Able Team #4: Amazon Slaughter

Able Team #4: Amazon Slaughter, by Dick Stivers
March, 1983 Gold Eagle Books

It’s been too long since I’ve returned to the work of GH Frost. His contribution to the Able Team series, #8: Army of Devils, is one of the best pieces of action pulp ever, a tour de force of madness and gore, up there with the Phoenix saga. Amazon Slaughter at times approaches that unhinged level, but not quite. It more than makes up for it with the high-quality level of Frost’s writing, which again is leagues above the genre norm.

The copyright page credits the book to “CJ Shiao,” but Frost acknowledges it as his own on his website. I think Frost, again working under an alias (“LR Payne”) also wrote the first and third volumes of the series (I don’t believe he wrote the second one, though – that was Norman Winski), but I haven’t read them. At any rate this fourth volume ushered in an unbroken set of installments Frost turned in for the series, though apparently he was removed from it; his comments on his blog and also those he left on my review for Army of Devils suggest that he didn’t quite get along with Gold Eagle.

Frost’s comments make it sound that GE was unhappy with his work, or at least the direction he was taking with the characters. This is just more indication that Gold Eagle never understood quality men’s adventure and just wanted to churn out the same old “terrorist of the month” shit…and more indication why you’d have to pay me to read the majority of the books they’ve published. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the book at hand, which is a piece of quality men’s adventure.

The Able Team trio (Carl Lyons, Gadgets Schwartz, and Pol Balancales) are sent down into the Amazon due to recent evidence of a plutonium factory somewhere in the jungle, in an uncharted region of the map claimed by Bolivia. We readers know that the factory is under the control of Wei Ho (fetchingly named “Death incarnate” on the back cover), a Chinese warlord who employs a Khmer Rogue assassin as his security chief, as well as an army of mercenaries from around the world.

Wei Ho’s army ransacks the native Indian population (the Xavante), decimating entire villages. They kidnap the healthy and force them to work at the plutonium plant, which itself is a death sentence, as every Indian they’ve forced into bondage has died from working around the plutonium. All of which is to say that there’s a lot of death and bloodshed and misery going on here, and Frost really builds it up, showing the horrors of the Xavante in gruesome and excruciating detail.

Able Team is quickly on the scene, voyaging down into the jungle where they hook up with a group of Xavante warrirors. I believe this must’ve been the introduction of the Atchisson assault shotgun to the series, as Lyons has one and must explain it to his comrades. As is customary there’s a lot of witty banter between the trio, with lots of ragging and good-natured putdowns.

Even better there’s a touch of the psychedelic, when Lyons smokes some sort of substance with the Xavante. Pretty soon he’s gone native, painting himself in the black goup the Xavante make from genipap, covering themselves in it to ward off insects and to mask themselves with the terrain. Lyon’s mind is somewhat blown, and more banter ensues as Pol and Gadgets try to determine how gone he really is.

A goodly portion of the novel in fact is given over to Able Team working with the Xavante as they journey deeper into the Amazon. There are a few firefights here and there, most notably one in which they attack a group of mercenaries while they’re hauling around prisoners. One of the escaped prisoners is a young Brazilian army lieutenant named Silveres, who after initial hostility starts to help the team.

Action scenes are rendered very well, even if none of them have the savagery of Army of Devils. Frost is really good at getting you in the heads of his characters, for example Silveres as he volunteers to swim off alone through piranha-infested waters to sneak attack a ship filled with Khmer Rogue and turncoat Brazilian soldiers.

Strangely we get Wei Ho’s backstory toward the very end of the novel, as Able Team receives intel on his history. While this chapter is enjoyable, documenting how Wei Ho turned his family’s drug and crime business into an empire, blackmailing powerful communists in China, it just seems so out of place this late in the game. Even stranger is that Wei is so quickly brushed off in the last pages of the book, not nearly given the villain’s farewell you’d expect of such an evil character.

And for that matter, the finale itself is rushed. Two of Wei’s top henchmen just disappear from the narrative, and instead Able Team and the Xavante launch a dawn raid on the mercenary camp. Again, it’s a gory scene, with lots of heads exploding and guts spilling, but still nothing on the level of Frost’s later masterpiece. And again unlike Army of Devils, Amazon Slaughter just rushes to a conclusion. There’s no wrapup or even any real resolution, just a bunch of dead Cambodians and mercenaries. It’s as if Gold Eagle lost some of the pages of Frost’s manuscript during the printing process.

But for all that it was still an enjoyable book. The rapport of the team really sets this series apart from others, with the Able Team guys coming off like the soldiers in Gustav Hasford’s Short Timers, ribbing each other with that same sort of dark and morbid sense of humor. Frost returned with the next installment, Cairo Countdown, even though it too was credited to another author (Paul Hoffrichter). I’ll be reading that one next.

The Executioner #262: Trigger Point

The Executioner #262: Trigger Point, by Gerald Montgomery
September, 2000 Gold Eagle Books

I've been meaning to read this book for twelve years now. Back in late 2000, during a brief spark of re-interest in the men's adventure genre (which I hadn't read since I was a kid), I found myself on mackbolan.com, where this recently-published volume was being hotly debated on the forum. (This was also when I discovered that Gar Wilson didn't exist.) After reading the comments I went right out to a WaldenBooks store and bought a copy of Trigger Point...and it's sat unread in a box until now.

This was the first installment of a trilogy entitled "COMCON," written by first-time Gold Eagle ghostwriter Gerald Montgomery. It was also the first of only four books Montgomery wrote for the publisher; by all accounts he had some issues with them, as apparently Montgomery wanted to take Mack "Executioner" Bolan into different places than the usual terrorist-wasting storylines. It seems Gold Eagle started off on the same page as Montgomery; it's a wonder Trigger Point was even published, as it's basically an overhaul of the entire Bolan mythos, putting the Executioner up against a globe-spanning army of neo-Nazis who plan to destroy the US Constitution and take over the world.

The group goes by the name COMCON -- the Committee to destroy the Constitution -- and they mask themselves under the guise of real-life federal agency FEMA. Be preprared for a whole hell of a lot of FEMA-bashing in this book. Over and over again we are told that FEMA is basically an un-Constitutional agency, a government division created to take over the country in case of emergencies. In other words, if the emergency was great enough, FEMA could end all democratic freedoms and place the entire country under marshall law.

But Montgomery has it that FEMA is the brainchild of Nazis who came to America after WWII as part of "Operation Paperclip," in which the US imported all kinds of Nazi elite and put them to work in various governmental institutions and agencies, both to use their knowledge and also to keep them from the Soviets.

So, these Nazis have spawned their own vast army of black-garbed neo-Nazis, true fascists all, who plan to subvert the US Constitution and take over the country, initiating a New World Order (cue the Ministry track). Not only that, but they have high-tech military equipment that's beyond anything in the US arsenal; Montgomery doesn't get into details in this first volume, but apparently the COMCON guys run out of infamous Area 51, where it seems they have come upon some "advanced" weaponry. In Trigger Point this is displayed in their sleek gunship helicopters which are nuclear powered.

To recap: Nazis came to America after the war and got jobs within the government, they secretly banded together with plans to continue the Reich, they called themselves "COMCON" after their plans to destroy the Constitution, and they hid their activities behind the mantle of FEMA, which they themselves created. They now have endless legions of armed minions and command various secret bases, and also, due to their FEMA powers, can mandate "emergencies" wherever they want, thereby taking over entire towns with Federal authority. They in fact supercede the authority of the President, who meanwhile they have firmly in the pocket anyway.

