won't be my last. 

Prairie Fire picks up in medias res with Bolan escaping the clutches of this book's evildoers. I haven't read #67 so I don't really know if it's a continuation of that book, but you don't really need to know. Bolan explains that he's on the run again, from the mob, the feds and anyone else evil. Here, the evil dick is The Cowboy, a mercenary who grew up watching westerns and decided to model is whole vibe off it. So, hat, mirrored shades, western clothes and a shiny Smith and Wesson M29 .44 Magnum. He's a worthy opponent to our buddy Mack and a real slimy bastard you want to see get his componence. 

Mack finds himself in an isolated farmhouse with a crotchety old WWII vet, his nice lady wife and their conveniently widowed (and hot) daughter-in-law. Gee, I wonder what happens with her and Mack. Besides some random henchmen that's our whole cast of characters, which is pretty refreshing since a lot of Men's Adventure can get bogged down in side characters and extra plots. This one's a straight-ahead siege tale, like Mack Bolan starring in Assault on Precinct 13. Mack doesn't have all his gear, making do with a pump-action .22 and some MacGyver'd grenades. It's a real quick tale that barrels to its finish with a little humor and a lot of action.

In a lot of ways this feels like a modern action tale with its stripped-down feeling, you could easily see this being a DTV action film starring Michael Jai White or Scott Adkins. It might have been a great place to start a film series for Bolan back in the 80s, certainly would have been cheap enough to film. I think I like these early Gold Eagle's before it became such a factory set up and the early authors like Newton and Mertz actually knew Pendleton and made some effort to mold his style into the house style. But they're a little looser too with great ideas like this one and Mertz's Return to Vietnam.  

I'm far from a Bolan expert, but I always enjoy dipping my toe into the waters occasionally. This might be my favorite Executioner novel I've read, even more so than some of Pendleton's own work. It's exactly what I want when I pick up this kind of novel. It moved, the characters were well-defined within the story, and action ruled. This copy had an ad to join and get the "Live Large" bumper sticker in it and if the offer was still valid, I'd send away for it for sure. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes by Michael Kurland

I'm quite the fan of Micheal Kurland's work and I'm still on a mystery-bent, so the second (and final) Alexander Brass mystery called to me from the bottom shelf where I keep my hardbacks. It's pretty clear by now from this blog that I'm a paperback guy, so I have to REAL interested in a book to even consider reading a hardback. The only hardbacks I've ever really liked where the slightly squatter ones the Mysterious Press used to do. I read a bunch of Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters that way from the library. But I digress.

Michael Kurland is mostly known for writing about Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Moriarty in a long running series and for the Greenwich Village Trilogy of hippie-sci-fi. He wrote the middle book The Unicorn Girl and appears as a character throughout the trilogy. Men's Adventure fans might know him from his excellent War Incorporated series of 60s spy novels, some of the best of the era. Kurland's a very good writer, clever, suspenseful, and very witty. He wrote a lot of sci-fi and I'm not much of a reader of that genre, so his gems in the mystery/adventure field are extra special to me. 

The Alexander Brass books started in 1997 and finished in 1998. Brass is a syndicated columnist for a major New York paper in the 30s. He's a man of the people, knows cops, crooks, politicians, actors, actress and busboys and everyone in-between. Naturally being a mystery novel, he gets involved with various murders and blackmail plots and the like, sending out his aid-de-camp Manny DeWitt out to uncover the clues while Brass writes his column. 

It's a set-up that is vaguely reminiscent of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books. Though Brass is, um, more "active" than Wolfe. It's a series that also treads on the same field as the aforementioned Stuart Kaminsky series, where fictional characters interact with real folks (Dorthy Parker and Robert Benchley from the Algonquin Round Table here) though there's less emphasis on it here. Kurland knows the period, the whole thing feels pretty authentic with some mystery in-jokes like Manny hanging out with Black Mask writers and the like. 

The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes is a complicated story about the disappearance of "Two-Headed Mary" a beggar who hangs out in front of theaters and makes friends with all the chorus girls. But is that all she is? There are gangsters, show business types, con-artists, cops, and newspapermen. If you enjoy the old pulp tales of Daffy Dill, "Flashgun" Casey or the Kennedy and McBride stories this is for you. It's got a lot of the same vibe as those reporters-playing-detective-stories. Plus, it twists and turns and lands somewhere pretty satisfactory. 

