Bad Men Doing Bad-Man Stuff

Presenting a bunch of reviews of action books for the eyeball part of your face!  I'm pretty sure at least a few of these haven't been covered anywhere else yet so they'll hopefully be useful.  Enjoy!  Learn things that'll never do you any good but may be entertaining!  Or just look at the pictures.  You like pictures!

 That's about as badass a cover as you're going to find.  Looks like the cover of one of those old "sweat" magazines. Looks like the artist who did the Lone Wolf series covers, and several others.  Briggs looks like a BMF fo' sho'.

The Killing Ground - John Hardesty (Leisure, 1978)
Joe Briggs is a mercenary who's been targeted for assassination by the CIA.  After an attempt at him fails, Briggs agrees to lead a UN force against IRA terrorists in Northern Ireland to quash the grudge the CIA has against him.  He's soon in even more trouble, though, as the terrorists decimate his troops in a series of violent attacks and traps.  He manages to score some victories with the troops he has left, but they're dwindling and the UN wants to pull him out.  By then he's got personal business to settle with some of the terrorist leaders, though, both avenging some of his officers and a girlfriend they murdered, as well as wanting to finish what he started and prevent some political assassinations.   So, a showdown with the terrorists' top killer is inevitable... especially since Briggs is now on their death list, as well, and won't be safe anywhere unless he finishes it.  Decently written action novel, with frequent fight scenes that are handled realistically; Briggs is tough, but he's no superman, and he doesn't always have a lot of luck, either.  Not bad.

One of the few books I've ever seen that devoted all the cover art to someone who's actually a fairly minor character.

Black Narc - Jeffrey Feinman  (Manor Books, 1977)
Jacobs, the narcotics agent who's the main character in this book, is actually Jewish, but I guess Jew Narc wouldn't be as exploitable a title.  Jacobs is burned out and taking some vacation time with a girl he picked up.   All he wants is some fun but she's in some trouble because an ex-Nazi turned porn producer wants her to star in some depraved snuff-style films he's making, and Jacobs doesn't want that to happen.  Then an old colleague named Washington - who is a black narc - shows up, needing help in busting a bunch of criminals which includes the ex-Nazi.  They found Washington out when he was compromised while working undercover, and now they're threatening  his family.  Washington is a gimmicks whiz, and Jacobs and his girlfriend help Washington plant bugs in the Nazi's office, but they end up recording Washington getting murdered by the thugs.  Jacobs and Washington's sons want some off-the-books revenge for that.  Decently-written pulp novel that's not nearly as exploitative as the title would lead you to believe, and to my knowledge it never actually came out as a movie despite the claims on the cover.

The Burning Season - Wayne D. Dundee  (Dell, 1988)
Inaugural appearance of private eye Joe Hannibal, who in this one is playing bounty hunter as he tracks down a criminal hick named Junior Odum.  He catches Odum at his mother's grave, and Odum stands to give him trouble but swears to go along peacefully if Hannibal will investigate his mother's death.  Supposedly she burned to death while smoking in bed but Junior is convinced that someone killed her.   Junior's right, and finding out who did it will land Hannibal in a few tough scrapes.  Andrew Vachss compared Dundee with Mickey Spillane but I don't really see that; Hannibal is more of a Rockford type than a Hammer, avoiding fights when he can but getting in a few nonetheless, and taking almost as much damage as he deals out.  While the book is gritty it's not really all that hard-boiled, and reminded me a little of James Lee Burke's stuff.  In any case, it's good and well-written, with a solid eye for setting, character, detail, and pacing.

Mafia: Operation Hit Man - Don Romano  (Pyramid, 1974)
Part of a series of unrelated Mafia novels, this one depicts the saga of Dom Caressimo, a former soldier enlisted as a hit man by the mob as a way to start a new "Murder Inc." type of business.  Dom is given assignments and paid upwards of $10,000 a hit, and he's doing well and getting rich until a contract goes out on a girl he once had a fling with.  He fills the contract, in a way that can lay the blame on a serial rapist, but afterwards he has an impotency problem.  He learns that he can temporarily cure the problem by visiting a dominatrix, but for some reason this bit of kink so unnerves the mob that when they get wind of it they decide that Dom may be a liability.  Murder doesn't phase these guys, but a little hanky-spanky gives them the vapors?  Dom finds out they want him dead, though, and he's not a safe man to cross.  Sleazy but well-written sex and violence that plays kind of like one of those Italian crime movies. 

The Headhunters #1: Heroin Triple Cross - John Weisman & Brian Boyer (Pinnacle, 1974)
This is kind of an odd choice to build an action series around -- a police department's Internal Affairs Division -- the watchdog unit that tries to bust dirty cops.  In this book, at least, the authors don't seem to know what to do with the concept, either, and the unit takes a back seat to the criminals as most of the narrative focuses on a high-living Black drug kingpin and his dealings with a brutal, corrupt Black cop.  There's some decent action and drugs and sex sleaze (including a woman who specializes in an act so depraved the reader's never allowed to know what it is) but the narrative gets so muddled you stop caring after a while, and it's trying so hard to read like a blaxploitation movie that it gets embarrassingly racist and silly.  The writing itself isn't bad and I'm betting there's a better book in the series.


You can read a much better review of this book at the great blog, Glorious Trash.

Is that Zach Galifianakis?

Lethal Injection - Jim Nisbet  (Overlook Press, 2009)
A prison doctor is disturbed by a prisoner's nonchalant response to his execution and starts believing the man was innocent.  Driven to find out and with his own personal life in free-fall, he tracks down some of the dead man's partners in crime and tries to uncover the truth about what happened.  His new friends are scary sociopaths and definitely not safe company, and when he finds out the truth, even that has more secrets and drags him further into darkness.  The characterization is a little weak; it's hard to feel much sympathy for such self-wrecking douchebags, but the situation is bleak and severe and packs a punch despite the lack of sympathetic protagonists.  Solid neo-noir.

 The cover art is the best thing about this book, easily.  Gotta love the Glenn Danzig guy in gladiator/bondage gear on the back whose arm's a squid, and the ax-weilding guy with a spider-plant-flower beard and the Cuisinart haircut.  And the insect-face guy must've won one helluva rodeo to score that belt buckle.

Mutants Amok #1 - Mark Grant (Avon, 1991)
In the future mankind bred mutants to fight their wars and do their work, but it backfired and the genetically-engineered monstrosities have enslaved mankind.  Most humans work on farms or are used for horrible experiments, but small bands of human rebels try to free mankind from the mutant enslavement.  One rebel leader named Max Turkel crashes his plane near a farm and is hidden in a treehouse by a human who's never known anything but enslavement.  Turkel is pretty much of a jerk, getting drunk and making lame sex jokes, but somehow he inspires others to seek freedom, and when they farm boy's girlfriend is abducted for mutant experiments, he teams up with Max to fight back.   The whole thing's too sci-fi goofy for me and you can't really take it seriously (the mutants bred a race of Hobbits for Christsake), and Turkel is a clownish, unrealistic oaf of a hero.  There's lots of gore but it all comes off as cartoonish, and the mutants are so evil I'm not sure how they'd maintain a society when they kill each other off so randomly.  If you have a tolerance for sci-fi and aren't too picky, though, you may get more out of it than I did, because it's not boring or anything, just wacky.  