The obvious question is, if COMCON is so powerful and so prevalent, how in the hell has it taken Bolan so long to come across them? To Montgomery's credit, he does answer this, having Bolan guess that some of the "shadowy government-type" organizations he's dealt with in the past were most likely COMCON agents. In other words, he's fought them before, he just didn't know who they were. But still, it's a bit far-fetched. I'm not saying it's bad or anything, it's just all very sci-fi and crazy, and thus a bit hard to swallow after the "real-world" banality of most other Gold Eagle Executioner novels.

But as I've mentioned many times, I like the crazy shit. Trigger Point gets pretty crazy, with COMCON-brainwashed teenagers (mostly girls) becoming Terminators, blitzing their way through schools and etc. This is how Bolan gets into it; there have been a rash of school shootings in the US, all of them perpetrated by teens who then killed themselves.

A government official (believe it or not, a Democrat!), who is aware of COMCON and is determined to stop them, realizes that this is the neo-Nazis's master plan finally becoming a reality: they intend to use these school shootings to engender mass protests across the US, for people to call on a ban of assault weapons, so that once the weapons are out of the public's hands COMCON will have little resistance when they finally move in to create their NWO.

I remember when this novel came out, Montgomery had a website (now gone) where he stated that his two favorite authors were Don Pendleton and Hunter Thompson. I also remember he stated it was his intention to return the Pendleton spirit to the Gold Eagle novels. Strangely though, Bolan is in full-on cipher mode in Trigger Point. There's nothing about him different from any other stoic men's adventure protagonist; he's just a stone-cold patriot determined to destroy COMCON and thus save the US Republic. Pendleton's Bolan was human, but then, it's my contention that the Gold Eagle Bolan should just be considered a wholly different character from Pendleton's original.

After being called in, Bolan meets with the COMCON-opposed diplomat and the two are promptly attacked by those nuke-powered helicopters and a legion of COMCON commandos. This is probably the best action sequence in the book, with Bolan taking on the gunship and the troops with his handy M-16/grenade launcher combo. Montgomery doesn't go too far out in the gore department, just delivering taut action scenes.

One thing I didn't enjoy as much however is that Montgomery tends to write his action scenes like military fiction. In particular the finale, in which Bolan leads a group of Rangers on an assault on COMCON's "Tranquility Base." It all comes off like Blackhawk Down, with Bolan directing fire squads and mortar rounds and etc. I'm assuming that Montgomery has some military experience, as he knows of what he writes, but personally I prefer it when action scenes have all the reality of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Commando.

The best element here though is that Tranquility Base stuff -- it's a secret COMCON base which poses as a Christian teen-rehabilitation center. Here a Nazi-lovin' brainwashing genius oversees the staff, and any kid who comes in who has a history of being sexually assaulted is shunted off to the secret underground lair, where they are promptly brainwashed. They're given multiple personalities, from assault troops to intel couriers. Montgomery gets pretty lurid here, and there's also a cool scene where Bolan performs a "soft probe" of the base; shades of Death Merchant #36: The Cosmic Reality Kill.

Really though, the majority of Trigger Point is given over to setting up the ensuing volumes. There are a lot of scenes of Bolan and his fellow Stony Man commandos learning about COMCON and FEMA, but Montgomery does spice it up every once in a while with an action scene -- there's also another good sequence where Bolan and his fellows take on one of those reprogrammed teenage girls. This must be the only scene in a Bolan novel where the Executioner goes up against a machine gun-toting schoolgirl. Another good scene is later on where Bolan poses as a COMCON "man in black" and meets a gorgeous female agent who is against COMCON; not sure if she shows up again, but her presence was a nice touch in the male-centric Gold Eagle world.

I know the trilogy only got the crazier as it went on -- the next one, Iron Fist, has Bolan going up against a nanotech-powered COMCON monster. After a decade-plus I went out and finally bought the rest of the trilogy, as well as Montgomery's fourth and final novel for Gold Eagle. While Trigger Point didn't blow me away, it was nice to see a Gold Eagle ghostwriter trying to do something different with the series, so I look forward to reading the rest of his work.

Stony Man #83: Doom Prophecy

Stony Man #83: Doom Prophecy, by Douglas Wojtowicz
June, 2006 Gold Eagle Books

Able Team and Phoenix Force were canceled as individual series in the early 1990s, but lived on collectively as the Stony Man series, in which both teams would together take on the latest global or domestic threat. As of this writing there are a whopping 119 volumes of this series in print. Could you imagine reading all of them?? You'd probably put a bullet in your brain afterwards -- though, these being Gold Eagle books, by that time you'd be able to identify the bullet as say a 5.56x45mm NATO round with a 62 grain Steel Penetrator lead core full metal jacket.

Yes, friends, we are back in the world of Gold Eagle and its overwhelming love of gun-porn. Vast sections of this publisher's novels have often read like copy from a gun catalog. Gold Eagle is the last man standing in the world of men's adventure publishing, which is a shame, for in many ways their offerings are the worst of the genre. Whereas in my opinion these action series should offer escapism, Gold Eagle instead tries to make everything "realistic," with the end result being that their books are dour, bland, and boring affairs, filled with cipher-like "heroes" who, when they aren't killing people, just sit around and clean their guns.

The biggest surprise is that sometimes a Gold Eagle book offers a bit of promise, something different than the standard "terrorist of the month" gimmick. Doom Prophecy is a case in point. There are rave reviews for this novel over on mackbolan.com; the author, Douglas Wojtowicz, is a fan favorite. And to be sure he does seem to have fun with his novels, pulping them up with oddball villains and crazy threats. He's also relatively new to the Gold Eagle stable, but to date has already turned out 30-some books in various Gold Eagle series. He also has an obvious fondess for the characters and their world, so it's a good sign that there's at least one Gold Eagle writer who is willing to do something different than the norm. But to be sure, the reader must still be prepared for the Gold Eagle trademark of endless action sequences and weapons fetishizing.

The villains here are pretty great, the best part of the novel; they're much in the line of the sort of villains you would encounter in the pulpier 1970s examples of the genre. For one, there's a Vietnamese lady who, as a young girl, watched as her mother was murdered by a US soldier in 'Nam. Years later, attempting to gain vengeance, the girl was raped by the same man, now a high-ranking government official. And now, in the present, she is a self-styled "cyber prophetess" who has named herself Ka55andra, after the mythical oracle-spouting character Cassandra. She heads up a globe-spanning terrorist cell called AJAX, and is now finally bringing her plans of vengeance to fruition, while also sowing hell in general.

Even better are the various henchmen who work for AJAX. First and foremost there's Algul, a dude who not only wears a mask made of human skulls, but also a cape of human skin -- each patch of flesh adorned with a military tattoo, Algul having stitched it together from the hides of US soldiers he has killed. Oh, and he enjoys drinking blood. He also commands a legion of mud-encrusted zombies in all but name, shambling creatures who tear up out of the ground and attack en masse any who stand in their way, eating their flesh. Crazy stuff for sure. There's also a trio of assassins: one a dwarf, the other a tall and thin guy who compares himself to a boa constrictor, and finally a big biker dude whom Wojtowicz actually names "David Lee Haggar." And on top of that there's even a small army of ninjas, lead by a self-proclaimed "American Ninja" named Wilson Sere, who goes around with his gorgeous blonde Argentenian lover Terremota, an explosives expert.

I mean, all of these characters seem to have walked out of, say, Black Samurai #6: The Warlock. But for some strange reason, Wojtowicz does little to exploit the potential of the villains. All told, he only spends a handful of scenes with them, instead focusing the entirety of the tale on the bland and boring members of Phoenix Force and Able Team. I know this is a strange criticism, to blame an author for giving the focus to the stars of the book, but still. When your villains are this interesting -- and when there are so many of them -- I think it would be a bit more entertaining for the reader to actually read about them. Because as it is, the Phoenix Force and Able Team guys just put you right to sleep.

