COPP ON ICE by Don Pendleton

The fifth in the Joe Copp series, Copp on Ice, is pure hardboiled fun. Joe Copp, the toughest most righteous P.I. in Southern California, is hired on a short term basis as the chief of police for the growing inland city of Brighton. The city manager has promised him 48 hours, but Joe will be lucky if he makes it 36. His mission: find Brighton PD's corrupt cops and kick every last one to the curb, dead or alive. And corruption is exactly what Joe finds. Enough to make him good and angry.

Heavy on the hardboiled—prose and attitude alike—Copp on Ice reads like a shot of rock candy. The mystery quick and satisfying. The social commentary rough-edged, but illuminating and surprisingly relevant more than 25 years after its original release. The fun includes a climactic gunfight shot in the nude, more than a handful of murders, mostly cops, a house of sin and graft, sexual perversion and more. And Joe Copp, the man on a mission, the man with a code, the man who gets the job done, the man who is anything but an enigma, is always entertaining in his rough, over-the-top tough guy way.

Don Pendleton's Stewart Mann Series by Stephen Mertz

I read this essay about five early Don Pendleton novels, featuring Stewart Mann rather than Mack Bolan, written by DP devotee, all-around great human, and terrific writer Stephen Mertz a few years ago. Steve was kind enough to allow me to reprint it here. The books are difficult to find, and maybe even harder is trying to filch a decent cover scan or two. And if you find these books, take pity and send a few to me.

I was in need of some light reading, and so just finished one of Don’s earliest books, a Stewart Mann, private eye novel called The Hot One (1966), written as by Stephan Gregory.

It was a hoot and if you haven’t yet sampled the Mann series (there were five books), you owe yourself a glance at another side of Don that he rarely (understandably) revealed in the Bolan novels: he was one funny dude.  I’ll always remember his warm Arkansas chuckle.  The Mann novels are cast in the Shell Scott/Carter Brown style of sexy, breezy, funny, hard-hitting short mysteries that were popular in the 1950s and 60s.  In fact, The Hot One totally holds its own in the Prather level of ribald detective fun. 

This isn’t the voice Don used in his Joe Copp private eye books, by which time he’d firmly carved his own distinctive writing style, but is that of an enthusiastic young writer stretching his muscles for the main event (Bolan is three years away, remember).  But there is foreshadowing of the big guy to come.  Towards the end of this book, Mann has his moment of despair and considers bailing when he has a chance, but Don has him reflect, “Bug out, Mann, bug out.  And I started to.  But I knew I’d spend the rest of my life feeling like a whipped pup.  I did care about the people involved.” 

But about the humor: as this is a “sexy” 1966 paperback, most of the funny stuff are witty asides about this gal or that; my favorite is when Stew and a chick are trapped and it looks for sure like they’re gonna die, but when she sees Mann, she starts touching up her face.  Don writes, “I watched idly, marveling at that creature called woman.  At the gates of hell a woman would ask Lucifer for a comb and lipstick.”  The plot is the purest hokum, seat-of-the-pants plotting with holes big enough to drive the War Wagon through…and I loved every word.

Well, almost every word. 

A few caveats are in order if this series sounds interesting enough to you to go on-line in search of it.  The ones to start with are The Insatiables and Madam Murder, which were published exactly as Don wrote them.  The Hot One and The Sexy Saints were “spiced up” with about 10 pages of graphic sex (written by the editor) scattered throughout each book.  Don was a romantic writer and these passages are easy to spot in their crudeness (and easy to skip over).  More problematic is Don’s wonderful naming of Mann’s self-destructive sex impulse: ol’ creature.  Just when everything is going hunky-dory for Mann, on a case or with life in general, ol’ creature stirs.  Stew got booted from the Marines for doing a General’s daughter.  Kicked off the cops for doing the captain’s wife.  It’s a great literary device.  Well, in Saints and Hot One, ol’ creature becomes ol’ baldy.  Which I think is hilarious.  Whenever the subject came up in conversation, Don invariably repeated the new name, rolled his eyes and there was that soft Arkansas chuckle again. 

The only Mann to avoid is The Sex Goddess, which is incomprehensible through no fault of Don’s.  The book was over the word-length so the editor arbitrarily deleted three consecutive chapters from the middle of the book.  Yowza.