Kurland's an old pro and this is the work of an old pro. Is it going to change your life? Probably not. Are you going to consistently entertained? Yes, undoubtably. Unfortunately, the series must not have done well. Kurland might have been too late on the 30s/40s nostalgia mystery book for the era, it was kinda a crowded space at the time. So, he only got two books out of Brass and one short story in The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits. What a shame, but luckily, he returned to the time period recently with a WWII spy series called Welker and Saboy. I guess I have to go buy those right now. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Leonardo's Law by Warren B. Murphy

I came to Warren Murphy's work not through his most popular co-creation, The Destroyer but through his comic mystery novels about the insurance investigator Trace. I stumbled onto the Trace books because I had been reading Gregory MacDonald's Fletch series and the covers of the Trace books ripped off Fletch's design. Big font with the title, bold colors, littler font with a snippet of dialog from the book. So, I guess ripping something off does indeed work from time to time.

All in all, I eventually came to like Devlin "Trace" Tracy more than I.M. "Fletch" Fletcher, Trace's books are more consistently entertaining. So, Murphy was on my radar. The old Thrilling Detective Website told me that Trace is the same as Digger, a character from a different publisher. I liked those as well. The same website told me the Razoni and Jackson who appeared in a Trace book had their own paperback series. I liked those too. then I was off and running reading, The Destroyer and other books like Grandmaster. I was a Murphy fan and somewhere along the way unbeknownst to me, he wrote Leonardo's Law for the short-lived publisher, Carlyle.

When I discovered the book, I promptly bought it and filed it away on a shelf and sorta forgot about it. When winter fully embraces the Midwest, my mood tends to run toward mystery novels, I don't know why it happens, but it seems to every year. Then I start rooting around for forgotten favorites or new-to-me books. I was considering re-reading a Razoni and Jackson when I saw this one shelved next to it and felt like I won some sort of forgotten prize. I cracked it open. 

On the cover you see it's a "locked door mystery." My mystery tastes tend to run toward the hardboiled stuff, but I've read a few Ellery Queens and John Dickson Carr and the like, but it had been years since I've dipped my toe into that particular pool and the idea of Murphy tackling the usually quaint and gentile genre in a paperback original from the 70s was an interesting prospect. From his writing I get the picture that Murphy was a bit of a curmudgeon, his characters like to complain, his plot like to satirize (even if I don't fully agree with who he was poking fun at) and they have a wonderful cynical edge about them, what would a cynical, grumpy locked-room-mystery look like? 

Lenardo's Law is obviously supposed to the first in a series of mystery novels. Murphy was a series guy, especially at the time, and you generally don't write a detective novel to be a stand-alone. Our hero Leonardo is an impossible man, much like Poirot or Holmes. He's a professor, an un-official police detective, super handsome, super smart and tools around in a '37 Cord. He borders on parody as a character and his opposite the regular Joe cop Lt. Anthony Jezail (also the narrator) is a fairly stock paperback cop, if a little Murphy-fied. Their dynamic is fun, and it does echo Murphy at his best, when he has two disparate characters bitching at each other, but it doesn't quite boil over enough to be Razoni and Jackson or Chiun and Remo. Maybe if the series continued. 

The "locked door mystery" is fairly interesting, an asshole author is murdered in, you guessed it, a locked room and there's enough suspects to give you pause. Murphy plays it fair and if you pay attention, you can kind of figure it out (I knew a certain character played a part but didn't know the why) and the ultimate solution is wonderfully ridiculous (like the best locked door mysteries) where the book sorta faulters is spending too much time with some really unlikeable characters. We have to put up with Jezail's boss who's just despicable and it rides the nerves after a while. Murphy's asshole characters are usually entertaining to hang around, but Chief Semple is just too much. It's a slim book; I would have rather hung out with Leonard himself more throughout instead of frustrating jerks. 

I always find these aborted series books interesting. Obviously, Murphy might have found his groove with the characters by book #2 and we could have a totally different type of Warren Murphy series to enjoy. Also, this isn't for sensitive readers, there's a lot (too much) casual racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. etc. I sorta of skip over that shit and just get on with the book and I think Murphy was trying to use it all in the satire, (he had done it better elsewhere) but it's still a drag to have to read all the time. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Dead Ringer: A Hank Bradford Mystery by Mike Warden

 

A while back I went down a major paperback rabbit hole and started tracking down books published by Carousel Books, a division of American Art Enterprises a, uh, porn publisher trying to go "legit." To do this they hired some up-and-comers and some seasoned pros to (it seems) write whatever the hell they wanted. How else could you account for Irwin Zacharia's Protector books or his Vendetta books. Not to mention his Landshark series (which is recently FINALLY tracked down and need to read and review) which features no actual sharks. Chet Cunningham did some work for them, with a couple of Team Three books and some westerns. Mike Newtown also wrote Terror at Boulder Dam for them, an awesome slice of private eye action, again with some westerns and an action series called Intersect File as John Cannon among others. 