It's been about twenty-five years since I've read a Phoenix Force novel, so it was humorous to see that the same stock epithets are still employed -- Encizo is the "powerful Cuban," Calvin James is the "tall ex-Navy SEAL," Manning is the "big Canadian." Like we're reading the Iliad or something! Changes have occurred since my last encounter with the Force, though; Katz, the elderly Israeli leader of the team (who as I recall was a missing a hand, and, Army of Darkness style, would put various weapons in the empty socket), has apparently bought the farm and the team is now lead by McCarter, a former SAS soldier. A new character has been introduced in Katz's wake: TJ Hawkins, a vague nonentity who appears to be from Texas and is some sort of special forces type.

The guys from Able Team, as always, are a bit more colorful. Carl Lyons, the leader, is still prone to violent outbursts, and I know this is Lyons's "thing," but I wonder when this happened? In the Executioner novels I've read by creator Don Pendleton, Lyons is presented as a level-headed guy. But then, he also has a wife and kid in those early Pendleton books, and given that they're never mentioned in the Gold Eagle books, I'm guessing something must've happened to them, something that created the anger-prone Lyons of the Gold Eagle world. Anyway, throughout Doom Prophecy Wojtowicz keeps alive the Able Team tradition of witty banter amid the team members, showing their longstanding camaraderie, doing a great job of keeping the spirit of the characters alive.

Ka55andra initiates her mission and havoc breaks out across the globe. Able Team tracks down the aforementioned David Lee Haggar in the US and gets in some fights with bikers. Phoenix Force splits up, one half of the team going to Africa to take on Algul's zombie forces, the other half going to Hong Kong to take on Wilson Sere, Terremota, and the ninjas. And from there it's action, action, action.

That is, other than the scenes which take place in Stony Man headquarters, detailing the very 24-esque activities of the Stony Man "cyber team." It's like we're back in CTU and watching Chloe and the gang trace various threats while reporting on them to Jack Bauer in the field; my assumption is that Gold Eagle has added all of this tech warfare nonsense as a gambit to draw in the military fiction crowd. I mean, just look at that stupid damn cover Doom Prophecy is graced with. It might as well just be emblazoned with "Tom Clancy Presents."

But anyway, I do not exaggerate about the action onslaught. Every place Able Team or Phoenix Force goes, they are attacked. Over and over again. There's even a scene where Encizo and James catch a flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo, and even on the damn flight they are attacked by a team of ninjas! Wojtowicz can write a good action scene, and throughout he displays his knowledge of firearms and bladed weaponry. But after a while you want a little breather. And again, given that this is a Gold Eagle novel, the endless action scenes lack the nutzoid spark of a Joseph Rosenberger -- they are all relayed in a sort of real-world format, which I find strange in this post-9/11 world.

And now let's look at the gun-porn, a longstanding hallmark of Gold Eagle. Every time a person pulls out a gun, we get like four sentences describing it, no matter what's going on in the narrative. The characters themselves even discuss the various weapons, info-dumping blocks of detail about their rifles or knives or whatever. Hell, there are even scenes where, during combat, the heroes will taunt their opponents about their poor choices in weaponry -- in particular I'm thinking of a scene where a member of Able Team derides an opponent for using a gun "without a slide-action," or something to that effect.

Again, I realize it's stupid of me to complain about gun-porn in an action novel; it would be like buying a Harlequin Romance and complaining about all of the flowery dialog. But what has always most annoyed me about gun-porn is that it ruins any sort of tension or suspense. Just check out this scene, which occurs as a special forces soldier is attacked and overrun by Algul's zombies -- a tension-filled scene, mind you, which is suddenly ruined as Wojtowicz tells us all about the soldier's nifty gun:

Wild eyes rimmed with red focused on him and his team, and he brought up his Barrett M-486. The Barrett was an M-4 rifle that had been chambered for the new Special Forces 6.8 mm special purpose cartridge as an improvement over the smaller 5.56 mm NATO round. Grabbing the rail-mounted forward grip to stabilize it, he flipped the rifle to full-auto and fired through the gap between the door and frame of the downed aircraft, spitting a stream of SPC rounds.

Start taking notes, 'cause there's gonna be a quiz later:

Encizo backed his pair of Glocks with a 7.65 mm Walther PPK. While he was a fan of Heckler and Koch weapons, the excellent 9 mm USP wasn't as ubiquitous as the Glock, and finding spare magazines around the world would be more difficult. As well, the brand new P-2000 compact didn't share the Glock-26's record or reliability, nor the capability to use the larger USP's magazines.

And here's a third example, because everything comes in threes:

He picked up an M-3 submachine gun. In .45 ACP, the weapon was a standard with the US Army for a period of thirty-five years before being gradually phased out. However, being cheap and easy to build, it showed up in arsenals around the world.

There's stuff like this throughout the book. And again I realize, this sort of thing is not only expected but demanded by the core Gold Eagle readers. Wojtowicz proves himself a master of the craft, but it's just not a craft I'm crazy about. Actually the one thing I learned from Doom Prophecy is that I can't consider myself a "core" Gold Eagle reader. Elaborate gun and weapon detail just wears me down to the point where I start to hate life and just wish Flanders was dead. It's all just so blatant and annoying and, ultimately, pointless. I just kept wanting to shout, each time some dude would whip out a gun and we'd get endless detail about it: Who fucking cares??

But the hell of the thing is -- the core Gold Eagle readers do care. There are really people out there who want to read a few paragraphs explaining some Heckler & Koch submachine gun. And believe it or not, these people (whoever they are), will write angry letters when they see something incorrectly described about the gun. But for me this real-world focus just destroys the escapism, the lurid quotient, the fun of the genre. Rather than the fun pulp of say John Eagle Expeditor, most of these Gold Eagle books are just depressing, and ultimately forgettable.

That is, save for the ones by Wojtowicz. I have a few more of his books and they all look promising -- not to mention that they're all raved about over on mackbolan.com. As I say, he definitely knows what he's doing. He knows his core readers and he knows what they want, and he delivers. And as mentioned he has an obvious fondness for the characters. He also has a definite knack for coming up with memorable villains, as proven here with Doom Prophecy. Personally though I would've preferred more scenes from their perspective, or even more background on them. But I guess you can't blame the guy for making the stars of the book, you know, the stars of the book.

But then, I'm biased. I much prefer the original incarnations of the genre, from the '70s and '80s. And whereas I and other reviewers around the Web enjoy reading and writing about those men's adventure novels from 30 and 40 years ago, I'll bet you good money that no one will be writing about these current Gold Eagle books a few decades from now. They just aren't much fun. And I don't even blame the writers. All of the stock epithets, the gun references, the "real-world" attitude, all of that stuff I'm betting is mandated by the editors.

In a way, it's almost like Gold Eagle is committing willful suicide. Given the lack of marketing for the imprint, the minimal web presence, and the fact that the books are steadily disappearing from the shelves of bookstores and department stores (K-Mart, I've read, is just one such store that has stopped carrying Gold Eagle books), I'm guessing that parent company Worldwide Library is just letting these novels trickle out, doing little to improve or differentiate them, until the day comes when they can finally (and happily) announce that profits have dropped too much to continue publishing, and thus the adventures of "the Stony Man warriors" et al will come to a close.