Sexy Violent Trash Lit! or, How I Spent My High-School Vacation

A while back I promised (or perhaps threatened) to do a post about the “action” paperbacks that appeared in the early 70’s and flourished during the lunkhead 80’s, when America was drunk on Reagan and Rambo and “action hero” was almost a profession you could look for in the yellow pages. I read a lot of these things back then, because I went to a crap private school that was basically a scam: it was overpriced, had mostly substandard teachers, occasionally used us for free labor, tried to indoctrinate us in Baptist-Madrassa style, and wasted two hours every day on “study halls,” also known as "day care for teens." I never did my homework in study hall. Instead I’d flirt (incredibly clumsily, in embarrassing retrospect) as much as I could get away with with a girl I had a crush on (even though we were totally unsuitable for each other and it was pointless. She was cute at the time, but I bet now she looks like she’s carved out of turkey bacon. You could just tell she’d be one of those… mmm, sour grapes). And read.

And read and read. Actually, given the quality of most of the teachers, study hall probably was the most educational part of the day for me. I read a lot of my dad’s old Max Brand and Louis L’amour Westerns (which are actually really well-written) and Edge books. Edge books were “The Most Violent Westerns In Print,” and I got turned onto them by buying a couple at a neighborhood yard sale and eventually collected all of ‘em (the ones that sold in America, anyway - turns out they were a British creation). They were spaghetti-westernish and, indeed, violent. Edge was always sticking knives in people’s mouths and slicing their cheeks open and such.

Anyway, that bad influence sparked me into seeking more violent literature in the form of these “men’s adventure” paperbacks I’m going to discuss here. These series were the bastard sons of pulp magazine heroes like The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, The Green Lama, the Phantom Detective, the Black Hood, G8 and his Battle Aces, Secret Agent X, Operator 5, and others. I won’t go into those too much, but you can still find reprints of them at places like Vintage Library, and I’ve read a good many of those, too. The Spider especially kicks ass, and even though they were written in the 30’s they’re crazy-violent, with body counts sometimes reaching the tens of thousands as terrorist masterminds put cholera in New York’s water supply, topple buildings, turn people into deformed homicidal maniacs, etc. How could you pass up hyperbolic titles like The Devil’s Death Dwarfs, Death Reign of the Vampire King, Machine Guns Over The White House, or King of the Fleshless Legion?

Anyway, back to the 70’s and 80’s paperbacks. I bought lots of these at used book stores for pennies, and - being a total trash-fiend who buys so much library-sale crap that rooms in my house are now literally impassible - I still snag ‘em if they’re cheap enough. I even still read them once in a while. They’re often printed on cheap paper (though better quality than the pulps), sometimes have cigarette ads in the middle (because apparently there’s nothing like reading about a bereaved psychopath killing Mafiosi to make you crave the smoooooth taste of a micronite-filtered Kent), and the cover art is sometimes priceless. It’s fun to think about artists making their livings doing endless paintings of angry people firing guns. This will probably be a multi-part project because there are so damn many of these series, and I’m not even going to try to be organized about it; I want to hit the popular ones as well as the obscure junk nobody remembers. At some point I may do a “reviews-of-action-series-that-don’t-exist” post because these things are so easy to satirize, but all of the following do exist, even if they sound over-the-top. You probably shouldn’t read them, though, because they’d distract you from something more worthwhile, like a study of Leviticus.

And now, randomly…

1. The Executioner - Don Pendleton, Pinnacle Books. Okay, this one’s not so random, because along with the Nick Carter Killmaster books, they kicked off the whole party. They were here first, and they’ve outlasted all their competitors; you can still find Executioner books (and their spin-offs, Mack Bolan and Stony Man) in your grocery store. First in and last man standing, baby! Mack Bolan, a.k.a. The Executioner, Sergeant Mercy, and “that Bastard Bolan,“ was a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran whose family was murdered by the Mafia, sparking him to use his military skills to declare a one-man war against them. After reaching 38 books in the series, Don Pendleton turned it over to a corporate author team and Bolan wrapped up his Mafia vendetta and went to work for the government, where he rescues us all from international terrorism to this very day (even though he’s probably pushing 70). The Executioner spawned a zillion other “one man war against the Mafia” series (most lacking any class whatsoever), which were so blatant that they even borrowed the title shtick of using a city’s name in the title (such as Vegas Vendetta, Colorado Kill-Zone, Miami Massacre, etc.). Marvel Comics’ The Punisher is also a direct steal of Bolan, and is another way the long arm of the Executioner is still influential today. Ya just can't kill 'im.

2. The Butcher - Stuart Jason, Pinnacle Books. This was one of my favorites until I noticed the pattern, and the fact that some books would have entire chapters lifted from previous books with a few names changed! This was an Executioner variant, with the novel twist that the badass antihero was a former Mafia goon himself. He’d gotten sick of all the crime and quit the mob. But nobody quits the Mafia, you say? Of course not, which mean that our hero not only had to carry out international spy missions for the government, but also had to fend off Mafia torpedoes who were after the $100,000 dead-only price the mob put on his head (which was upped to $250,000 as the series moved on and inflation devalued the dollar). They usually showed up in the first chapter, got dispensed with, and then it was off to Angola or whereever. The Butcher was an expert shot with his Walther P-38 (equipped with a silencer “it was illegal for Jesus Christ himself to own”) and also used a switchblade and brass knuckles a lot. He usually had time to engage in some badass dialogue with the inept (and usually perverted) hitmen he “chilled,” and sometimes did outlandish feats like firing down the barrel of another guy’s gun or killing an ox with one brass-knuckled punch. The bad guys were always comically gruesome fiends, covered with pus-filled warts and such, and so sexually depraved they'd rape a rock heap if they thought there was a snake in it. Even though Butcher always came out on top, every book ended with him having “the bitter ashy taste of defeat on his tongue.” Oddly, some of these books had a picture of a real guy on the cover instead of artwork. Wonder what that guy's doing now. Probably sitting in some nursing home telling people "I used to be The Butcher!"


3. .357 Vigilante - Ian Ludlow, Pinnacle Books. The movie Death Wish inspired almost as many of these series as The Executioner, and this short-lived series (a trilogy) was a standout. Written by a cash-needing college student Lee Goldberg, who went on to write for a bunch of TV series, these stories of “Mr. Jury” taking on neo-Nazis, child-pornographers, and criminal punks weren’t bad and sometimes winked at you, making you think they might be parodies of the genre, just a little bit.

4. Mondo - Anthony DeStefano, Manor Books. Extremely tough and hardboiled action about a maladjusted, misanthropic badass who’s a thief by profession but ends up killing people more often than not. As he battles ninjas and drug kingpins, our fiercely-alienated antihero takes a lot of abuse himself (even getting hooked on heroin while in captivity and having to go cold-turkey by chaining himself to a tree). Realistically grim and cold-blooded. It's highly obscure and I’ve only got one (Cocaine Kill) but may seek out others, because it was kinda impressive.

5. The Rat Bastards - John Mackie, Jove Books. Oh, how I loved the fucking Rat Bastards. It was impossible to tell one book from the other, but they were so violent, vulgar, and over the top that you couldn’t help but be a fan, if only for the reason that you got to take a book to school that had "Bastards" right there in the title. If they'd had a series called The Gun-Toting Motherfuckers I'd've been the happiest kid in the world. I always imagined the “Bastard Squad” show mentioned in The Young Ones show would be like this series. It’s basically a Dirty Dozen ripoff set in the Pacific theater of WWII, following a squad of criminal types who killed Japanese while they weren’t beating each other up, trying to find something to fuck, a place to take a dump, something to steal, or something to get drunk off of. They were cowards, lowlifes, goldbricks, thieves, and would frequently get badly wounded or killed( so you’d always get new replacement scumbags coming into the cast), but they sure perpetrated a lot of mindless violence. The books were so action-packed that there wasn’t really anything but action, which made them completely interchangeable. Only one book - where the boys got some R&R time and got in violent trouble amongst the civilian population in the form of whorehouse fights and such - was in any way different from the others, and the series continued to the end of the war. Trashy, reprehensible fun.