I ended up buying a wide variety of books published by Carousel. Westerns, Gothics, Horror, Science Fiction, Action, and Mystery books by random authors probably working under pseudonyms. It's a stack of books that I will eventually read because publishers have a certain flavor all their own. Pinnacle is sorta one thing, Paperback Library is another thing. Leisure is yet another looser thing and publishers like Carousel are so looser they're falling apart. It's clear that there was little in the way of editorial supervision, so a lot of the books are, well, technically BAD. Sloppily written, wrapped up in a hurry once the word count is met, and very much rough first drafts. That's stuff I love for some reason. Don't blame me for bad taste, I came by it honestly.

One of their longest series is the Hank Bradford mystery series, he's sometimes referred to as a "supersleuth," which coincidentally I want on my tombstone with no explanation. Mike Warden either had a few books in his sock drawer waiting for an eager publisher or wrote them all in a blindly white heat over a couple of years. I haven't been able to track down anything on Warden, if that's his real name. So, drop a line if you know anything about this paperback writer. There's precious little information about Carousel books out there in general. 

So, I have several of the Hank Bradford books and figured it was time to try on. Hank's an ex-cop turned part-time criminology professor. He sorta left the force under a cloud after his partner went on a bust by himself instead of waiting for Hank. Hank stuck around long enough to bust the guys who killed his buddy and then turned in his badge. Now, he's sorta broke living in an apartment, looking to get laid, avoiding his crazy landlady and taking it easy mostly. He's far from a hardboiled character; he doesn't pull out a .38 from his cookie jar or slug a baddie anywhere in the book. Mostly he hangs out and talks up his liberated upstairs neighbor and tries to sleep with her. 

But wouldn't you know it, suddenly his lady friend is getting obscene phone calls with death threats. 'Ol Hank sees this as a great time to try and get into her pants, not that she isn't interested either. Hank must be studly. Anyways, toward the end of the Hank finds a dead body of a guy who he saw in another neighbor's apartment, then that neighbor turns up dead after Hank calls his police nemesis, Oscar. And wouldn't ya know it; Hank's lady friend is the prime suspect. So, Hank plays detective for about two chapters and then the obvious conclusion happens. 

This is a pretty half-baked book. The first have of this (luckily) slim novel is all about Hank dealing with his landlady who sneaks into everyone's apartment, getting sick, then hanging out with his lady friend while she's afraid of the phone calls. Then it's like Warden remembered that it was a murder mystery book and killed a couple of people, only to breeze on past any sort of "investigation" on Hank's part. We hardly ever even leave the apartment building. It kind of feels like Warden was describing one lazy weekend he had but threw in some thriller elements to spice it up.

But you know what? I sorta liked it. It was like an hour read all-in-all, the pages flew by and Hank's a pretty okay protagonist, in a regular joe sort of way. It makes me wonder if the temperature every goes up in the series or if they are all "hang-out jams" like this one. Good thing I have more of them.

HANK BRADFORD BOOKS: 

(I think this is a complete list, correct me if I'm wrong)

Wasp in the Woodpile (1980)

Kill F-M (1980)

Death Beat (1980)

Bitter Homicide (1980)

Dead Ringer (1980)

Model for Death (1981)

The Topless Corpse (1981)

Twins in Trouble (198?)

The Condominium Killings (198?)

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Ninja Master #2: Mountain of Fear by Wade (Ric Meyers) Barker

I'm fairly sure the 80s were just jam-packed with ninjas. It seems like they were everywhere, hiding the shadows with katanas and nun-chucks at the ready. I was a little kid then, and I was well versed in ninja, from Turtles to G.I. Joes, to little suction cup throwing stars and various B-movies on TBS or TNT. So, it makes sense that someone over at Warner Books would think that it'd be a good idea to make a ninja into a paperback hero.

Warner was always trying to have a big men's adventure titles of their own, but they seemingly always picked authors uninterested in writing men's adventure fiction. So, there line of "Men of Action" books suffered from a lack of, uh, action. Not to mention the gun-porn, the sleaze or the fun of their competitors. Ric Meyers was nearly their only writer to get it. Between his work here with Ninja Master (and later in the slightly more upscale version as The Year of the Ninja Master) and the Dirty Harry books, Meyers proved his pulp credentials.