Able Team #2: The Hostaged Island

Able Team #2: The Hostaged Island, by Dick Stivers
June, 1982 Gold Eagle Books

These early Gold Eagle novels are turning out to be much better than I expected. This one in particular comes off like an action-packed B movie, with an army of bikers taking over the peaceful island of Catalina, right off the California coastline. The three-man Able Team is called in to take care of the problem. Or, as team leader Carl Lyons succinctly puts it: "Kill them all."

The novel plays out very much like the '70s incarnation of men's adventure novels, with a lurid vibe and pulpish plot and villains. In other words, the imprint hasn't yet devolved into the nuke-of-the-month/Team America jingoism of later years. It does though uphold the Gold Eagle philosophy of, "Everything will be fine as long as you have a gun." It also makes cursory mention of the right wing bias that would also become so prevalent in later Gold Eagle offerings; when helicoptering to the island, Able Team is informed by their boss Hal Brognola that the civil rights of the bikers have been "suspended." IE, no need to worry about law and order or prosecution; just kill the bastards.

The writing however is quite good. The cover credits the book to Don Pendleton (who had nothing to do with it) and house name Dick Stivers, but the copyright page of the book credits authors Norman Winski and LR Payne. Winski published several novels over the years, but Payne is a mystery; the only credits to his name are the first three Able Team novels. I suspect the name was the psuedonym of a Gold Eagle editor who polished these early manuscripts to better fit the burgeoning Gold Eagle house style; what makes me suspect this is the last chapter of the novel, which has nothing to do with what came before, and seems to be written by a different author. In it Able Team basically sits around and waits to meet up with Mack Bolan. It just struck me as something an editor might add to the book to remind readers that the Able Team boys are part of a larger universe.

The takeover of Catalina is taut and well-rendered. The bikers are all well armed and, in a prefigure of Chuck Norris's Invasion USA, infiltrate the island in the dead of night and seal it off from the rest of the world. What makes the novel fun though is that the bikers act like bikers, and not like a commando force; most of them would rather tear across the streets on their choppers, get drunk, get high, and mess around with the local women. After killing the sheriff and making a call to the governor with their demands, the bikers imprison the island residents in a community center and bide their time until their demands are met.

A few islanders manage to escape and arm themselves, killing a few bikers and finding cover. But the brunt of the rescue of course goes to Able Team, who are quickly called into action, as the government wants to keep the takeover a secret. Winski does a fine job of juggling the three characters, meaning that the novel doesn't come off solely focusing on just one of them. Also, there's great rapport between the three, including a lot of enjoyable banter, even while the bullets are flying. This again lends the novel a B movie feel.

The Gold Eagle focus on guns also factors in when Able Team is equipped with their firepower for the mission. Their gun supplier lays out all of the equipment, going on and on about each piece. Literally paragraph after paragraph of firearm detail that will likely have gun-porn enthusiasts reaching for the Lubriderm. And of course following the old "rifle hanging on the wall" dictum of Chekhov, each firearm is shown in action as the novel unfolds. Winski excels in the action scenes, pouring on the graphic violence and gore.

The Hostaged Island has the one plot and follows it through to the end. Since the novel isn't long, it all works out perfectly. We know of course that Able Team will survive the mission, so Winksi plays up some truly dramatic scenes with the island residents and their constant danger. He even works in some great stuff like when the bikers keep getting nailed by this secret "commando team" (Able Team of course striking from and returning to the shadows) and so decide to take out their rage on the residents. This involves a plan to basically spray everyone in the community center with gasoline and set them on fire. Winski provides excellent revenge material as well; he makes these bikers truly evil, and all of them get their comeuppance in gory and spectacular ways.

I think this was Winski's only Able Team novel, but his contribution here was enjoyable enough that I'll look out for more of his stuff, in particular his three-volume Hitman series, which sounds like a lot of fun.

The Executioner #115: Circle of Steel

The Executioner #115: Circle of Steel, by Dan Schmidt
July, 1988 Gold Eagle Books

This is a crazy, wild Doc Savage sort of yarn that goes non-stop from beginning to end. Anything ever said previously about violence in the Executioner books must be put on hold. Circle of Steel drips with gore, gore with no particular point. Brains splatter, intestines spill out, eyes are shot or gouged out – you name it, it happens in the pages of this story. -- William H. Young, A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction

Yep, that made me want to read the book, too!

And truth be told, Circle of Steel lives up to its gory promise. Not only is this the best Dan Schmidt novel I've read, it's also the best of the Gold Eagle-published Executioner books. True, it's yet another Schmidt tale about a squad of American black ops going rogue and selling weapons to terrorists, even financing them in their terrorist activities, with Mack Bolan again caught in the middle of a convoluted plot filled with way too many characters, but there's a crazed element here that elevates the tale, something that was missing in the other Schmidt novels I've read.

The gruesome madness begins on the opening pages, as a band of scimitar-wielding Islamic terrorists hack and slash a senator and his houseful of guests. This scene is almost a tribute to the gory splendor of GH Frost's Army of Devils. These terrorists are part of a faction known as The Followers of the True Way; they are financed by a mercenary who goes by the impressive title Killer Keller. Keller also controls an army of mercs, whom he considers his real soldiers; he uses the Muslim fighters as "cannon fodder," exactly like the character Crammon did in the much later Schmidt offering Devil's Bargain. (One could easily argue that each Schmidt novel is the same as the one that came before, with only the names of the villains changed.)

Keller's complex scheme is to train these terrorists (on American soil, no less!) to kill a bunch of senators and whatnot, generally sowing chaos, while also selling them arms at inflated prices. He then plans to kill them so as to get back the arms and re-sell them. There's also a scheme involving a group of peacekeepers on a mission to the Middle East which Keller plans to kidnap and sell to the Followers; it was all a bit too convoluted to keep up with, really. More interesting are the arms Keller plans to sell -- the M-40 Maneater, an assault rifle designed by an associate of Keller's which fires regular bullets but is also outfitted with "x-wings" of grenades. Keller has a few crates of these; just one M-40 will turn a soldier into a destructive force.

Bolan comes into it after interrogating a former accomplice of Keller's who wants to come clean. As usual in a Schmidt tale, it's not so simple. The CIA's involved, neither Bolan nor his contact Brognola have heard of the Maneaters, and Bolan is forever one step behind Keller and his men. In a way Schmidt's novels are like action equivalents of film noir, with Bolan the hardboiled hero lost in a murky, convoluted, and dangerous world of cutthroats and killers.

And, just as in film noir, there's a femme fatale -- Ilsa Tausen, a blond German beauty who not only resembles a valkyrie but considers herself one. Ilsa once worked with Keller and was also his lover, but eight years ago Keller left her behind to rot in a South African cell. Ilsa eventually freed herself and is now consumed with vengeance upon Keller; her plan (one of many plans in this novel) is to infiltrate his team and kill him. Ilsa's father was an SS officer and she wishes the Nazis had won the war. She loves to use her body to lure men into their deaths...after having sex with them. She relishes murder and gets off on it, going into combat in a "skin-tight leather combat blacksuit," blowing people away with a smile on her face. Oh, and she also enjoys freebasing cocaine.

Yes my friends, Ilsa Tausen is the greatest character to ever appear in an Executioner novel.

It occured to me as I read it that Circle of Steel isn't only an amped-up variation of film noir, but also of screwball comedy. It operates on the same principles, with our straight-laced hero Bolan caught up in a madcap world of bizarre characters and goofy situations. For example: midway through the book Bolan realizes he's being followed. He springs a trap on the pursuers, who turn out to be a pair of guys in suits and ties. Immediately they tell Bolan they're CIA operatives, trying to capture Keller; further, they're part of a tactical team calling itself Talon. Then they ask Bolan if he'd like to help. All this, mind you, before they even ask Bolan who he is!

