The Executioner 79: Council of Kings

The Executioner 79: Council of Kings
by Chet Cunningham and Les Danforth
1985 Worldwide Library

Through the decades and hundreds of books, Mack Bolan has gone through several phases.  After Don Pendleton's original run of his war against the mafia, Bolan got recruited by the government to fight terrorism.  At some point he avenged the death of a love interest, burning his bridges with the government as he went, so he's back to fighting the mob, supported by his brother Johnny.  I may prefer this era of the Bolans, with Mack as a stone cold sociopath moving from target to target.

Council of Kings is set very much in Oregon, with shootouts at Multnomah Falls and Mount Tabor Park.  Bolan's target is a mafia lone sharking operation, which spins off into prostitution and arms running.  There's a little bit of him working with the sister of a women killed in the operation, but Bolan is so uniquely horrible at keeping women alive that she's soon dispatched and forgotten about.

There's a bizarre sequence of Bolan going through a series of deathtrap rooms in a warehouse before he can confront a pimp.  There's a room full of cobras, another room covered in sand full of landmines, etc.  I can't see the pimp having to run the gauntlet every time he wants to leave his office, and I wonder who feeds the snakes.

The book ends with Bolan telling Johnny a story from his 'Nam days as an excuse to include a short story to fill out the page length.  I don't know how common this practice was, but this particular story was one of the darkest in Men's Adventure.

Bolan has a buddy who, after getting a Dear John letter, shaves his head into a mohawk, signifying that he didn't intend to come back from his mission.  He doesn't, but Bolan's convinced that he managed to swallow a canvas map before being killed.  He becomes obsessed with the idea, and breaks into a mortuary to cut open his buddy's corpse to find it.  Instead, he finds a stash of heroin.

Here Bolan learns that the US military is controlled by a cabal of organized crime, the titular Council of Kings, who use war to push drugs.  And we learn that female VC spies would kill GIs while screwing them, via toilet paper tubes lined with razor blades secreted in their hoo-hahs. 

Mack Bolan Miscellania

Some inserts from a 1986 Executioner novel, #093 The Fire Eaters, to be precise.

Inside Front Cover

Center Insert

Eat It, Canada

Inside Back Cover

Able Team 07 - Justice By Fire

Justice by Fire
Able Team 07
by Dick Stivers (GH Frost)
1983 Gold Eagle

An El Salvadorean death squad is operating in the US.  After an activist attorney is assassinated and a reporter is threatened, a liberal congressman gets in touch with the Able Team, who assist in guarding the reporter and his witness.

Pretty much no plot here.  Able Team goes to a place, are followed by Black Nationalist and El Salvadorean death squads, stuff is blown apart, go to next place.  This isn't a bad thing.  The action scenes are among the better written ones, with some genuinely exciting stuff, and with anatomical details that rival most splatterpunk books.  Plenty of details on the effects of a grenade on the groin and legs and what damage can be done with the real star of the book, the Atchisson Assault Shotgun.

Executioner 093 - The Fire Eaters

The Fire Eaters
Executioner 093
by Don Pendleton (Ray Obstfeld)
1986 Gold Eagle

I don't have all the Mack Bolan continuity down, but by this time Bolan appears to have gone back to being a fugitive fighting the mafia.  After an opening scene assassination, Bolan turns his attention to helping the widow of one of his Nam buddies who was killed by his own son.

Bolan goes undercover as a survival skills teacher at a military academy, where two shady teachers are using a chemical cocktail called "broth" to brainwash the children of prominent people to steal their political and trade secrets.

Meanwhile, a nineteen year old philosophy student hitman who may or may not be gay is hunting down Bolan, the CIA has their own agent at the school, and the KGB has sent a squad of killers.  Points for having so many irons in the fire, but loses them again by having a rushed ending.

Executioner 009 - Vegas Vendetta

Vegas Vendetta
Executioner 009
by Don Pendleton
Pinnacle 1971

This is starting to get tiresome.  Mack Bolan goes to a place, this time Las Vegas,  and kills some gangsters as a teaser.  He rescues someone from the mob's clutches, in this case a Lenny Bruce style comedian who wouldn't cooperate with a mob talent agency racket.  We're treated to a looooong stand-up routine about racial sensitivity, which was more awkward than anything else, and lots more of Bolan infiltrating the mob as they run around trying to catch him.

We're teased that the Feds are being added to the mix, but not so much.  Hardly any action in the whole thing.

Mack Bolan, the Executioner

Mack Bolan, the Executioner

The grandaddy of the Men's Adventure genre, the series that started it all, and the only one still in print.