6. The Marksman - Frank Scarpetta, Belmont Tower. Bottom-of-the-barrel Executioner rip-off, turned out cheap, fast, and sleazy. These are great mostly because of the violent titles (one’s just called Kill! - ya can’t get more straightforward than that) and cheap, gory cover art. Phillip Magellan is a guy killing off all the Mafia goons he can find because they killed his wife and kid. Even though the writing’s pretty crap (with such weird author tactics as using exclamation points outside of dialogue), you gotta love titles like Icepick In The Spine, Kill Them All, Mafia Wipe-Out, etc., and declarations on the back like “Tortured Death!,” “Garbage Disposal,” “Open Season On Rats!” and hyperbole about “squashing Mafia lice.” The kind of book you often find used, still smelling of cigarette smoke and spilled Pabst.







7. The Sharpshooter - Bruno Rossi, Leisure Books. I strongly suspect that the author was also writing the Marksman books, because I’ve seen him slip and call the hero, Johnny Rock, “Magellan” once or twice. I imagine he was turning these things out so fast that he oversaturated one publisher and branched out to another and forgot which guy he was writing, since they’re exactly the same. Again, cover copy and paintings are the charm in these blatant Executioner rip-offs. Neither the Marksman or the Sharpshooter books ever decided what their hero was supposed to look like, so his appearance changes from cover to cover, making these sloppier than most. One of ‘em looks like they just painted Clint Eastwood, complete with Dirty Harry .44 Magnum.



















































And speaking of…

8. Dirty Harry - Dane Hartman, Warner. Yep, they made a series based on the Dirty Harry movies, even featuring paintings of Clint Eastwood on the covers. These are really good and stay in the spirit of the movies, and if - like me - you can’t get enough of the movies, these are a welcome addition to the canon, and would have made good movies. Ironically, Clint’s “Man With No Name” Spaghetti Westerns also spawned a series of Western novels, expanding on their mythology.




































9. The Chopper Cop - Paul Ross, Popular Library. This very obscure series’ biggest claim to fame is probably that Raging Slab used one title - Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert - for one of their CD’s. From the back copy: “Terry Bunker is a cop other cops don’t like. He’s too hip, too honest, too much his own man. He plays the game his way or not at all, but he gets the job done.” Basically, this is a “hip” cop who rides a motorcycle and hangs out with hippies, weeding out the crime in their midst. These are pretty rare, I’ve only run across one.

























10. Bronson: Street Vigilante - Philip Rawls, Manor Books. How blatant is this? It’s such a Death Wish ripoff, the hero’s named after the movie’s star. Gotta admire the panache of that, at least they're not fuckin' with ya. “He was a knee-jerk liberal until they murdered his family. Then he became even more savage than the street scum he stalked.” I remember these being pretty over-the-top sick as far as the violence went. It got pretty depraved. Not a healthy read.

11. Operation Hang Ten - Patrick Morgan, Macfadden Books. Odd and very obscure series (I’ve only seen the two I bought, but apparently there were at least ten of ‘em) with a spy surfer keeping Communists and killers out of the surf scene. Odd titles like Cute & Deadly Surf Twins, Freaked-Out Strangler, Topless Dancer Hangup, Too Many Murders, and Beach Queen Blowout leads me to believe these are probably tongue-in-cheek, but I haven’t read one yet.

12. Keller/ Ryker - Jack Cannon/Edson T. Hammill/ Nelson DeMille. Manor, Leisure, Pocket. This Dirty-Harry-inspired asshole-cop series has a storied history, being put out under various pseudonyms and by various publishers, with even the main character’s name being changed as a dodge for copyright litigation or something. Anyway, the main character is a racist, sexist, rule-bending (but effective) dick of a police sergeant who has to take on the slashers, cannibals, drug dealers, snipers, psychotics, etc. that plague his city. This one really works hard to make the hero completely unlikable, which is fun.

13. The Outrider - Richard Harding. Pinnacle. One of the early Road Warrior ripoffs. The hero, a guy named Bonner, drove around a post-apocalyptic wasteland, having rather boneheaded battles against gangs of scumbags, most of them led by a guy named Leather. Leather had knives for hands because Bonner had cut his real ones off. Ammo is pretty scarce in the post-nuke world, so Bonner mostly used knives. The oddest thing about this series is the weird choice for cover paintings: Bonner looks like Andrew Dice Clay with Downs Syndrome! Look, I’m not kidding.


























Rather than looking tough, he looks like he could be distracted in the midst of a fight by a kitten or a shiny red apple. They changed cover artists after the third book, but by then he was pretty well-established in my mind as being goofy-lookin’.

14. M.I.A. Hunter - Jack Buchanan, Jove - Rambosploitation with veteran Mark Stone (seems like every action hero has a last name dealing with either rocks or birds of prey; they were born to be tough!) going back to Vietnam and elsewhere to liberate P.O.W.’s. Thin plots that exist only to propel cartoonish action make this read like a transcript of a video game, with lots of cheesy gushing about how heroic Mark and his friends are. The narrative sometimes stops to say things like “Damn right!” and the action scenes tend to be of the “he shot this guy and then spun and shot another guy and then a guy came up on the right and he shot him too,” etc. Pretty average.

15. Fox - Adam Hardy, Pinnacle. This is an oddball for an action series, since it’s a period piece, and the writing is actually verging on classy and highbrow. It’s a naval adventure about a complete bastard trying to rise in the ranks of the British Navy in the old sailing ship days. This anti-hero, George Abercrombie Fox, is a real prick and even a psychopath, with some kind of brain-damage condition that causes temporary blindness if his blood pressure gets jacked too high. He mistreats his men, press-gangs citizens, and mostly looks out for himself, but he’s effective, and the action scenes are realistic and strong. These were much better than most series books, and the author is so knowledgeable about the topic that you may need to study up on your period nautical terminology just to keep up.

16. K’ing Kung Fu - Marshall Macao. These came from an obscure publisher and are hard to find used, but I just noticed on Amazon that they’re back in print, apparently from some print-on-demand place. Wise move on the part of the author, I think. I haven’t read any of ‘em yet, but they’re martial arts adventures following a fighter known as “the Son of the Flying Tiger.”

17. Black Samurai - Marc Olden. Signet. These actually inspired a movie version, with Jim Kelly. Haven’t read one yet, but they deal with an African-American G.I. who gets trained in martial arts while in Japan, and uses his skills to combat various evildoers. The Blaxploitation thing spilled over to a lot of obscure books (most notably the Holloway House back catalog) but this was as mainstream as it got. They’re reportedly pretty good, and I’ll have to get around to actually reading some of ‘em one of these days.

18. Narc - Robert Hawkes, Signet. I’ve read a couple of these badass-D.E.A. agent John Bolt vs. drug dealers books and have been pretty impressed with the level of writing. He usually faces off against some particular cartel led by a colorful badguy, and the action is less brainless than most.