More dark comedy ensues as Bolan finds himself working with the Company. Of course they're all rubes and don't heed Bolan's advice and so get wasted in vast numbers during the many ensuing battles with Keller and his men. Bolan eventually goes all the way to Greece in pursuit of Keller; meanwhile Ilsa succeeds in her infiltration and allies herself with the man, plotting his death. But sadly this plot is lost in the shuffle of schemes and counter-schemes, with Schmidt once again sullying his tale with too, too many characters.

As in previous Schmidt books, there's a whole bunch of wheel-spinning here. I lost track of the number of times Bolan would grimly survey events and determine to see the mission through, or when Keller would basically do the same thing. I've realized that one can't fault Schmidt and others for this; one reason Pendleton's original novels are so much more streamlined is because they were simply shorter. In the mid-'80s Gold Eagle boosted the page count of their books, no doubt to make them look like "real novels," but the outcome was that now the authors had to fill more pages. Every Schmidt novel I've read would have benefitted from being shorter.

As William H. Young noted in his study of the series, Circle of Steel is quite gory, spectacularly so. Heads explode like watermelons, intestines sluice out, there's even a full-on gutting courtesy Ilsa. And given the presence of the M-40 Maneaters, there's also room for people blowing up real good -- and yes, Bolan manages to get hold of one of them, of course showing everyone how to properly use them. Schmidt even works some sex into the tale, with Ilsa sleeping with a few men she later kills.

Despite the wheel-spinning, despite the fact that the plot was recycled from previous (and future) Schmidt tales, I really enjoyed Circle of Steel. Ironically this was the last novel Schmidt wrote for Gold Eagle for several years, but at least it was a great way to go out.

A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction: The Executioner and Mack Bolan

A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction: The Executioner and Mack Bolan, by William H. Young
January, 1996 Edwin Mellen Press

Who would've thought that a scholarly tome was published about the Executioner series?? Well, one was, and it's one hell of a weighty tome, packed with detail and insight. The author, William H. Young, is a literature professor who has taken it upon himself to document the series, and while it's interesting to read one man's thoughts on the novels, the cost of the book is prohibitive. I got it via InterLibrary Loan, and I suggest you do the same.

The majority of the book is Young's summary of every installment in the Executioner series from #1 up to the final volume published in 1991, including the SuperBolans and Stony Mans. (Able Team and Phoenx Force are not covered.) This same information is of course available on mackbolan.com, in the reviews section; only there you get the perspectives of several reviewers rather than one man. And given that Young is a professor, you get more of a scholarly view here -- however not as much as I would've liked. Instead Young relays the plot of each volume and comments on the author's skill, how each ghostwriter's version of Bolan differs from Pendleton's (he vastly prefers Pendleton's work to the ghostwriters), and he also takes time to point out troublesome entries in the series (he very much dislikes the work of Dan Schmidt, E. Richard Churchill, and Peter Leslie; there are others he roasts but these are his least favorite).

What's odd is that Young often relents that so many latter entries in the series are "gory," as if he has no idea the genre he is reading. He even comments on the "regrettable violence" of some of Pendleton's originals, and shows much disgust with the scenes with the "turkey doctors." This book, published in 1996, bears all the hallmarks of the then-current Politically Correct scene, with Young apparently wishing for a "kinder, gentler" Executioner, and he also goes on about various "racist" bits he encounters...again not realizing that this exploitative, over-the-top nature is part of the genre's charm.

He ranks Mike Newton as the best of the ghostwriters -- further, he ranks Newton's Prairie Fire as the best Executioner novel ever, even better than Pendleton's originals. I have this volume but haven't yet read it.

Young shows special distate for Chet Cunningham's Baltimore Trackdown, spending two pages going on about that volume's "sadism" and gore. (Of course, immediately after reading this I got myself a copy of Baltimore Trackdown!)

The biggest draw to the book is the behind-the-scenes stuff, which admittedly isn't much. Young wrote this in the pre-Internet world and so didn't have access to as much info as we do now. (Ie, he has no idea who 16th-volume author "Jim Peterson" was, when a simple Google search today will tell you it was William Crawford.) Young instead gains insight from interviews with various authors, conducted by mail, which are published at the end of the book: from 1986 he has interviews with Don Pendleton, Mike Newton, and Chet Cunningham. Of the three, Cunningham proves himself the funniest, sort of poking fun at Pendleton's original books. Then from 1990 Young has another mail-conducted interview, this time with Mel Odom.

It's a bit frustrating in there's no rapport in the interviews; each interviewee was given the same set of questions to answer. We do however get a little information about the troubles Pendleton had with Gold Eagle, including a lawsuit in 1986. In fact twice he almost lost the rights to the series, first with Pinnacle (which resulted in the Jim Peterson-written Sicilian Slaughter, which Pendleton admits here to never having read), then with Gold Eagle, which increasingly distanced itself from Pendleton and his advice on the direction the series should take.

In summary, about 400 pages are given over to Young's rundown/commentary on the entire series up to 1991. Then we have a section on the Pinnacle cover art, where, believe it or not, Young comments on every single cover, explaining what they look like. This is followed by another chapter where he does the same thing for the Gold Eagle books! These two sections will be a trying read for most.

We also have another short section where Young looks at the Executioner's "competitors;" ie other men's adventure series. But this is a woefully short list; he is unaware even of the Sharpshooter series -- however he does list the Marksman series, commenting that it is only for "the very sick." (Honestly, Young comes off like a total wimp in this book.) And again he demonstrates his lack of research; in the entry for the Penetrator , Young states that he only knows that Chet Cunningham was one of the authors for that series, and he has no idea who the other author was. But all a person has to do is open up any odd-numbered entry in the Penetrator series, look at the copyright page, and there find "Special acknowledgement is given to Mark K. Roberts."

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend this one as a purchase; I'd say get it via InterLibrary Loan like I did. However if you do buy it, it might prove valuable in the long run, as something you can often check back to for various (but scant) behind-the-scenes info.

The Executioner #112: Blood of the Lion

The Executioner #112: Blood of the Lion, by Dan Schmidt
April, 1988 Gold Eagle Books

This was one of Dan Schmidt's earlier Executioner novels, published nearly twenty years before his later offering Devil's Bargain. Thankfully Blood of the Lion is a lot better, proving yet again that the shorter these novels, the better. But regardless Schmidt still finds a way to jam too many plots into one book, again neutering an otherwise interesting concept.

Alchupa, a South American drug lord with plans to launch a takeover of Brazil, hires the "top assassins in the world" to kill Mack Bolan. Five dudes who have just walked out of your average '80s Cannon action film: there's the Viper, American, former CIA hitman; a Swede who goes by the name The Headhunter; a Mongol who likes to battle with bow and arrow; an Arab who relishes the idea of gutting his prey with his scimitar; and a Britisher who uses a Weatherby sniper rifle, the same rifle Bolan has been known to use. Strangely, everyone knows who Bolan is; Alchupa even has an entire wall of his place lined with newspaper clippings about the Executioner's exploits.

Alchupa has the assassins draw straws to see who goes first; he's offered a million dollar bounty for whoever kills Bolan but he's uncertain if any of them will succeed. Why he doesn't send them all out at once is glossed over; it's intimated that the five wouldn't get along. The Arab is up first and heads from Brazil up to the midwest, where Bolan has been tracked -- for in his own subplot Bolan has conveniently just learned about Alchupa.

