A Tale of Two "Challengers of the Unknown" by Ron Goulart

After the passing of Ron Goulart a while back, I knew it wouldn't be too long before I pulled one of his books off the shelf and gave it a whirl. He's one of my go-to-guys for light, fun adventuring and mystery. Besides being a helluva readable wordsmith he was a great historian and his books on the pulps and collections are top-notch. "The Hardboiled Dicks" sparked my love of Black Mask and Dime Detective. Then you got his John Easy books, his entries in The Avenger books, mysteries starring Groucho Marx, the Vampirella's...I could go on and probably will.

Goulart was a long-time comics fan and historian. It just makes sense that he adapted comics into novels, The Phantom, Flash Gordon, Captain America, the Hulk...and The Challengers of the Unknown. I stumbled upon the Challengers via Joseph Loeb and Tim Sales's "The Challengers of the Unknown Must Die" which is a FANTASTIC run on these pretty much forgotten characters. So, The Challengers are basically big monster/bad guy fighters who go out and be adventurers to help people after almost dying and living on "borrowed time." There's Prof, Rocky, Ace, Red and June. It's a clean set up for comic booky-adventures. The early comics were drawn by Jack Kirby and a little later the set-up might have helped the Fantastic Four along, too. The Challengers don't really have a big footstep in the DC universe anymore (or ever really) so it's kinda surprising that this got a paperback. I mean, where's Cave Carson's book?

Goulart was an old hat at this kind of derring-do when he tackled this book, and it shows. It's a well-oiled machine of a pulp novel. Little bit of mystery, little bit of globe-trotting, little love-stuff, action and banter. There's enough of a hook for each character for them to bicker at each other and enough bad guys for them to fight. Basically, they go down to down to South America to get tangled up with a swamp monster and a political hot-bed of armies, spies and presidents and it just zooms right along to a fairly wide conclusion. 

Look, none of this was taxing. It's a simple, clear-cut pulp novel. Doc Savage could have had this adventure, the weird late-60's Shadow could have had this adventure. Or Goulart's own take on The Avenger team. It's not going to change your life, but you'll have a brisk little thrill-ride for an hour or so and that's what you need sometime. Goulart was an unpretentious writer, just out to entertain you. It's probably not his best book (those John Easy books are hard to beat) but if you were wondering what a 70s TV movie of the Challengers of the Unknown might have been like, here ya go. And that hits a lot of the right buttons for me.

Funny thing happened to me on the way to writing this review: I needed TWO COPIES of this slim Dell paperback to get it done. Why, you ask? Well, my first copy stopped with thirty pages to go and filled the page count with the previous thirty pages like it was VCR stuck on rewind. So, I had to wait for the mail to send me another copy for my resolution. It was like a proper Cliffhanger Serial. That's the first time I have ever had anything like that happen with a paperback and I was especially surprised that it was a Dell and not a Leisure or Manor book that did it. 

Anywho, Goulart is just one of those divisive writers. I love his work, or mileage may vary. But isn't that just the way it goes?

Serial Reflections: John Easy by Ron Goulart

California is a crowded place to be a Private Eye, especially in the 70's. You have all the sons and daughters of Marlowe beating the trail down, what could an author do to stand out? Answer: Be Ron Goulart. Goulart is a seasoned professional. He was a seasoned professional in the 70's writing the continuing adventures of Kenneth Robeson's The Avenger, Vampirella, Flash Gordon, Lee Falk's The Phantom, not to mention his detective work in the fields of Golden Age comic books and pulps. Then there's his wild and wacky sci-fi adventures. In the middle of this he set his own P.I. creation upon the paperback world: John Easy.

Easy's a easy going guy. He packs a .38 in a shoulder holster, has an office and a suffering secretary, tools around in his dusty VW Bug and finds beautiful women, catches murderers and encounters oddball characters that populate a semi-surreal California. He's a archetype-character with enough foibles to be interesting but no tragic backstory or dark secrets that plague more modern heroes. He's just a semi-regular guy who who'd you like to ride shotgun with on some crazy adventures. The 70's oozes from the pages of these slim paperbacks. They are half-way between a Carter Brown and a Ross MacDonald, but fully Goulart's own voice. Goulart knows all the tricks, his collection "The Hardboiled Dicks" is could be a text book in a correspondence course on writing punchy crime fiction. House within that tome is stories by greats like Frederick Nebel, Richard Sale, Lester Dent (one of his two GREAT Oscar Sail stories), Raoul Whitfield, and others. But I bet the one Goulart liked best was Norbert Davis's tale about the shady Max Latin. Davis could be hard-boiled and hilarious in the same sentence. The Easy books are sort of like that but filtered for modern (70's) audiences. Easy's can crack wise and crack skulls and pick up the dames while doing it.