19. Mafia: Operation ________ - Don Romano, Pyramid. These were apparently all concerned with inner-Mafia conflicts, like the Sopranos or something, with no real heros around. I haven’t read any yet, and only have Operation Hit Man, but one called Operation Porno sounds promising.

20. Soldato! - Al Conroy, Magnum Books. More Executioner variation, kinda in the Butcher school, as the hero, Johnny Morini, is a Mafia goon who turned traitor and is hunted by the mob, and basically declares war on them out of self-preservation. The action in the one I read was more realistic than most books in the genre, and kept things at a this-could-actually-happen level.

21. Israeli Commandos - Andrew Sugar. Manor Books. A series from the author of another series, the body-hopping clone action series The Enforcer. This one took the unusual tact of focusing on a team of Jewish harasses battling Arab terrorists in defense of Israel. It’s a rare example of Jewsploitation, competently handled from cheap ‘n’ pulpy Manor Books.

22. The Revenger - Jon Messmann, Signet. Yet another direct rip-off The Executioner, with another gun-totin’ fella (this one named Ben Martin) “teaching the Mafia to sweat with fear” and “teaching the most feared men in America the meaning of blind, gut-wrenching terror.” And, presumably, teaching us all the power of unrestrained hyperbole. Forward, mush!

23. Joe Gall books - Philip Atlee, Fawcett Gold Medal. This series never had an official name, although the antihero, Joe Gall, was known as “The Nullifier.” He was depicted on the covers in both paintings and photographs as a craggy, ugly guy with a badly pock-mocked face, and he was a contract counter-espionage agent and “take-out artist.” Apparently this guy’s a real jerk (one back cover has sequential photos of this guy smoking a cigarette in an infuriatingly assholish manner) which is usually a fun thing in these books. Haven’t read one yet.





























24. Nick Carter, Killmaster - Ace Books. Not to be confused with the Backstreet Boys guy, this is possibly the most prolific action hero of ‘em all, having his roots in a detective incarnation back in 1886! The 70’s and 80’s version was an espionage agent working for an organization known as AXE, and he was armed with three weapons - a stripped-down Luger named Wilhelmina, a stilleto named Hugo, and a gas bomb he kept taped under his balls which he called Pierre. There were hundreds of these books (you’ll find some in almost every used bookstore, guaranteed) and they were written by a variety of authors (including some notables such as Michael Avallone and Martin Cruz Smith) although no author was ever listed on the cover. Some were in first person and some in third, but the quality of the writing in these usually isn’t bad. Nick beds a lot of women and usually endures torture at some point. One of them I’ve read, The Sign of the Prayer Shawl, was amazingly prescient: the plot involved former Japanese kamikazes who planned to hijack planes and crash them into America’s financial centers and government buildings. Sound familiar? And it was published in 1976!

25. The Doomsday Warrior - Ryder Stacey, Zebra Books. A survivalist named Ted Rockson heads a group of resistance fighters against the occupying forces in post-Nuke America. Mostly he battles against an evil KGB agent, Colonel Killov, and he gets captured a lot. These were pretty goofy but did move nicely and were engaging in a comic-bookish way. Every cover had a hand holding up something (a weapon, a burning flag, a Statue of Liberty, a Declaration of Independence, etc., and most titles had “America” in there somewhere. There were a lot of these, and I think the last one actually came to some kind of conclusion. You could do worse. Apparently you can even get these as audio books!

I better let off here, because this thing’s huge already. I do feel neglectful not covering such series as The Lone Wolf, The Vigilante, Traveler, The Black Berets, Stormrider, Roadblaster, Hawker, The Specialist, Enforcer, Hellrider, Mutants Amok, Mac Wingate, Gannon, Confirmed Kill, Phoenix, the horrible Ashes series, The Liquidator, Overload, The Assassin, Justin Perry: Assasin, TNT, Stryker, The Hunter, The Avenger, Kung Fu Featuring Mace, Detroit P.D., Jason Striker: Master of Martial Arts, Death Squad, The Mercenary, The Last Ranger, The Bounty Hunter, The Destroyer, The Penetrator, Man From O.R.G.Y, Cherry Delight, S.O.B.’s, The Zone, Omega Sub, Survival 2000, Black Eagles, Headhunters, the Death Merchant, and dozens more… but, maybe sometime in the future if I get around to it, who knows? Just too big a task for one post.

Action Series Books: an incomplete bibliography, pt. 1

First up, help Japan if you can. Goddamn earthquakes, anyway.

Okay, this may bore all 5-6 of our loyal readers who don't care about this stuff, but I'm putting the work in for the rare passerby who might find such a list handy. Anyone who doesn't find this one entertaining is welcome to go read the my-girlfriend-is-a-wanted-felon/I-am-confused-and-eat-things-I-find-in-the-street jokes that fill my glorious-yet-unheralded Twitter page instead. But sometimes ya gotta do things just for the one or two who'll appreciate it, and I know in my own obsessive search for these kinds of things, such a bunch of lists would've been helpful. I did find much useful information on such blogs as Bullets and Broads (post more often, dude!), Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot, and Glorious Trash, and also BareBones and Sick Hipster's especially great post on The Sharpshooter.

Speaking of The Sharpshooter, you'll notice that he's not on this list, nor are some of the other heavy hitters in the genre like The Marksman, The Death Merchant, my man The Butcher, The Doomsday Warrior, Black Samurai, Ninja Master, or a whole lot of others. That's because I've only got so much energy for totin' books back and forth and typin', so consider this a work in progress. If I get really ambitious I'll even try to count up all the freakin' Nick Carter books someday.

I have most of the books listed here 'cuz I'm an obsessive, hoarding weirdo, but some of 'em remain elusive. I'll look around the 'net and fill holes in my collections, but some of these puppies are just price-prohibitive and I'm not payin' more than $4-5 bucks for any of these things, 'cuz they are pretty trashy, after all. And some of the asking prices for these things is crazy... try looking up used copies of Mutants Amok: Christmas Slaughter sometime! Not me, brotha... I'll take my chances on finding it in a Book Rack for a buck-fitty someday.

Anyway, hope this will help some other weirdo in his neo-pulp hunt. I've included a little description of what each series is about. Those are very scant and may get expanded later in revisions of this post. Like I said, work in progress. To my knowledge, these are all the complete lists of the series. Any corrections will be appreciated.

And thanks to Lee Goldberg (author of the .357 Vigilante series) for the helpful reminder (and generous offer) in the comments - much appreciated!

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The Avenger - Chet Cunningham (Warner Books, 1987-1988) A DEA agent whose wife is murdered quits the force to become a vigilante and declares one-man war on the international drug trade. Kinda like if The Lone Wolf wasn't a lunatic.
1. The Avenger
2. Houston Hellground
3. Columbia Crackdown
4. Manhattan Massacre


The Black Berets - Mike McCray (Dell, 1984-1987) A group of highly-trained soldiers form a mercenary team to fight evil all over the world.
1. Deadly Reunion
2. Cold Vengeance
3. Black Palm
4. Contract: White Lady
5. Louisiana Firestorm
6. The Death Machine Contract
7. The Red Man Contract
8. D. C. Death March
9. Night of the Jaguar
10. Contract: Terror Summit
11. The Samurai Contract
12. The Akbar Contract
13. Blue Water Contract


The Bounty Hunter - Tiny Boyles and Hank Nuwer (Playboy, 1981-1982) The supposedly-based-on-real-life (but I doubt it considering the incredibly high body counts) adventures of a 380-pound redneck bounty hunter and his team.
1. The Deadliest Profession
2. A Killing Trade
3. The Wild Ride
4. Blood Mountain