In one of the many subplots here the regular branch of the DEA have been tracking the drug lord, suspecting something big coming up for Alchupa; also there's something about a secret branch in the DEA which is made up of former mercenaries and other of their ilk, rather than "true" DEA agents. Long story short, it all has the taste of a setup, and Bolan eventually learns that there are dirty agents in the DEA who are plotting with Alchupa to overtake Brazil.

The battle between the Arab and Bolan is well done and very much in The Most Dangerous Game mould, as the Arab hunts Bolan through the dark forests. In fact, Schmidt leaves little room to doubt this is his intention; he actually writes: "It was the most dangerous game." It's a good scene and makes one want to read more -- the idea of top assassins coming one after another to collect a bounty on Bolan's head makes for an interesting plot. Only, just as he did in Devil's Bargain, Schmidt blows it. It's as if he doesn't realize he already has a good plot, or perhaps that he gets bored with it. For the entire assassin plot is jettisoned.

The Viper, you see, is one of those DEA special agents and has his own subplot in the mire of subplots. He takes the weapons of the three other remaining assassins and informs them that they're now working for him; they're still going after Bolan, but not to kill him -- they're going to recruit him and then the four of them will join up with the Viper's DEA special team to launch their own war against Alchupa.

Bolan's captured after a running battle in which an innocent old truck-driver and a good DEA agent are killed. He goes along with the Viper and his men; Bolan is determined to kill Alchupa anyway, so why not? Also he's determined to find out who's behind the DEA corruption and bring them to justice, too. The other assassins, meanwhile, cook up their own plots; some of them still want to kill Bolan, so as to brag in the assassin's world (how exactly they'd spread the word goes unmentioned -- I gather there must be a magazine like Assassin's Weekly or something), whereas the Mongol in true B-movie "wise Oriental" fashion sees the noble character of Bolan and decides to help him.

There follows of course a huge battle scene, with everyone against everyone. Again like Devil's Bargain it all spirals out of control due to Schmidt's character-hopping. He doesn't POV-hop; Schmidt stays locked in the perspective of one character at a time, which is a good thing. It's just that he jumps from character to character to character. Too many cooks in the kitchen. After reading enough of these novels I've come to understand that they work better when they focus on just a few characters; Schmidt instead wants to deliver epics, complete with large casts of characters and various subplots. It just gets to be all too much after a while.

Other than that Schmidt is a good writer, which makes the plot-jumble such a shame. If he'd stuck with the Most Dangerous Game concept I think Blood of the Lion would've been an exceptional installment in the never-ending Executioner series.

SuperBolan #100: Devil's Bargain

SuperBolan #100: Devil's Bargain, by Dan Schmidt
January, 2005 Gold Eagle Books

This is a more recent example of the men's adventure novel; it's good to know the genre is still alive but it's obviously on life-support. Dan Schmidt may be a familiar name to some; since the mid-'80s he's ghostwritten 40-some Gold Eagle titles, and in the late '80s he wrote the Killsquad series under the psuedonymn "Frank Garrett." At the same time he also wrote the Eagle Force series under his own name.

Schmidt is usually taken to task for his "needless gore" and ultraviolence, especially amongst the die-hard Gold Eagle fans, but they just as often complain about the man's jumbled and padded narratives, with needlessly-overblown casts of characters. Reading Devil's Bargain, I can somewhat see what they mean, particularly on the latter criticism. In a way, this "SuperBolan" encapsulates why I stopped reading Gold Eagle books over two decades ago. It's almost monotonous in a way, and bores more than it entertains.

The biggest shame is that the villains of the piece have such potential: Alpha Deep Six, a deep-cover Black Ops squad so deep-cover that they've been missing for the past decade and presumed dead. These guys have the makings of awesome villains, US commandos who have gone rogue and now actually fund terrorists themselves. Each of the Six has been "reborn" with a mythical name: There's Crammon, the leader; Acheron, the second-in-command; Thor, a big guy who fights with double axes; and so on. Problem is, Schmidt does little to differentiate between them. I spent the whole novel confusing Crammon and Acheron.

In the middle of all this is Mack Bolan, the Executioner himself. I'm not sure if the guy is now like a comic book character, ageless; in reality he'd be in his sixties at least, which is hard to buy in the action genre -- but then, Sylvester Stallone proved it could be done (and damn well) in his 2008 Rambo. My guess is that these novels must occur in some time-stasis zone, as Bolan still acts like a man in his thirties...ie, just like the Bolan of the Pendleton originals or the Executioners I read back in the 1980s. To make it all the stranger, Crammon himself is a 'Nam vet, ordering around some men he considers his sons. I don't know. I guess I'm thinking about it too much, which is beside the point.

Devil's Bargain opens like an episode of 24, with a wave of terrorism slamming through the US. Bolan has been given highest clearance to stop the threat, which involves lots of bombings on commuter trains and buses. Schmidt pulls that old Gold Eagle page-filling trick I'd forgotten: opening the occasional chapter with pages and pages of the point of view of a terrorist who soon meets his end at the hands of Bolan. But then, Schmidt does that throughout; you only spend perhaps a page or two in a character's perspective before he hopscotches to the next one, leaving for a confusing and frustrating mess. The issue is not the multiple-character perspectives. It's that all of the characters sound the damn same.

While the US-attacks are going on, all of them the work of a certain Islamic group, the Alpha Deep Six guys kidnap Barbara Price, apparently a recurring character in the Bolan universe -- a lady who works for the top-secret "Stony Man" collective and occasionally sleeps with Bolan. She's kidnapped because Crammon and his men have heard of this ultra-secret commando facility which might impede their plans, and so kidnap Price as collateral. Or something. In fact this kidnapping angle only exists so that Bolan can become embroiled in the plot...and also so he has a personal reason to see the mission through. Because otherwise Price's kidnapping has nothing to do with anything, and after she's abducted she pretty much drops out of the narrative.

Once Bolan gets in the picture he begins to track down Alpha Deep Six. We gradually learn that the bastards have funded this day-long attack on the US as a sort of cover for themselves, so they could pull off a bank job. The bank they are robbing is the fictional "Bank of Islam," probably one of the more novel ideas in the book: an endless cache of dollars and gold hidden in an ancient crypt beneath Ankara, Turkey. The place is so secret that most US agencies consider it a myth, but Alpha Deep Six have learned that it truly exists. The place is heavily guarded and Alpha has recruited a team of Iraqi soldiers as well as disaffected US soldiers to raid the place.

After a few hundred pages of character-hopping the raid finally begins. It is a stirring scene, only again ruined by Schmidt's insistence upon hopping from one character to another every other page. It should be mentioned that Bolan is busy dusting his shelves while all this occurs; really, the Executioner is more of a guest star in Devil's Bargain. Though he wastes a few terrorists (as expected), he's instead always a few steps behind Alpha, trying to figure out what they're up to.

Meanwhile we have an endless but entertaining action scene as Crammon and his men wade into the booby-trapped bowls of the Bank of Islam. In a bit of dark humor they use their Iraqi soldiers as trap-bait, tossing them ahead into dark tunnels and letting them take the brunt of whatever trap has been set. It's all like Indiana Jones. Once through the traps of course they encounter armed resistance, and here Schmidt delivers heaps of ultraviolent fight scenes, but really it isn't as gory as I expected -- it's got nothing on Army of Devils, that's for sure. Along the way Alpha Deep Six suffers incredible casualties, and finally Bolan catches up with them while the battle is coming to an end. The climax of Devil's Bargain seems rushed and, well, anticlimatic, which is strange given the expanded page length of these SuperBolans.