• If Dying was All (1971)
• Too Sweet to Die (1972)
• The Same Lie Twice (1973) .
• One Grave Too Many (1974)

The 70's were a weird time for private eyes. They were morphing from the cookie-cutter paperback heroes built on the Marlowe or Hammer pre-made mix of the 50's and 60's. Some got more psychological and dived deep into "why" people commit crime. Some took "The Executioner" cue and had numbers on the covers and lots of action, rarely were the main characters in these books actual detectives but say "The Sharpshooter" by Bruno Rossi still worked like a P.I. novel just with more blood and guts. Others like Easy, Brad Lang's Fred Crockett, L.V. Roper's Renegade Roe, Alan Reife's Tyger and Cage books stuck more to the formula and produced the next wave of paperback heroes like Brett Halliday's Mike Shayne, Henry Kane's Pete Chambers, or Richard Prather's Shell Scott. These are meat and potatoes characters. All of them could have headlined a weekly TV show coming on right after "Mannix." After Robert Parker happened a lot of these types of characters dried up and the wave of Spenser/Hawk knock-offs flooded the market, some of them are great, a lot are lame.

Easy is a 70's guy, he's got a little of the left-over groovy 60's vibe. I appreciate book covers, but I think what's in the book is more important but MAN, the covers of these book nailed the tone and fell of these novels. The turtlenecks, the sports jackets, ascots and sultry women. Goulart did a lot of work in short periods of time. His "ghost-written" work is a bit hit or miss but when his heart was in a novel it's a lot of fun. The Easy books are uniformly quick fun reads with decent mystery plots and fast bursts of action. I could have read ten more of them if Goulart had written them. Later he wrote a series of books where Groucho Marx is a detective which I should probably read as I'm a sucker for Golden Age of Hollywood mysteries. He also wrote a wonderful stand-alone called "The Weissman Originals" about a slippery detective named Rudy Navarro who with the help of art dealer Briggs tangles with the mafia on the trail of original art stolen by those asshole Nazi's during W.W.II. Also check out "Ghostbreaker" a half of an Ace Double that collects his humorous take on the paranormal investigator genre. 

The book are easy to get a hold of as an ebook or audio book but they can be a little harder to track down in their original form. It took me a few years of occasionally looking to find the final book (and the only one who's cover sticks out like a sore thumb) but I've never paid more than 5 bucks (including shipping) for one, so don't break your bank.  

When I see the anyone talk about the Easy books (hell, a lot of Goulart's work) it's to knock it as fast hack-work. I don't see it, Goulart is just writing quick and clean with his tongue in his cheek. I suppose a lot of people aren't in on the joke (or just don't find it funny) but if your in the right mood any of is books will give you a hour or so's worth of fun. Who could ask for more?

"The Night of the Shadow" By Maxwell Grant (Dennis Lynds) & The Avenger: "The Back Cariots" by Kenneth Robeson (Ron Goulart)

For some reason when the wind starts blowing colder I get in the mood for pulp, now I mean actual pulp stories that appeared in the 10 cent wonders that where the pulp magazines. Maybe its the gloom of of the cool of the air and darkness that sets in, makes me think of The Great Depression when the pulps ruled. As a kid my taste for pulps was developed by countless re-watching of the Indiana Jones movies, tied in with movies like "Flash Gordon," "The Rocketeer," The Phantom," and "The Shadow." I actually knew of the Shadow before the 1994 movie, via a two-VHS collection of trailers and a documentary on the cliffhanger movie serials. Where I saw wonderful bits of serials, Batman, Captain Marvel, Commando Cody, etc. etc. I was a weird kid, okay? But they all seemed so fast, and action-packed and thrilling with evil looking baddies and damsels in distress. They looked exactly like what a 10 year old boy would want to see. Which I mean, is exactly what they were. I soon fell in love with the books. I read a mess of them, but until a couple of years ago I hadn't really read any of the pulp heroes what with my time being spent on hard-boiled crime and Men's Adventure, but you need the fantastic every now and then so I dipped my toe back in and been dipping it in every now and then.