I first encountered Meyers work in the Dirty Harry books. It was one of my first tastes of Men's Adventure paperbacks and some of the first stuff I read after moving past reading a bunch of various James Bond books. Luckily, this was back in the day when you could buy these kinds of books for a dollar at most and I ended up with a whole stack of more adventures of Harry Callahan. I took a few of them on a trip to my grandmother's house and read them quickly, mostly while my grandmother religiously watched The Lawrence Welk Show. *SHUDDDER* But even at the time I knew something was off. I didn't realize that Dane Hartman, wasn't a singular dude. One of the books would be awesome and then the next would be dull as hell. It was confusing. Tough lessons for a young reader.

Obviously, Ric Meyers wrote the good ones (the only ones you really need to read) but I figured that out later. I haven't bothered with #1 of the Ninja Master series since I heed the wisdom of those who tread the pulp-path before me, and it seems like it's a bit of a bore. I'm sticking to Meyers entries. He's a solid author who's written about everyone from The Incredible Hulk to Remo Williams to many non-fiction works on martial arts cinema. He was the right guy to call for a book about a ninja. 

Mountain of Fear is a helluva good time. Warner books were pretty slim, which is perfect for an action tale like this. The books starts out with a bang and keeps the things moving a fast clip. Brett Wallace, our titular Ninja Master is a stone cold killing machine, taking out the baddies with everything at his disposable. It's also got the classic "whole town is bad" story that works great for action stories. A Nazi-concentration camp doctor basically buys up a whole town, puts bad guys as cops and kidnaps women and children to do nasty Nazi-shit with them. There's a little too much sexual-type violence for my taste, but it was a norm then and what are Nazi's supposed to be likable? No. Fuck nazis. 

So, you get a ninja killing a bunch of Nazi assholes in gory detail. Meyers has a love of cinema, and it shows, he writes very movie-like books, everything is clear and the action moves fast but is still well-described. The book builds to a wonderful siege of the bad guy's compound that's just chock full of blood, ninjaing and guts. All that makes for a good time with a book in your hand.

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Coltray #2: Pay the Devil by David Alexander

I've been tackling a lot of David Alexanders work over at Fathom Press where I've been going through Alexander's Pheonix series, if you ever read or even just heard about that series, you know that it's a wild ride. It's really become a cornerstone of an era of Men's Adventure fiction, often whispered about and now commanding high prices on the secondary market. I've been enjoying the hell out of them. It's storytelling cranked to 11 and 100% pure pulp. 

So, I began to wonder about Alexander's other work. And being that vigilante fiction is one of my jams, his Coltray came calling. I've had the books for a while. Like always I seemed to have collected a large chunk of Alexander's work before I read a word of his. Lucky me, as like I said the prices are going up. The Coltray books are sorta lost in the shuffle of his series work on stuff like Z-Comm, Nomad or C.A.D.S. and probably seem a little pedestrian compared to his other sci-fi-tingled work. But they are just as wild as anything he ever typed out.

Stosh Coltray is the Lethalist. You can guess what he does. I guarantee The Lethalist was the original series title. He's a famous vigilante who has enough notoriety to appear on daytime talk shows. Seems like a nice gig. Anyway, he's on the TV show when he runs up against the evil Lavender who is a cult-leader with an "army of zombies" i.e. drugged up followers. Soon Lavender kidnaps a cult-deprogrammer named Dekker's daughter and Coltray and Dekker join forces to smash up some satanic cult worshipers who are protected by a deadly team of mercenary's led by The Coronel. To help they get the coolest character out of prison to help bust the cult up, a hulking man named Sister John who kicks just as much ass (maybe a little more) as Coltray, but does it with style. I'd have read a whole book about Sister John. 

Surprise signature!

I have the first two volumes of Coltray and chose this one based on the cult angle: it's one of my favorite pulp plots. When properly used it gives you a touch of horror with your action and those two things are like peanut butter and chocolate to me. Alexander wastes no time with getting the plot in gear. Everything is popping quick and Coltray, Dekker and Sister John are busy shooting (in gory detail) wave after wave of the Colonel's men as they rush to save Dekker's daughter. There's a lot of gunplay and fighting, some evil women for Coltray to bang and some gnarly cult ceremonies chock full of human sacrifice and orgies. Alexander is a writer whose natural instinct is to push the envelope and deliver on the shock and action. And he does, the books hit some surprising marks, including one scene that made me say "holy shit" out loud and with enough force to scare the cat sleeping in my lap. 