The series was started by Don Pendleton in 1969 with War Against the Mafia.  Pendleton wrote 37 of the first 38 installments, though he may have contracted out some of the writing duties.  These, the best of the series, had Bolan as lone vigilante fighting the mafia.

Bolan is a Vietnam vet who comes home for leave when most of his family is killed.  His father had gone into debt to the mafia, and his sister had turned to prostitution to pay it off.  Shamed, his father killed his daughter, wife, and himself, leaving Mack and his high school aged brother (who is promptly forgotten about).

Bolan goes AWOL and begins his war on the mafia, usually with a combination of sniper attacks and infiltrating their ranks.  It becomes a running joke that anyone that aids Bolan ends up as "turkey meat", a made up slang term for the bodies left over from mafia torturers.

Bolan avoids Bruce Wayne syndrome and quickly admits to himself that he isn't doing any of this for his dead family.  Once the war starts and there's a price on his head, he figures he's a dead man, and that fatalism gives him a boldness and carefree attitude at times.  This is helped by Pendleton's occasional poetic flourishes.

Bolan wears a tight black outfit, has a war journal, and drives a tricked out van called his war wagon.  If any of this sounds familiar to Marvel fans, the Punisher is a shameless copy.

Pendleton's Bolan also had regular one night stands (ala James Bond) who more often than not met a bad end (ala James Bond).  Many of these encounters were with mafia prostitutes.  Like, you know, his sister.

Then the 80s happened.  Pendleton left, Bolan sold out and joined a shadowy government agency Stony Man and turned his attention to terrorism and communism.  The focus went from vigilantism to military fiction, as did Men's Adventure in general.

There were two spin offs, Phoenix Force (51 books, 4 SuperPhoenix Force books) and Able Team (51 books, 2 Super Able Team books), both military group titles.  They were kind of combined into Stony Man (130+ books), which is still ongoing.

Bolan himself still headlines two titles, Executioner (425+ books) and SuperBolan aka Mack Bolan aka Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan (165+ books).

While I prefer the original Mafia Wars installments, it's good to see some remnant of serial Men's Adventure survive long enough to take advantage of the 21st century.  Reasonable digital editions are available at Amazon.

More at the official Gold Eagle site and a superior fan site Mackbolan.com

Executioner 048 - The Libya Connection

The Libya Connection
Executioner 048
by Don Pendleton (Stephen Mertz)
1982 Gold Eagle

This one's a few issues after Pendleton left the series and Mack Bolan joined up with the government to fight terrorism.  We could have used a recap, especially since this seems to be a continuation of the last book.  Bolan is after a crooked financier who has a former love interest of his hostage.

Bolan goes to a place, shoots some people, gets picked up, and told where the next place to go it.  We're in the 80s so there's lots of gun porn and Hueys.  Not much story and the writing ranges from flat to clunky.  And every chapter ends dramatically.

Every chapter.

Just.

Like.

This.

It's good to see that both the phenomena and term "turkey meat" made the transition.

Executioner 008 - Chicago Wipeout

Chicago Wipeout
Executioner 008
by Don Pendleton
Pinnacle 1971

It took this long for Pendleton to dig himself into a complete rut, so why not in Chicago, the American center of the Mafia.  Bolan snipes a mafia meeting place and ends up rescuing a near naked showgirl.  Since Pendleton is still writing the series, and Reagan isn't in office yet, Bolan sleeps with her a few times before managing to get rid of her.

He then proceeds to do what he did in the last book, taking advantage of the mafia's loose organization to pretend to be one of their number.  This time around he manages to manipulate various factions to start a full blown gang war before stepping in to wipe out the remains.

The ending was a bit rushed, not much action, and most of the slim page count was filled with mafioso talking to each other on the phone.  This was the first Executioner where Pendleton's heart didn't seem in it.  Let's hope he gets his groove back in later installments.

Executioner 362: Patriot Acts

Executioner 362
Patriot Acts
by Douglas P. Wojtowicz
2009 Gold Eagle

Brainwashed assassins of a deep cover pseudo government agency The Rose Initiative slip their programming and team up with militia groups to capture the Initiative's stash of weapons of mass destruction in an effort to start a civil war.

Pretty by-the-numbers.  Mack Bolan beats up people to find a place to shoot people.  The action scenes are decently handled, with just enough gun porn to keep things from becoming too monotonous.  Patriot Acts does suffer from a lack of sense of place.  Too many times characters are just there doing things, with no idea of where they are or how they got there.

Kindle ebook from Amazon