The Executioner 10: Caribbean Kill by Don Pendleton

The Executioner 10
Caribbean Kill
by Don Pendleton

Mack Bolan flies straight from Las Vegas to Puerto Rico, smashes his plane into a mafia compound and hits the ground running. After some jungle combat he rescues a sex worker who ends up being a federal agent, rescues a hostage, and raids a mansion to take out the local head. Along the way he recruits a mafia pilot 'Nam veteran.

Bolan learns of a Federal Government effort to have him snuffed out. The perceived enemy also expands, to include governments and corporation who profit from organized crime.

Available at Amazon 

Cataclysm by Don Pendleton

Cataclysm: The Day the World Died aka Cataclysm
by Don Pendleton
1969 Bee-Line Books

Don Pendleton is best known for starting the Executioner series, but he also wrote weird, conceptual science fiction.  And smutty private detectives, but I haven't found any of that yet.

The world is falling apart from social decay and natural disasters, and a handful of scientists try to find an answer for humanity's survival.

The story jumps forward a few years at a time, giving a quick page wrap up of all the disasters that happened in the meantime.  These are the scenes I wanted to see, but instead we mostly get folks talking like a 60s British sci-fi movie.

Cataclysm is not so much 70s disaster movie as it is 70s pop futurism.  There's weird pseudo-science (without society, humans physically revert down the path of evolution in one generation), and sex.  Lots of sex.  Not much actual sex scenes, but talking about sex.  The scientists are polyamorous, and survivors from the wild are treated with sex therapy to heal them.

The frustrating thing is that there is all kinds of crazy stuff going on somewhere else, over there, while we hear a bunch of scientists just kind of chat.  Near the end we actually get an action scene, as a man survives a massive earthquake while in a protective pod, but I could have used a lot more of this.

Interestingly, Joseph Rosenberger wrote some "non-fiction" about various Doomsday scenarios for Fate magazine.

Stony Man 091 - China Crisis

China Crisis
Stony Man 091
by Don Pendleton (Mike Linaker)
Gold Eagle 2007

China mistakenly tests a missle that uses stolen American technology and crashes near the Afghanistan border. It's a China Crisis!



Phoenix Force sneaks across the border, while Able Team tracks down the American end of the arms dealers in South Texas.



This suffers from what ails a lot of more recent men's adventure fiction.  As compared to the 70s and 80s, there's less action across more pages.  The same amount of plot and characterization as in past decades, but the action consists of "go to place where bad guys are, guns are shot, good guy wins".  Even in the anti-climax there are more pages devoted to what the bad guy has packed in his hummer than the actual shootout.  While there's a little bit of hacking and satellite surveillance, there isn't too much techno-thriller tedium.

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 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.