Bronson: Street Vigilante - Philip Rawls (Manor Books, 1975) An especially depraved (and blatant) rip-off of the Death Wish films.
1. Blind Rage
2. Streets of Blood
3. Switchblade


Chopper Cop - Paul Ross (Popular Library, 1972-1975) A somewhat-hippieish cop with a motorcycle fights crime his own way.
1. Valley of Death
2. The Hitchhike Killer
3. Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert



Confirmed Kill - Mike Morris (Diamond, 1992-1993) A two-man sniper team using a high-tech sniper rifle takes out bad-guy targets.
1. Confirmed Kill
2. Sniper Shot
3. Direct Hit
4. Point Blank



Crockett - Brad Lang (Leisure Books, 1975-1976) An impressive but short-lived series of novels about a hip, long-haired young private detective who takes cases involving hippie-types.
Crockett On The Loose
The Perdition Express
Brand of Fear


Dirty Harry - Dane Harman (Warner Books, 1981-1983) A very good series chronicling the continuing, unfilmed cases of Clint Eastwood's movie cop.
1. Duel for Cannons
2. Death on the Docks
3. The Long Death
4. The Mexico Kill
5. Family Skeletons
6. City of Blood
7. Massacre at Russian River
8. Hatchet Men
9. The Killing Connection
10. The Blood of Strangers
11. Death in the Air
12. The Dealer of Death



Doctor Death - Herb Fisher (Berkley, 1988-1991) A Vietnam vet who's also Native American uses the skills he learned in war to fight bad guys back home.
1. Doctor Death
2. Retribution
3. Slaughter Island
4. Savage Streets

The Executioner - Don Pendleton (Pinnacle, ended 1980) The one-man-war-against-the-Mafia that spawned the whole pulp-revival-in-paperback thing, as well as Marvel's Punisher comics. This is one of the few series that continues to this very day under several titles (Executioner, Mack Bolan, Stony Man), which have reached numbers I'm not even gonna try to count. The ones listed here are the original war-against-the-Mafia run.
1. War Against the Mafia
2. Death Squad
3. Battle Mask
4. Miami Massacre
5. Continental Contract
6. Assault On Soho
7. Nightmare in New York
8. Chicago Wipeout
9. Vegas Vendetta
10. Caribbean Kill
11. California Hit
12. Boston Blitz
13. Washington I.O.U.
14. San Diego Siege
15. Panic in Philly
16. Sicilian Slaughter
17. Jersey Guns
18. Texas Storm
19. Detroit Deathwatch
20. New Orleans Knockout
21. Firebase Seattle
22. Hawaiian Hellground
23. St. Louis Showdown
24. Canadian Crisis
25. Colorado Kill-Zone
26. Acapulco Rampage
27. Dixie Convoy
28. Savage Fire
29. Command Strike
30. Cleveland Pipeline
31. Arizona Ambush
32. Tennessee Smash
33. Monday's Mob
34. Terrible Tuesday
35. Wednesday's Wrath
36. Thermal Thursday
37. Friday's Feast
38. Satan's Sabbath


Gannon - Dean Ballenger (Manor Books, 1973 - 1974) Uniquely-written, double-tough saga of a hardcase blue-collar guy who puts the slam on the abusive rich. A real oddity.
1. Blood For Breakfast
2. Blood Fix
3. Blood Beast


Hardball - William Sanders (Diamond) A special agent using his skills to fight evil.
1. Hardball
2. Aryan Legion
3. Skorpion


Hawker - Carl Ramm (Dell, ended 1987) A frustrated cop gets the backing of a rich guy and becomes a vigilante. Carl Ramm was now-popular author Randy Wayne White under a pseudonym, which is why this series tends to be a bit more expensive when you look for used copies online.
1. Florida Firefight
2. L. A. Wars
3. Chicago Assault
4. Deadly in New York
5. Houston Attack
6. Vegas Vengeance
7. Detroit Combat
8. Terror in D.C.
9. Atlanta Extreme
10. Denver Strike
11. Operation Norfolk


The Headhunters - John Weisman and Brian Boyer (Pinnacle, 1974-1975) An Internal Affairs team takes on crooked cops.
1. Heroin Triple Cross
2. Starlight Motel Incident
3. Three Faces of Death
4. Quadraphonic Homicide


Hellrider - Dan Killerman (Pinnacle Crossfire, 1985) Unfortunately-short-lived series about a guy who declares war on motorcycle gangs after his family's murdered.
1. Hellrider
2. Blood Run
(a third, The Guns of Hell, was announced but never published to my knowledge)

Justin Perry: The Assassin - John D. Revere (Pinnacle, 1984-) The sex-heavy adventures of a professional assassin.
1. Justin Perry: The Assassin
2. Vatican Kill
3. Born To Kill
4. Death's Running Mate
5. Stud Service


The Last Ranger - Craig Sargent (Popular Library, 1986-1989) Post-apocalyptic adventures of a Kamandi-like guy who rides his motorcycle around the ruins of America with a pitbull at his side, trying to rescue his sister from depraved gangs of survivors. One of the few series that came to a definite ending.
1. The Last Ranger
2. The Savage Stronghold
3. The Madman's Mansion
4. The Rabid Brigadier
5. The War Weapons
6. The Warlord's Revenge
7. The Vile Village
8. The Cutthroat Cannibals
9. The Damned Disciples
10. Is This The End?


The Last Rangers - Jake Davis (Berkley, 1992-1993) Trilogy about futuristic Texas Rangers trying to enforce the law after the apocalypse.
1. The Last Rangers
2. Crime Zone
3. Destination: Showdown


The Liquidator - R. L. Brent (Award/Charter, 1974-1978) Tough guy takes on organized crime all by his lonesome.
1. The Liquidator
2. Contract for a Killing
3. The Cocaine Connection
4. Invitation to a Strangling
5. The Exchange

Little Saigon - Nicholas Cain (Lynx Books, 1989) A former Vietnam MP uses the skills he learned overseas to police a violent Vietnamese section of the city.
1. Abel's War
2. Death For Sale
3. Street Tricks
4. Off Limits
(two more books, Rough Cut and White Death, were apparently written but never published)


The Lone Wolf - Mike Barry (Berkley, 1973-1975) One of the most bizarre action series ever, written by sci-fi writer Barry N. Malzberg, who apparently didn't like vigilante fiction and wanted to mock it. A narcotics agent becomes unhinged when his fiance OD's, becomes a vigilante, goes to war with the international drug trade, and eventually becomes a raving lunatic who guns down random citizens. Another series with a definite ending.
1. Night Raider
2. Bay Prowler
3. Boston Avenger
4. Desert Stalker
5. Havana Hit
6. Chicago Slaughter
7. Peruvian Nightmare
8. Los Angeles Holocaust
9. Miami Marauder
10. Harlem Showdown
11. Detroit Massacre
12. Phoenix Inferno
13. The Killing Run
14. Philadelphia Blowup

MacMorgan - Randy Striker (Signet, 1981-1982) Adventurer Dusky MacMorgan keeps finding trouble. This is another pseudonym of Randy Wayne White, so Doc Ford fans may want to check it out.
1. Key West Connection
2. The Deep Six
3. Cuban Death-Lift
4. The Deadlier Sex
5. Assassin's Shadow
6. Everglades Assault
7. Grand Cayman Slam