This is the ultimate 80s action TV show episode in book form, like if HBO made a version of The Equalizer and put a lot of boobs and blood in it. It was formulaic as all get out, but I found comfort in that. Coming on the heels of reading Chet Cunningham's Avenger and Norman Winski's Hitman felt I was reading about a buddy of theirs. It's easy to see them all sitting down in a bar and sharing a beer, talking about guns and ammo all while eyeballing the rest of the crooks in the place and waiting for the fight to break out so they can get down to business. 

This is some great stuff. It's top-tier 80s Men's Adventure that harkens back to the grittier 70s style. Best of both worlds. Unfortunately, this is only a three-book series and #3: Vengeance seems to be pretty hard to track down. Which is even more of a shame since this one sorta ends on a little cliffhanger. I mean I figure Coltray makes it out alive to star in his next book but still. I probably should have read #1 first as Alexander really does dwell on who Coltray is or why he does what he does. But who cares? He's the guy on the paperback cover with the gun so he's the hero and he's out doing hero things. What more do you want?

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Hitman #1: Chicago Deathwinds by Norman Winski

I've sorta avoided Norman Winski's Hitman series. I think it's a subconscious thing, because I've gone on record with my love for Kirby (Kin Platt) Carr's Hitman series and could I have too Hitman book series in my life? Would I be cheating on one with another? Deep thoughts. Well, I've cheated now and I'm feelin' fine.

Norman Winski was like a lot of the writers I read here. He kicked around a bit, apparently wrote a book called The Sex Urge in 1965. Sounds relatable. Then wrote some for the movies, the awesomely named Six-Pack Annie and a pretty solid Wings Hauser (one of my favorite actors) actioner called Hostage which co-starred the editors of Solider of Fortune magazine. He did the novelization of the radical Sword and the Sorcerer. His other writing is, uh, bonkers. It's made up of pop-psychology and bios, stuff on Carl Jung AND Ray Charles. Past that the dude ghosted the internet. I'm pretty sure he died in 2002. 

But Winski got a three-book series out of Pinnacle so that's pretty good, he had worked in the Pinnacle mines before, writing Able Team #2: Hostage Island. And Pinnacle was always on the lookout for another Mack Bolan or another Remo Williams, maybe even, if they had too, another Richard Camellion. Here we have Dirk Spencer, which I'm just going to assume was named after The A-Team's Dirk Benedict and Robert B. Parkers Spenser. He's a 'Nam-vet/rich guy with Uzi's, a Lamborghini and a thirst of action and ass-kickery, also if you believe the photos on the covers, little berets that he wears too high on his head. 

Dirks got it all, ladies, cars, etc. etc. but he misses "the action." Luckily for him (unlucky for others) a family he's friends is killed and it's a shady deal. Dirk decides to become a good old-fashion vigilante. He buys a bunch of guns and rocket launchers and the like and starts blowing people away. Everything goes good with his initial taste of street vengeance, and he basically sets himself up as Batman and sets his sights on whoever does evil. 

And here's where it gets real good, the bad guys are Neo-Nazi's and there's plenty of Nazi-killing! They are all headed up by a politician, Murdoch (again, A-Team?) who's just going around spreading racism, hate and murdering innocents. And Dirk being a good-guy doesn't care for Murdoch's Nazi-bullshit and just starts wrecking Murdoch's shit. Nazis are my favorite villains; they are the perfect bad guys because fuck them, amiright? 

This is an OVER-THE-TOP book, it's wild. There's Uzi drive-bys with planes, Nazi She-Devils, some nice gore, nasty torture, spunky lady reporters, and action galore. Winski was having a good time with this one. It's funny because it is a sorta 80s update of the 70s Kin Platt Hitman. They both wear black suits and masks and take one wild and vile villains. Both series have a playful energy about them even in the sleazy filth that the peddle of writers having a good time pounding typewriter keys. These aren't quite as wild as say, the TNT books or David Alexander's Phoenix books, but this one was close.  

These are a little difficult to track down, I got lucky and found all three in one old bookstore in the clearance section back before everyone looked up every book are priced everything too high. I think I got all three for around a buck-fifty. That's some solid value to the dollar. On the internet they all look like they all go form between ten and twenty-ish dollars. That's a little steep, bit I've paid more for less entertaining books, so...