Upon finishing The Hot One, I found myself leafing through my correspondence with Don from when I was just a writer-in-the-making—a year from my first professional sale, two years from my first book sale.  I had initially written Don a straight up fan letter, and waited awhile before letting on that I nurtured dreams of a writing career.  In a letter to me dated 24 March 1974, Don wrote:

“I could have guessed that you too are a writer.  Keep at it.  Nobody ever said it was easy—and I’ll let you in on another little truth.  The more “successful” you get, the harder “it” gets.  I used to knock out those Stephan Gregory books in 5 or 6 days and never feel a pain.  Now I pace the floor and sweat blood to get 8 or 10 pages a day.  But it’s all worth it, so hell keep at it.”

Thanks, Don—for Stewart Mann, and for the advice.

The Evolving Cover Art of Mack Bolan

I started reading Don Pendleton’s adventure series The Executioner in middle school and it was (somewhat embarrassingly) the staple of my reading for two or three years.  I even belonged to the “book club” and received the newest edition of The Executioner, and its two offshoots Able Team, and Phoenix Force every month.  A new one every month!  Those were good days.  Go to school for six hours, come home and read a little Mack Bolan.

I read online somewhere the cover art for the series, which is somewhere around 425 titles as I type this, is being updated.  The most recent cover style has featured an embarrassing—embarrassing because I would be shamed if I took it to the counter for purchase—“live action” artwork featuring a model posing with guns, grenades, knives, bazookas, and god knows what else.

The change made me reminisce about the cover styles I read as a teenager, and as I looked back at some of the older covers many gave me something like the thrill I used to feel when that book club package arrived each month.  So much action.  So little responsibility.  I made a brief survey of the Internet and identified 12 variations of style, and each of them, particularly those published pre-1990 really spoke to me. 

Variation 1.  This is a little disingenuous because the first two novels—War Against the Mafia and Death Squad—were published with their own unique covers, but I’m going to ignore them and focus on the first “standard” cover style.  The first 38 novels were published by Pinnacle Books, and, mostly, actually written by Don Pendleton.  The cover art is terrifically lurid with weaponry and violence. These titles were published between 1969 and March 1980.

Variation 2.  Mack Bolan’s publisher changed—from the old Pinnacle to Gold Eagle—his war changed, and so did the design of his books.  These titles were published between April 1981 and May 1983—entry numbers 39 – 53.

Variation 3.  A small change to the original Gold Eagle covers.  The overall design did not change, but “Don Pendleton’s” was added above the large block letter “Mack Bolan”.  These titles were published between June and December 1983—entry numbers 54 – 60.

Variation 4.  Not a big change, but a change nonetheless.  “Mack Bolan” was moved to one line, and “Don Pendleton’s Executioner” was added.  The artwork remained consistent; however the quality of the cover art improved over the run.  These titles were published between January 1984 and July 1984—entry numbers 61 – 67.

Variation 5.  Another minor change here.  The “Executioner” tag was removed from above “Mack Bolan” and it was replaced with “The Executioner” and the book number in a circle in the top right corner.  This is the first style I remember reading as a kid, and I still get a little excited when I run across one.  These titles were published between August 1984 and June 1986—entry numbers 68 – 90.

Variation 6.  The same format as all of the Gold Eagle titles to date; however the yellow line at the top is gone.  These titles were published between July 1986 and January 1988—entry numbers 91 – 109.

Variation 7.  This represents the biggest change since the Pinnacle novels.  The “Mack Bolan” shrinks (and is consistently yellow or white), the title font changes significantly, and the cover art becomes less of a cohesive scene and more of a montage with something approaching a posing Mack Bolan.  A blurb from the San Francisco Examiner is also added—“The biggest of all adventure series.”  These titles were published between February 1988 and August 1989—entry numbers 110 – 128.

Variation 8.  This is the big change.  It is one I think of as the all-American Bolan.  The background is consistently white.  “The Executioner” is in red white and blue; including three stars in the “E”, and “Featuring Mack Bolan” is added just below.  The blurb also changed to a rolling format between three of four different.  This is the cover style I received once a month with my book club subscription.  These titles were published between September 1989 and December 1994—entry numbers 129 – 192.