But all the tried-and-true gimmicks you remember from Gold Eagle are still at play: endless detail about various guns and the ammo they use, right-wing philosophizing, and a protagonist more superhuman than possible. Don Pendleton was sure to give his creation a dose of hummanity, something which has obviously been lost over the past decades. I'm sure other Gold Eagle ghostwriters have attempted to keep the spirit alive, but separating the wheat from the chaff is a job for someone with a stronger will than mine -- I'll be much happier staying in the lurid and exploitative world of the Imitation Executioners, like The Sharpshooter or The Marksman.

Able Team #8: Army of Devils

Able Team #8: Army of Devils, by Dick Stivers
October, 1983 Gold Eagle Books

Without a doubt, this is the most insane, brutal, sadistic, over-the-top gory book I've yet reviewed on this blog. It's great!! It goes beyond even the lunacy of Gannon or Blood Bath, which is shocking enough, but even more shocking is that Army of Devils comes from a most unexpected source: Gold Eagle Books. If more of their novels had been like this rather than generic, status quo terrorist-of-the-month stuff, then they'd be as hotly-collected as the earlier, more lurid examples of the genre. Because in reality Army of Devils is more like something Manor Books would've published a decade earlier.

"Dick Stivers" was a house name for the series; this novel was actually written by GH Frost, a man who wrote a dozen or so Able Team books, many of which are supposedly as insane as this one. When I was a kid in the mid-'80s I subscribed to Gold Eagle; every other month I'd receive a box of books. Able Team was always included, but I never read any of them. (They sure looked good lined up on my bookshelf, though!) Being such a fan of the publisher I knew all about them, though: a three-man commando team who usually responded to domestic terrorism threats, but would occasionally go abroad.

The Team is comprised of Carl Lyons, the leader and general alpha male, Pol Blancanales, and Gadgets Schwarz. It doesn't really matter though, as Lyons is the star of the book; the other two don't even show up until over halfway through, and even then mostly serve as back-up. This isn't a problem for me, as it allows Frost to concentrate on a protagonist and really build up the novel. Because quite honestly, Army of Devils is superbly written, with a level of character depth usually unseen in this genre; the action scenes are sadistic and brutal and insanely gory, but amid all of that Frost is still able to dole out exceptional dialog, narrative, and quiet moments of reflection.

But first the carnage. The novel opens with some of the most over-the-top stuff I've ever read, as Frost details the murderous rampage of a gang of punks one summer night in LA. Out of their minds on a variant of PCP which turns them into zombies, their only thought is to kill whitey. Yes, this novel preys on the fears of the conservative white male even moreso than the earlier Hijacking Manhattan.

These opening pages give the tone of a horror novel more than action, as the punks -- black and Chicano the lot of them, as Frost often reminds us -- kill with abandon, often in the most brutal of ways. And they truly do become zombies under the influence of the mysterious drug; unable to reason or talk, unable to feel pain. And the only way to kill them is to blow off their heads or sever their spinal columns! Just when you think this opening section has attained the peak of brutality, it goes even further, ending with another gang of punks killing the occupants of a broken-down car and then playing a quick game of ball with their baby...before finally tossing it out the window of their speeding car.

LA is set into a panic and Carl Lyons just happens to be on the scene, in town to provide a demonstration of an automatic shotgun to the LAPD. He's here with his girlfriend Flor, a pretty DEA agent who happens to be a sort of liason with Stony Man, the shady ensemble for which Able Team works. And who would believe that here we get an actual sex scene in a Gold Eagle novel?? Again, it's as if Frost has no idea who he is writing for, and more power to him. Beyond the shenanigans this is another well-crafted scene, with great dialog and introspection for the two characters. And Lyons himself comes off like a throwback to those earlier men's adventure protagonists, a hothead who's always about to blow a fuse.

Lyons hears all about the horror that was the previous night, and vows to find out what's up. He calls in his teammates and here the gory fun begins. The whole middle section of this novel concerns Able Team infiltrating a building filled with these drugged-up zombies, all of them armed and ready to kill. It's one hell of a gory ride, with the Team blasting apart wave after wave of zombie-punks, even hacking them up with machetes when they run out of ammo. In fact it gets to be so gory that eventually the Team finds themselves standing in ankle-deep blood!

Army of Devils comes off like Dawn of the Dead meets Assault on Precinct 13...or even like an NC-17 version of Death Wish 3 or Stallone's Cobra. If you have a fondness for those '80s action movies where middle-aged protagonists spend the entire film blowing away punks, then you owe it to yourself to check out Army of Devils. Just when you think he's topped himself, Frost rises to another peak and shocks you all over again. And again, it's not just a case of ultraviolence -- the man can truly write, even delivering some dark humor.

Every time I read one of these OTT novels I wonder how seriously we're to take the author. This is especially important when one is reading a Gold Eagle novel, a notoriously right-wing publisher. And Army of Devils does go out of its way to bash the "liberal media," the hippies of the '60s, the Black Panthers, and on and on. There's even a Geraldo Rivera-type who works for a "communist" public access show who suffers perhaps the goriest fate in the book, literally hacked to pieces by frothing, drugged-up punks -- Frosts's commentary on what the liberals deserve? There are also many instances where Lyons and his friends lambaste the liberal, tree-hugging attitudes of both the public and the media.

We learn early in the novel that the drug has been dispersed by a former Black Panther (of course, right?) who works with the CEO of a non-profit Hispanic American company. This non-profit guy is secretly a Communist agent and works to destroy the government (of course, right?). These two have amassed a veritable army of punks -- all of them black and Chicano, remember -- and juiced them with the drug, working them up into anti-white fits of rage. The idea is to foster a race war which will destroy the US. But the question is, where did they get this drug? The Team discovers there's more to the story than they first expected, and it all ends with a climatic battle with the Team in a helicopter going after a van which might be driven by CIA agents...a battle which ends in personal disaster for one of the Team.

Anyway, you can consider me impressed with the work of GH Frost. I'm definitely going to seek out more of his Able Team novels one of these days. This one comes highly recommended to all who want to see just how extreme the men's adventure genre can get.

My letter from Gar Wilson

As I've mentioned in previous posts, in my youth I was obsessed with men's adventure novels. My favorites were the Gold Eagle stable, particularly Phoenix Force. I subscribed to Gold Eagle, receiving a bimonthly package of 2 Mack Bolans, 1 Able Team, 1 SOBs (later on though I received a Vietnam series instead, which I never read), and most importantly, 1 Phoenix Force.

Phoenix Force was by far my favorite. Usually I didn't even read the other books but I always read Phoenix Force. I also scoured the racks of the Paperback Exchange in nearby LaVale, Maryland for back issues, soon building up quite a collection.

The series was by Gar Wilson, a man who, in biographical sketches included with the earliest volumes of Phoenix Force, had once served in various armies and had even been a mercenary for hire. My obsession was at its peak from ages 12 to 13, and even at such a young age I still found something a bit off about this bio. But what I didn't realize -- something I didn't discover for a few decades more -- was that Gar Wilson didn't exist.

"Gar Wilson" was a house name, created by Gold Eagle; house psuedonyms of course being a standard in the world of men's adventure novels. But again, I didn't know this. All I knew was that "Gar Wilson" was my favorite writer and Phoenix Force was my favorite series.

At any rate, as my obsession was wearing off I was becoming more interested in sci-fi. I'd wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, so one day in late 1987 I sent Gold Eagle an idea for a Phoenix Force novel which in my mind combined action with sci-fi. I don't have a copy of my letter, but if I recall it correctly, the Force battled some terrorists who were plotting against NASA and ended up on a space ship headed for Mars. I think they even got in a fight on Mars.