Mafia: Operation - Don Romano (Pyramid, 1974) Not sure this is really a "series" so much as separate sagas about the Mafia.
Mafia: Operation Hijack
Mafia: Operation Hit Man
Mafia: Operation Porno
Mafia: Operation Cocaine
Mafia: Operation Loan Shark

Mondo - Anthony DeStefano (Manor, 1975-1977) Ultra-hard-boiled, badass adventures of an alienated thief who's highly trained in the martial arts and doesn't particularly like anyone. Nihilism at its finest.
1. Mondo
2. Cocaine Kill
3. A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die

Mutants Amok - Mark Grant (Avon, 1991) Mutant animal-people created as super-soldiers decide they should be running the planet and go to war against humans.
1. Mutants Amok
2. Mutant Hell
3. Rebel Attack
4. Holocaust Horror
5. Christmas Slaughter

Narc - Robert Hawkes (Lancer/Signet, 1973-1975) Great series by Marc Olden (who wrote the Black Samurai series) about a narcotics agent trying to stop drug dealers.
1. Narc
2. Death of a Courier
3. The Death List
4. The Delgado Murders
5. Kill the Dragon
6. The Beauty Kill
7. Corsican Death
8. Death Song
9. Kill For It

Nazi Hunter - Mark Mandell (Pinnacle, 1981-1983) The son of a notorious Nazi war criminal tries to hunt down and kill his father, taking out as many neo-Nazis as he can along the way.
1. Nazi Hunter
2. Slaughter Summit
3. Killer Instinct
4. Butcher Block
5. Hell Nest

The Outrider - Richard Hardin (Pinnacle, 1984-1985) A rip-off of the Mad Max movie series.
1. The Outrider
2. Fire and Ice
3. Blood Highway
4. Bay City Burnout
5. Built To Kill
(a fifth, Black Death, was announced but never published)


Overload - Bob Ham (Bantam Falcon, ended 1991) A couple of war buddies go into the trucking business, using a weapon-equipped 18-wheeler and ATV's to spread justice. Yee-haw!
1. Personal War
2. The Wrath
3. Highway Warriors
4. Tennessee Terror
5. Atlanta Burn
6. Nebraska Nightmare
7. Rolling Vengeance
8. Ozark Payback
9. Huntsville Horror
10. Michigan Madness
11. Alabama Bloodbath
12. Vegas Gamble
(a 13th - Urban Justice - was announced but never published to my knowledge)


The Penetrator - Lionel Derrick (Pinnacle, ended 1984) One of the better series, dealing with a highly-trained warrior who uses his skills to fight all kinds of threats to civilization.
1. The Target is H
2.Blood on the Strip
3. Capitol Hell
4. Hijacking Manhattan
5. Mardi Gras Massacre
6. Tokyo Purple
7. Baja Bandidos
8. The Northwest Contact
9. Dodge City Bombers
10. The Hellbomb Flight
11. Terror in Taos
12. Bloody Boston
13. Dixie Death Squad
14. Mankill Sport
15. The Quebeck Connection
16. Deepsea Shootout
17. Demented Empire
18. Countdown To Terror
19. Panama Power Play
20. Radiation Hit
21. The Supergun Mission
22. High Disaster
23. Divine Death
24. Cryogenic Nightmare
25. Floating Death
26. Mexican Brown
27. The Animal Game
28. The Skyhigh Betrayers
29. Aryan Onslaught
30. Computer Kill
31. Oklahoma Firefight
32. Showbiz Wipeout
33. Satellite Slaughter
34. Death Ray Terror
35. Black Massacre
36. Deadly Science
37. Candidate's Blood
38. Hawaiian Trackdown
39. Cruise into Chaos
40. Assassination Factor
41. Hell's Hostages
42. Inca Gold Hijack
43. Rampage in Rio
44. Deep Cover Blast-Off
45. Quaking Terror
46. Terrorist Torment
47. Orphan Army
48. Jungle Blitz
49. Satan's Swarm
50. Neutron Nightmare
51. Plundered Paradise
52. Brotherhood in Blood
53. City of the Dead

Phoenix - David Alexander (Leisure, 1987-1988) Post-apocalyptic hero fights bad guys for the scraps of civilization. I'm not an e-book fan, but this whole series is available as a Kindle download on Amazon.
1. Dark Messiah
2. Ground Zero
3. Death Quest
4. Metalstorm
5. Whirlwind

Rat Bastards - John Mackie (Jove1983-1986) A Dirty Dozen style squad of misfits fight the Japanese in the Pacific during WWII. The series followed them through the whole course of the war. You can't tell one book from another, but they're all entertaining as hell.
1. Hit The Beach!
2. Death Squad
3. River of Blood
4. Meat Grinder Hill
5. Down and Dirty
6. Green Hell
7. Too Mean To Die
8. Hot Lead and Cold Steel
9. Do or Die
10. Kill Crazy
11. Nightmare Alley
12. Go For Broke
13. Tough Guys Die Hard
14. Suicide River
15. Satan's Cage
16. Go Down Fighting

The Revenger - Jon Messmann (Signet, 1973-1975) Another guy who's been done wrong by the Mafia declares one-man-war on 'em and "teaches them to sweat with fear."
1. The Revenger
2. Fire In The Streets
3. The Vendetta Contract
4. The Stiletto Signature
5. City For Sale
6. A Promise For Death

Roadblaster - Paul Hofrichter (Leisure, 1987-1988) Post-apocalyptic adventures of a guy trying to cross the devastated U.S. to find his family, using his mechanical skills.
1. Hell Ride
2. Death Ride
3. Blood Ride

Soldato - Al Conroy (Magnum/Lancer, 1972-1973) One of the Mafia's torpedoes gets fed up and quits, but the Mafia doesn't allow you to quit... so, he has to bring the whole thing down to find any peace.
1. Soldato!
2. Death Grip!
3. Strangle Hold!
4. Murder Mission!
5. Blood Run!

The Specialist - John Cutter (Signet, 1984-1985) A mercenary-type super-tough-guy's always gotta get revenge against somebody or other. Secretly written by horror novelist John Shirley.
1. A Talent for Revenge
2. Manhattan Revenge
3. Sullivan's Revenge
4. The Psycho Soldiers
5. The Maltese Vengeance
6. The Big One
7. The Vendetta
8. One-Man Army
9. Vengeance Mountain
10. Beirut Retaliation
11. American Vengeance

Stormrider - Robert Baron (Jove, 1992-1993) After the apocalypse, biker gangs band together to live free and fight off the oppressive ruins of the government.
1. Stormrider
2. River of Fire
3. Lord of the Plains

Stryker - William Crawford (Pinnacle, 1973-1975) A tough cop fights crime.
1. Styker
2. Cop-Kill
3. Drug Run
4. Deadly Alliance

The Terminator - John Quinn (Pinnacle, 1982-1984) An ex-CIA assassin does work for hire, or for revenge.
1. Mercenary Kill
2. Silicon Valley Slaughter
3. The Kill Squad
4. Crystal Kill
5. Chameleon Kill
(a sixth, The Checkmate Kill, was announced but never published to my knowledge)

.357 Vigilante - Ian Ludlow (Pinnacle Crossfire, 1985) A Death Wish style saga of a vigilante, written by more-well-known-now author Lee Goldberg when he was in college.
1. .357 Vigilante
2. Make Them Pay
3. White Wash
(Later published as an e-book, with the first three novels re-titled and a fourth added, under the titles Judgement, Adjourned, Payback, Guilty. I don't count e-books, but I include the info just in case. I don't blame authors for trying to make some extra cash off of out-of-print titles, but I consider e-books a plague on the reading public. Your mileage may vary, though, so if you've got one of those Kindle devices and can't be talked into smashing and burning it, go download these - they're good.)