Variation 9. Another big change.  This one happened well after I stopped reading the series, but I remember seeing these in the bookstore and thinking, “They don’t even look like Bolan books.”  “The Executioner” is flipped vertical on the left side.  These titles were published between January 1995 and January 1999—entry numbers 193 – 241.

Variation 10.  Not much of a change, but a change nonetheless.  “The Executioner” in the title is emptied and the artwork behind can be seen.  Starting with No. 258 “Featuring Mack Bolan” is removed from the cover.  These titles were published between February 1999 and April 2000—entry numbers 242 – 299.

Variation 11.  The live action—think posing model(s)—era starts with No. 300, and it runs an impressive 128 books.  This is my least favorite incarnation of Mack Bolan.  It keeps with the montage effect, but rather than artwork it is photography.  These titles were published between May 2000 and July 2014—entry numbers 300 – 428.

Variation 12.  The newest variation is something of a mixture of the most recent and the older titles.  It appears to be art rather than photography.  The montage effect is gone, and the title is nice and clean.  Conspicuously missing is the Series Book No. on the cover.  These titles will begin arriving in August 2014.

   

Thrift Shop Book Covers: Panic in Philly

Panic in Philly is the 15^th title in Don Pendleton’s enduring The Executioner men’s adventure series.  It made its debut in a nifty paperback original published by Pinnacle in 1973, but the edition that first caught my eye—in the Shopko Book Department in the late-1980s most probably—as a teenager was Pinnacle’s reissue.  It’s more than a touch corny, but it is so late-1980s from the pastel trimmings to the pastel blue dress to the big hair, and even the Uzi in Bolan’s hand.  All it is missing is an explosion in the background with a couple bad guys being blown in the air. 

The opening paragraph:

“Panic came to Philadelphia on a cool Spring morning and its name was death—purposeful, clad in black as a symbol of utter finality, moving swiftly in its inevitability.”

One of my favorite components of a Mack Bolan novel is the Bolan “quote” featured on the first page.  It is a sort of Rockford telephone message without the intentional humor, and bunches of attitude.  And if you’re lucky there may be more than just one.  The quote in Panic in Philly summarily prepares the reader for the battle to come: “So maybe I can’t win this lousy war.  But I’m going to give it one hell of a try.”

Don Pendleton's Joe Copp Novels

Don Pendleton is best known for his men’s adventure series The Executioner.  He created it and wrote, more or less, the first 38 titles in the series before he handed it off to Gold Eagle books and a host of ghost writers.  Mr Pendleton’s later work never found the same success as The Executioner, but he wrote a series of private detective novels featuring an ex-cop tough guy named Joe Copp.

Copp appeared in six novels between 1987 and 1992.  They were published in hardcover by Donald I. Fine, and paperback (except the first) by Harper.  There is something almost juvenile about the stories—black and white themes, hard as nails action, and prose as hard as Mickey Spillane—but the stories are vivid, exciting, and very entertaining. 

Below is a listing of the books in chronological order with the cover scans of the original hardcover and paperback editions of each title, excepting Copp in Deep, which I was unable to find a scan for the hardcover.    

Copp for Hire.  Published by Donald I. Fine in 1987 as a hardcover, and reprinted in mass market by Lynx Books in 1988.

 

Copp on Fire.  Published by Donald I. Fine in 1988 as a hardcover, and reprinted in mass market by Harper Paperbacks in 1989.  Read the Gravetapping review.

Copp in Deep.  Published by Donald I. Fine in 1989 as a hardcover, and reprinted in mass market by Harper Paperbacks in 1990.  If anyone has a scan of the hardcover I would be much obliged for a copy.

Copp in the Dark.  Published by Donald I. Fine in 1990 as a hardcover, and reprinted in mass market by Harper Paperbacks in 1991.

 

Copp on Ice.  Published by Donald I. Fine in 1991 as a hardcover, and reprinted in mass market by Harper Paperbacks in 1992.

 

Copp in Shock.  Published by Donald I. Fine in 1992 as a hardcover, and reprinted in mass market by Harper Paperbacks in 1993.

