80s Men's Adventure fiction has a different feel than the earlier stuff. Call it the Gold Eagle-fication of the genre. In the 70s sleaze was an important part of the equation, sex, depravity and nudity. The 80s still had some sex, but the emphasis was definitely shifted to pure action and copious details about various firearms. It didn't help that by this point a lot of the writers of the various series had in face written Mack Bolan for Gold Eagle by this time and if you're going to copy something, copy the most successful thing.
Chet Cunningham had been knocking around for a while by the late 80s when he came up with The Avenger (no, not the pulp hero, though I wonder if he remembered the title from his youth) he had co-written The Penetrator books (they took turns, I like Chet's better) with Mark Roberts in the 70s, a fair amount of westerns, Scholastic young-adult fiction, and was in the first wave of new Mack Bolan writers. He also dipped his toe into the world of Carousel Books, the (supposedly) quasi-mob-owned publisher. Carousel was an off shoot of a "dirty book" publisher who was trying to go "mainstream," so they had Chet and people like Mike Newtown write them westerns, action yarns, horror stuff etc. etc. I covered Chet's "mystery-team" book Silent Murder a long time ago and had a good time with it.
I like Chet's work; he's not a flashy author by any stretch, but he's always got his mind on the readers wants and needs. He keeps things moving, has enough flair to be a little memorable and has a good handle on writing action, mystery and suspense. He was an old-pro young and continued to put out work almost right up to his death in 2017. That's a long, good run.
The Avenger started in the mid-80s. It has Jason Savas on the cover, who is basically the 80s Steve Holland, and has a fairly familiar set-up. Matthew Hawke, the titular avenger is a 'Nam vet and DEA agent who's too good and his wife gets killed by the baddies. He resigns and goes revengin' and that's the whole set-up. I knew this going in and since I didn't have the first book in the series, I just jumped headfirst into the fourth. The whole concept is reassuringly basic. It's nearly every direct-to-video action movie set-up and it clearly owes a fair amount to ol' Mack Bolan. Like Bolan, Mark Hardin and many more paperback heroes, Hawke goes town to town and fucks shit up for bad guys with guns, explosives and other tough guy antics.
Chet wrote these books for Warner Books who was always trying to launch a lengthy Men's Adventure series it seems. They were probably most successful with their paperback Dirty Harry adventures, but their editorial staff never seemed to figure out the genre. They produced some fun series. Like the Ninja Master books, The Hook series, or S-Com but a lot of their titles didn't last more than four or five books. The Avenger is no different.
#4 Manhattan Massacre finds Hawke in, uh, Manhattan and going after the deadly New Control, a fancy mob that has taken control of the drug trade. Hawke sorta just barges in, finds an old 'Nam buddy who's bored, buys some machine guns and tackles New Control. The rest plays out very much like you'd figure a book like this to play out. There's action and intrigue, some unfortunate racism of the time, firearm information, and Matt Hawke's sort of bland brand of psychotics. Hawke's not much of a character. I go back to the direct-to-video action movie vibe; he reads like a martial artist or model got a starring vehicle after the success of Segal or Van Damme but lacking in major personality. But as I have said Chet handles the action scenes well and they are frequent, the stuff in-between isn't too bad either. It's all just incredibly workman like. Which sounds like a dig, but I find that kind of writing comfortable.
The Warner Books must have had a shorter print run than the competitors because they're a little scarcer, not impossible to track down, but you'll pay a few books more for most of them if you're so inclined. I got lucky in a dusty old small-town bookstore a few years ago and got three of them off the 25-cent table, it was an easy mistake for a bookstore to make, they are nearly indistinguishable from the sea of Mack Bolan's. But I think they are worth a read or two if you need something the same-but-different-in-between an Able Team and a Pheonix Force.