Traveler - D. B. Drumm (Dell, ended 1987) Another Mad Max rip-off that gets a little wacky as people show up riding giant mutant housecats and such. The weird end to the series is pretty unique.
1. First, You Fight
2. Kingdom Come
3. The Stalkers
4. To Kill A Shadow
5. Road War
6. Border War
7. The Road Ghost
8. Terminal Road
9. The Stalking Time
10. Hell on Earth
11. The Children's Crusade
12. The Prey
13. Ghost Dancers

Tunnel Rats - Cliff Banks (Popular Library, 1989-1990) Tough short fellas fight the Vietnam war underground by invading VC tunnels.
1. Tunnel Rats
2. Mud and Blood

The Vigilante - V. J. Santiago (Pinnacle, 1975-1978) Another Death Wish inspired series.
1. An Eye For An Eye
2. Detour to a Funeral
3. Kill Or Be Killed
4. Knock, Knock, You're Dead
5. Dead End Delivery
6. This Gun For Justice



...more to come one of these days...

The Re-Return ofTrash Lit From Hell: Vengeance Is... These Guys'

Back into one of my obsessions - those trashy "adventure series" paperbacks that only a few of us (including this guy - one of my favorite blogs, and if you like this post you can get happily lost reading back-entries there for days) still care about, much less remember. They were basically what the pulps of the 30's and 40's turned into during the 70's and 80's. I discussed that earlier, with a bit more here, if you missed it and are interested).

Anyway, I scanned some covers, 'cuz, really, that's the funnest part of these posts, ain't it? I haven't read some of these series yet, so the information will be pretty superficial, but whenever I get around to reading 'em I'll probably revisit them; this'll just be a "did you know these things exist?" post. Here goes...


1. The Bounty Hunter - Tiny Boyles and Hank Nuwer


Real-life bounty hunter Tiny Boyles (that's him sweatin' Seagrams on the cover) supposedly recounted some of his real-life adventures to Hank Nuwer (who probably did the heavy lifting when it came to the writing) and published four (I think) books as the adventures of a bounty hunter named Tiny Ryder. He's 6'6", 389 pounds, and rides a Harley (because a Suzuki's suspension just wouldn't handle that kind of bulk). And he deals out countrified justice with a .45 and a .357. I can't wait to read these, I'm totally expecting something Shakespearian. Vicar of Wakefield, with unfiltered Luckies.

2. The Lone Wolf - Mike Barry



Burt Wulff (not to be confused with the chef... or, what the hell, go ahead and confuse 'em, that'd be hilarious!) is another one of those cops who gets fed up with the system after a loved one dies, so he goes renegade vigilante and declares war on organized crime, specifically the drug trade that led to his girlfriend's O.D. I started one of these once and quit early because I hated the writing style... and only recently did I figure out why: it's written by noted sci-fi writer Barry N. Malzberg, and I almost always hate sci-fi writers. Your mileage may vary, of course, and I do know that despite their bloody-afro covers (this is the only one I've seen that looks like it's a race-war book, promise) these books are marked by self-impressed poetical digressions on things (read one at this review) and are kinda weird because this Wulff guy isn't a hero so much as an obsessed lunatic. It's also one of the few action series (and I'd say only, but I think it also happened in the last Penetrator book) where the hero actually gets killed eventually.


3. Stryker - William Crawford



I'm currently reading this book, and all I can say is, wheeeeeee! You could never publish this thing now because it's so politically-incorrect and offensive, which is Crawford's idea of talking tough, I guess. "Spics," "spades," and "queers" all get dumped on; the two hit-men after lead cop Stryker and his partner (who's Latino just so the author won't be called racist for all the slurs flying around) are gay and are reacted to by everyone with revulsion, especially the stereotyped "guinea" (which Crawford doesn't even spell correctly) Mafia goons who hired them. If you can get around the closed-mindedness-as-a-literary-device (and if you read this kind of book, you probably can, because the 70's books were full of such stuff), as well as a big preoccupation with graphic scenes of people defecating (seriously, it's like scat-porn! Unless you're the hero you're going to shit your pants at some point if you're in this book), it's pretty well-written and the writing's not quite as trashy as most series paperbacks; it's kinda like if Joseph Wambaugh decided to do some slumming. I scanned the back of the book, too, because that prose cracked me up. The coffee stain (at least, jeez, I hope it's coffee) that was on the book when I bought it kind of adds to the gutter-level reading experience. And what exciting cover art, eh? "I'm going to put this gun away now because it's too heavy for the deformed dwarf-arm I have, and anyway, I'm sleepy now."

4. The Ashes series - William R. Johnstone



Here's a bizarre one from the guy who I've always considered the absolute worst writer of all time. Advice to any aspiring writers out there: go get some William W. Johnstone books and read them if you ever feel discouraged; trust me, whatever you're writing is waaaaaaaaaay-ass better than this guy's crapspasm prose, and he's one of the most widely-published people in the business! There is hope! Your napkin-scribbles may be publishable! Anyway, if you're an ultra-right-wing conservative, this is a wank-book for you. In the "future" year 1999, America has been destroyed by nuclear and bio-warfare between the U.S., Russia, and China. A Vietnam vet named Ben Raines sets up a free zone called the Tri-States, where only conservatives are allowed because everybody else is stupid and bad and criminal and stinky anyway, nyaaaaah. Oddly, these staunch right-wingers live by pretty much of a Communist system, because Johnstone was a complete idiot who didn't understand his own politics -- he just knew he hated "liberals" (who are hilariously stereotyped in his books; even Michael Moore would want to smack these guys). Anyway, Johnstone's only method of moving a story is to get someone shot on almost every page, so there are reams of characters who haven't been developed at all being gunned down like cardboard standups, and you couldn't possibly care. Offensive racial and gay caricatures abound and are mocked with a dullard's aplomb. Also, he talks a lot about having great morality and values, but his books are extremely preoccupied with sadistic rapes, sodomy, and every kind of depraved graphic gruesomeness. If you combined a John Birch Society speech with a 12 year old boy's armymen fantasies and then had a pervert recount it to you, you'd get something like this book. And I've read better prose in the captions of coloring books. It's just dumb, dumb, dumb stuff, but it could be funny if the prose weren't so painfully awful.

This is one of the few pulp action-adventure series that have been widely made into audio books, for the simple reason that a lot of Johnstone's core audience can't read! If you doubt that, here's a really fun thing you can do: go to Amazon and look up Johnstone's books and look at the grammar and spelling in the positive reviews. If you can find one that doesn't read like the work of a second grader, you may have a cookie. They all read like the product of great labor with a dull crayon. Durrrg!

5. The Lady From Lust - Rod Gray



Action of a different kind... the bomp-chika-bow-wow kind. Like the action pulps of the 30's spawned "spicy" versions, so did the action series of the 70's. These are the adventures of Eve Drum, Agent Oh Oh Sex, who goes on seduce-and-destroy missions to save the U.S. of A. Haven't read any of the porn parodies yet because it's kind of a big time investment for satire, but I guess they could be funny. "L.U.S.T.," by the way, stands for "League of Undercover Spies and Terrorists." I know the curiosity was just killin' ya.