"The Night of the Shadow" is the first Shadow novel I have read in maybe ten years. My older self's pulp-taste runs toward The Spider, the Avenger, Operator #5, Secret Agent X and G-8. Doc and The Shadow seem to get lost in the mix. Dennis Lynds got me to check this entry out. He's writer who always puts out a good book whether its under his name or not. 

The 60's incarnation of The Shadow is a representation of the pulp tastes of the time, just as the original one was to the taste of the 30's. Here The Shadow acts more like an active Waverly from "Man From U.N.C.L.E." with his companions acting like UNCLE agents. It's an overall odd mix of styles of pulp, the over-the-top near-super powers of The Shadow and the Bond-Mania flavored villain plot. It doesn't have the mystic quality that Walter B. Gibson brought to the character, Gibson's interest in magic somehow gets in between the lines of the books setting a prefect atmosphere. The magic quality of the speed and the twisty-turning narrative is something melds perfectly together. There will never be a moment in time again that is ripe for the kind of writing. Lynds take on the character is certainly what would have appealed to the readers of the 60's, but as Gibson's work is pretty timeless the 60's version is a bit more bland. The villains have a cool pulpy-evil plot involving weaponized organic warfare, but they themselves are forgettable stock characters. Lynds goes through the motions with other fun stuff like kidnappings, assassinations, the never-full secret pockets of The Shadow's suit that holds his whole costume plus a bucket-load of guns, etc. etc. it just never seems to kick into high gear. There's enough good stuff in here that I will read the other Dennis Lynds novels in the series, just with a few of Gibson's before. Dennis Lynds has a mountain of great work to read with his Dan Fortune novels, Kane Jackson and his work writing for Mike Shayne and Nick Carter.

Ron Goulart picked up the Kenneth Robeson mantle to continue The Avenger series in the 70's, but they wise chose to keep the setting in 30's. Goulart gets a bad rap sometimes, I dunno why. I've always enjoyed his work whether it's his own series like his John Easy P.I. series, his humorous Sci-Fi novels, editing of anthologies or licensed work with Vampirella, Flash Gordon and The Phantom. His short story collection, "The Ghost Breaker" is a absolute blast, a fun take on the whole occult detective bit. He's an acquired taste I suppose, leaning into the humor more then some might like. He's obviously a student of pulp fiction, cliff-hanger serials, newspaper strips and the like and he can write the hell out of them. Paul Ernst created "The Avenger," AKA Richard Benson and his team of crime-fighters originally, though he shared Kenneth Robeson with Lester Dent for Doc Savage. If your not familiar with The Avenger it is in conception a mish-mash of The Shadow and Doc Savage, originally with a neat gimmick that Benson's "stone face" could be molded into anyone for a endless variety of disguises. It was later dropped when the pulp hero racket was waning.

His Avenger stories (and most of his work) are "light entertainment," they breeze on by and the pace never lets up, he build character through dialog both internal and external witty banter. The action is frequent and very much of the movie serial variety. He leans a lot on the character of Cole Wilson who was a later addition to the crime-fighting team of Richard Benson. In a lot of ways Wilson is the classic Ron Goulart character quick mouth, capable but not infallible. It's easy to see why he chose to have Wilson and Nellie Grey, the Emma Peel of her day get stuck together a lot of the time and bicker and blunder into the fantastic plots. Only to have The Avenger working his own way and swooping in to save the day with the help of the rest of the team. "The Black Chariots" are basically rocket-powered spy planes and the inventor (there's always a wayward inventor in pulps) is missing. The Avenger's team gets roped into the case and solves with with machine gun fights, aerial battles, escapes, sieges and the like. It's not going to change your life, but it's a very solid entry. Though Goulart's Avenger tales "The Cartoon Crimes," and "The Purple Zombie" are hands down the most fun taking place within the newspaper comic strip industry and the movie industry, respectively. 

Books like these keep the pulp-hero concept alive in lean years, now there's a whole boom of New Pulp, with new characters, refreshed old characters and more continuations of beloved characters in books and comics. It's a good time to like the genre. I suppose its tied into the dire times we live in being a bit like the dire times of The Great Depression, escapism is a wonderful thing.