I should mention I was thirteen years old when I wrote this. (And I was still going by the name "Joey!")

I sent off my handwritten letter and early in January of 1988 I got a letter back! A scarlet red envelope, containing a typed letter on the same colored paper. An editor from Gold Eagle telling me that, though they appreciated the letter, my story was not fit for Phoenix Force as it was moreso science fiction than adventure. They also informed me that a trip to Mars would take several years, something I'd failed to grasp at the time. (I still have a copy of this letter and maybe sometime I'll post it as well.)

But what really took my breath away was a single sentence, at the very end of the letter: "A copy of your letter has been forwarded to Gar Wilson."

And then, a week or two after that...another letter came in for me, same Nashville, IN return address as Gold Eagle's letter had come from (though post-stamped "San Diego, CA"). But with the name "Gar Wilson" above that return address.

An actual letter to me from Gar Wilson!

I've typed up the letter below, but it's hard to convey the thrill I got, reading through these three crisp, hand-typed pages. Complete with typos and white-out and "Gar's" signature; hell, I still get a thrill reading it.


Gar Wilson
Gold Eagle BooksPO Box 1035
Nashville, IN 47448*


Joey Kenney
PO Box 480
Fort Ashby, WV 26719

February 12, 1988


Dear Joey:

I received a copy of your letter concerning your story plot idea for a future PHOENIX FORCE book. I want to personally thank you for the story plot suggestion about Phoenix Force combating terrorists and winding up on a space shuttle to Mars. Judy Newton has already sent you a letter explaining why this idea would not work for Phoenix Force. I have to agree with her, but I’m writing to you because I don’t want you to be discouraged and give up any hope of writing stories in the future.

Your story is good, but it isn’t right for PHOENIX. The stories in Phoenix Force are in a contemporary setting. They’re taking place in the present. Since the space program is currently on hold…more or less…the idea of a trip to Mars isn’t apt to happen for some time. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t develop a story with the same plot, using characters you come up with on your own instead of Phoenix Force.

I also suggest you first study the accepted style for manuscripts for books (neatly typed, double-spaced, proper use of quotation marks, sentence structure, ect.) you also have to consider how long you want the story to be. PHOENIX FORCES are usually 250 pages (manuscript form) which is about 220 when printed in book form. Your story may be shorter or longer, depending on what you decide to do. Shorter stories might be submitted to magazines. To be honest, since you’re a relative newcomer without many credits as a published author, you’d probably have a better chance getting started as a writer by writing stories for magazines. That’s how I started. I wrote twenty short stories and novelets for

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detective magazines before I started writing full-length novels for Gold Eagle. Book publishers are reluctant to take material from anyone without a track record. Magazine publishers are more inclined to take stories from new guys.

I suggest you also go to the library and look for THE WRITER’S MARKET. It is a book, new editions come out every year, and it prints the various markets for writers. Book publishers, magazine publishers, ect. Look for the 1988 edition. It is a rather expensive book so I suggest you go to the library instead of buying a copy. Look for what magazine or book publisher would be most likely to print a story of the type you wish to write.

When you finish the story (book or short story or novelet), proof-read it for errors. Then send query letters to publishers. Write the letters in proper business-letter form (like this one) and give a brief description of your story (about one page total. Longer descriptions probably won’t be read because editors get a lot of material sent in and they’re more apt to read brief, neatly typed descriptions than long wordy ones). If a publisher is interested in your story, they’ll write to see it. Be sure to enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope with the submission of the manuscript. If a publisher doesn’t accept your material, they’ll mail it back to you and you’ll try to send it somewhere else. Oh, yeah. Make a copy of the manuscript and keep it for your own use, just in case.

Now, every writer gets rejects. I still get them. Gold Eagle doesn’t accept every idea I come up with for Phoenix Force either, so don’t feel bad that your idea wasn’t accepted. Editors are people and they have opinions just like everybody else. They’re not necessarily right or wrong, but they are the guys who take or reject material. If they reject something it doesn’t meat it isn’t any good, it just means they don’t think it will sell as a book. I’ve written stories which were rejected by one publisher and accepted by a different one the same month. Rejections happen. They’re disappointing, but it happens. If you really want to be a writer, you’ll keep trying.

Another thing, I suggest you research subject matter as much as possible.

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I write stories that take place in countries and cities I’ve never been to. I include dialogue in languages I don’t speak and subjects I know nothing about until I’ve done research on the material. The more information you can get on a subject, the better you can write about it. Knowledge is never a waste of time anyway.

Try to find out as much as you can about writing books or short stories before you try to submit anything. Do the best you can every time you write and NEVER CHEAT YOUR READERS. A fiction writer is a story teller. Those stories are suppose to entertain the reader. Everybody makes mistakes and everybody makes errors in stories occasionally, but if you always try to entertain the reader (as well as please yourself) you can’t go too wrong.

I’m writing a rather long letter here and I hope you aren’t bored, but I recall when I was thirteen and wanted to be a writer. I didn’t get any encouragement at the time and a lot of people thought I was just a geek dreamer. People said “you know how much competition there is” and “how many guys are trying to do that.” I won’t say it’s easy. It isn’t. Writing is a lot of hard work, time consuming effort and every writer I’ve ever known has had some big disappointments. Yet, it is very rewarding to see one’s material in print.

Another thing that’s very rewarding is knowing that folks are reading my books and enjoy them. When a reader takes the extra effort to write a letter to me concerning PHOENIX FORCE it is always appreciated, especially from someone interested in writing. If you decide to pursue writing, good luck and bear in mind it can be tough at times, but few things in life worthwhile come easy. Thanks again and good luck whatever you do.


Sincerely,

Gar

Gar Wilson


* Envelope stamped “San Diego, CA, 16 FEB 1988”

I'm not sure how many times I read this letter. My interest in men's adventure novels waned, but my passion for writing continued, and it was in fact from this letter that I learned about the Writer's Market.

And the letter was very inspirational; I followed "Gar's" advice and, after much struggle, succeeded in selling a few short stories, following his advice on how to break into the market. Though I've yet to get a novel published, I'm still trying, and currently have two manuscripts under consideration (neither of them would fall under the "men's adventure" rubric but I've got something in mind that might...!)

In early 2000, years after receiving this letter which still meant so much to me, I briefly became re-interested in the men's adventure novels I'd read as a kid; only then did I look up Gar Wilson. This is when I discovered he was a creation of Gold Eagle.

Ten years after that and I'm back again, reading these novels I enjoyed ages ago. And I'm still wondering who exactly wrote me this letter. It was obviously one of the series writers, but which one? The San Diego postmark is certainly a clue; does anyone know if any of the "Gar Wilsons" lived there?

Regardless, I just want to say "thanks" to Gar Wilson, whoever you are/were; this letter has always been and will continue to be one of my treasured posessions.

3/13/13 Update: A big thanks to Stephen Mertz, who has informed me that the above letter was actually written by William Fieldhouse! Fieldhouse was one of the authors who served as Gar Wilson, and the one most fans consider "the" Gar Wilson. Stephen told me that recently he spoke with Fieldhouse, who remembered writing the letter to me! What I find so great about this is that I now know that my favorite Phoenix Force novels were actually written by Fieldhouse, meaning that this "Gar Wilson" letter was really sent by my favorite author. Not only that, but it was thanks to Fieldhouse that I even got into this genre -- it was his Phoenix Force novel Night of the Thuggee that served as my introduction to men's adventure novels. I discovered it in a WaldenBooks store in late October 1985 when I was 10 years old, bought it, read it, and became an instant fan.