6. Cherry Delight: The Sexecutioner - Glen Chase



Another porn-action parody, this stars "Sexecutioner" Cherry Delight, Agent for N.Y.M.P.H.O. (New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization), who, I guess, uses her vagina to fight crime as often as she uses her gun. Or, probably, even more often. The suggestive titles of the books in this series are pretty funny, stuff like Treasure Chest, Over The Hump, Fire In The Hole, Chuck You Farley!, Crack Shot, Up Your Ante, Tong in Cheek, etc. might give you a hint of the snickering juvenalia to be found within. Weird thing about these and the "Lady from L.U.S.T." books - they're written in first person from a female point of view, by supposedly male authors. That had to be strange, writing those...

These books are so sleazy the model in the cover photo has a big herpes on her chin. Nice.

7. The Man From O.R.G.Y. - Ted Mark



Also written first person, by "Ted Mark," these are comedic sexual takes on Man From U.N.C.L.E. type adventures. O.R.G.Y ("Organization for the Rational Guidance of You") battles rival organizations such as S.M.U.T. ("Society for Moral Uplift Today") who try to censor porn. Again, I can't really picture devoting hours to reading this, but I suppose I could be missing something hilarious.

8. Dennison's War - Adam Lassiter



This was a short-lived but higher-class series about a team of trained experts fighting crime and terrorism outside of the confines of the law. I didn't read many of these, but I really loved the one I've got pictured here. How could you not: a badass chick declares one-woman war on outlaw motorcycle gangs, infiltrating them and then gunning 'em down with mighty mighty firepower. This series was such a step up from average that it gave you extra cover art on the next page, just to fit in more paintings of Special-Agent Scooterfox smokin' badguy hog-jockeys with her .12 gauge. Check it out:



Sha-weeeeeet! Might be time to re-read this 'un.

9. The Black Samurai - Marc Olden



One of the best-written action series (along with The Narc, which Olden wrote under the pseudonym Robert Hawke), these books were done by a black author and were one of the few series to get a movie adaptation, Black Samurai starring Jim Kelly (although since it was directed by Al Adamson, it didn't do the books justice). They're well-paced, intelligent, and effectively written martial arts books.

10. The Last Ranger - Craig Sargent



These are good friendly violent fun, even if they do get a bit ridiculous. In a post-nuclear world, a highly-trained warrior named Martin Stone emerges to battle mutants and warlords with is pitbull Excaliber, while trying to retrieve his sister from gangs of depraved bastards. It's been a while since I read any of these, but I remember liking them a lot even though they were a bit lunk-headed. Whoever painted the covers thought that having goggles on your forehead was a pretty good tough-guy look (he was wrong), and it's interesting that Martin Stone is depicted with crooked teeth. He looks vaguely like cornball wrestler The Ultimate Warrior. He and the pit bull are making the same face, which I find gigglesome. Anyway, as the post-nuke adventure books went, this was my favorite, and one of the few (along with The Doomsday Warrior series) to actually completely destroy the world eventually.

11. Mutants Amok - Mark Grant



I really need to make time to try reading one of these, because they look crazy. Apparently mankind engineers some mutant warriors by creating Dr. Moreau-style hybrids of humans and other creatures... but this brilliant idea backfires on them, and after a holocaust of some sort, the mutants hunt down humans, who must band together and become guerrilla fighters to save themselves from annihilation! I wanted to scan in the covers of all four that I have, because they're some crazy shit. Check out the one I did scan... the one guy has a bunch of little faces growing on the back of his head, like warts! And they're screaming! And then you have this Lovecraftian horror (in blue jeans and a vest he stole from the bassist for Foghat) about to get his piranha-face smashed in by Mark Trail himself! Hoohah! How could this not be a work of genius? Answer: it couldn't! It simply must be brilliant! One day I'll read 'em and find out instead of just gushing away in gleeful ignorance.

12. Omega Sub - J. D. Cameron



Still haven't read any of these yet, either, although I love the premise: the world is annihilated in a nuclear exchange, but an American nuclear submarine is spared, and it sails the oceans trying to find any pockets of survival... and, apparently, getting in fights with any survivors they do find. Sounds good. The cover paintings aren't so hot, though, because they feature this gooby-lookin' dude who always has his mouth open, yelling while he fires some weapon. He looks scared out of his mind, or possibly like a baby bird straining for a dangling worm, but definitely not badass. Mack Bolan always looks grim. Learn from that, you action-book-cover-painting fellas.

13. Crockett - Brad Lang



Definitely a product of its time, I had to scan the front and back of this one just because it's so 1975. "He's young, hip, long haired - a private detective." Yeah, baby, yeah! And look at the cover - is that really long hair? He looks like he was maybe patterned on Peter Fonda. Haven't read any of these yet (I think there are only 3, and I've got 2) but they look kind of interesting. This particular book is so cheap that it was cut all wonky -- all trapezoidal and off-center. That just makes it more funkyfied!

14. Mafia - Don Romano



With all these war-against-the-mafia heroes running around, it was inevitable that somebody decide to grant the bad guys equal time, so these books are (I think) the stories of Mafia torpedoes and such. Each title was "Operation something-or-other." Operation Porno sounds promising. And was that the author's name... or his rank? Hmmmm.

15. Israeli Commandos - Andrew Sugar



The author of the body-hopping-clone series, The Enforcer, turns his attention to butt-kickin' Jews for this series about a team of highly-trained commandos protecting Israel from Arab terrorists. Decently-written and unusual. Note that the guy on the cover has his goggles around his neck. He needs to confer with Martin Stone, The Last Ranger, to learn the cool way to wear 'em. On second thought, this guy's got a beautiful woman on the cover with him, while all The Last Ranger's got is a pit bull... so maybe around-your-neck is the way to go for goggles-wear.

16. Death Squad - Frank Colter



Why have one fed-up-with-rules vigilante cop when you can have three of 'em? And make it a rainbow coalition of a white guy, a Latino guy, and a black guy. Criminals are in trouble now, you betcha! The series was short-lived, though.

17. Kiai! - Piers Anthony and Roberto Fuentes



Okay, back there we had Barry N. Malzberg writing Lone Wolf books, and here's another sci-fi writer, Piers Anthony, turning out adventures of "Jason Striker, Master of Martial Arts." And I'll be damned if he doesn't look exactly like the guy on the Lone Wolf covers, too! Add some "wolf ear" grey streaks in his hair and it's the same dude. I never realized that you could name a whole series after a sound a guy makes when he yells. This makes me want to go out and write a series called "Yeeeaarrgggh!" Or the guy who wrote the Stryker series could up his descriptions of bowel activity and put out the "Frrrraccck, Plunk!" action series. A lot of these books probably got read in the bathroom, anyway, so why not? Anyway, this Jason Striker guy has apparently mastered all the martial arts, and is a peaceful guy... when he's not stomping ninja's faces into hamburger. Which is good, because action series about peaceful guys wouldn't be very interesting. And that's why there's nothing like Ghandi: Bombay Barbecue out there.

18. Overload - Bob Ham



Yeee-haw, somebody finally done done it: married vigilante vengeance to the world of big-rig trucking! A couple of Special Forces buddies (one black, one white, both badass) fight back against the mob to save one of 'em's family trucking business... and decide, why stop there? Why not fight crime using eighteen wheelers and submachine guns and ATV's and such? Makes sense to me! This series ran for a pretty good while. I read one and it was pretty average, but not bad.


That's enough for now, but I do have more series in my hoarded piles o' trash-lit (and I'm always looking for more, although they're getting harder to find in used bookstores these days) so one day I'll probably delve back into 'em.