Mack Bolan Convention

I stumbled across a cool video on YouTube. It is a news feature about the Mack Bolan convention held in San Francisco in 1985. The film is low quality, but the audio is great. There are some interesting comments by Don Pendleton and more than one or two shots of bookcovers and hairstyles that made me smile.

BOSTON BLITZ by Don Pendleton

I’ve “rediscovered” The Executioner over the last year. I voraciously read this series as a teenager and somewhere between eighteen and twenty I completely lost track of the older titles as well as the current books in the series. I viewed them as nothing more than fond memories solidly in the rearview mirror of my reading, but like much of what I read Mack Bolan has cycled back into my reading pile. The most recent title I read is the twelfth in the series: Boston Blitz.

Boston Blitz is one of the original Mack Bolan novels; it was written by Don Pendleton and published by the old Pinnacle Books in 1972. I have it on good authority that Boston Blitz was Pendleton’s favorite executioner title and after reading it I can understand why. It is exactly what this type of novel is supposed to be: fast, lean, hard and very rough.

As the title suggests Bolan’s twelfth war ground is Boston, but this time it’s a little more personal than a few of the earlier hits. The Boston mob has kidnapped Mack’s kid brother—Johnny—and girlfriend Valentina Querente.

The novel opens at a mob hangout with Bolan blasting a low-level mob boss named Julio LaRocca. When the audience is properly attentive he tells them to spread the word he is in town and ends it with:

“Tell them! I’m here. Tell them someone knows why! Tell them.”

The plot moves quickly and without a hitch. The action is explosive and exciting, but there isn’t nearly as much action as you would expect. It is paced expertly and the action is used moderately to emphasize and catapult the story from one twist to another. Bolan is a super-hero; more comic book hero than anything else, but Mr Pendleton clutters the narrative with a visually tired, worn out and burdened Mack Bolan. Not so much that it gets tiresome, but rather just enough to make the guy likable and human.

The prose is very hardboiled:

“Yeah, all too familiar. Bolan threw off a tremor of revulsion—for himself, for the world he adopted—then he steeled himself and dropped into the reality of War Everlasting.”

And it—the prose—matches the action and mood of the novel perfectly. There is no humor. There is only sorrow and sadness in the manner of the outsider, very much like the hero of a traditional Western that saves a society that cannot tolerate him or his actions.

Boston Blitz is the best The Executioner novel I have read and if you think you know the work of Don Pendleton and you haven’t read it you should. You might be surprised how good these novels can be. And you might be surprised that Don Pendelton was a pretty fair storyteller who not only created a genre, but worked that genre better than anyone else ever has.

Other Don Pendleton reviews:

COPP FOR HIRE
COPP ON FIRE

Reviews for Executioner Novles not written by Don Pendleton:

#63 DAY OF MOURNING by Stephen Mertz
"Early Fire" by Stephen Mertz

Don Pendelton's New York Times Obituary

It’s probably not a secret to my regular readers, but I enjoy the work of Don Pendelton— his original The Executioner novels as well as his Joe Copp series—and I’ve been “rediscovering” his work over the past few months and I have enjoyed every minute of it.

While I was cruising around Google a few days ago I came across his obituary in the New York Times. The author credits DP with the creation of a genre (a notion I share) and goes on to say that without Don Pendelton there would be no Rambo, or any of the other super hero types from 1980s film and literature.

The Rambo comparison intrigued me because the film and novel are very different. I can see a clear correlation with the Stallone film, but the David Morrell novel is less clear. The hero does not fit the super hero mold, and the novel, while firmly in the action thriller category, is much darker and more realistic (than the Mack Bolan books) with both emotion and turmoil.

The obituary is interesting, and mostly spot-on. Here it is, at least part of it…

You’ll notice the paper misspelled the last name of Mack Bolan.

Don Pendleton, 67, Writer Who Spawned a Genre
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.
Published: October 28, 1995

Don Pendleton, whose "Executioner" series featuring Mack Boland spawned the paperback genre of men's action-adventure novels, died on Monday at his home in Sedona, Ariz. He was 67.
His wife, Linda, said the cause was a heart attack.

In the beginning there were westerns, mysteries and science fiction. But until Mr. Pendleton, a onetime air traffic controller, brought Mack Boland to unlikely literary life in 1969, there was no action-adventure category, in which a lone, well-armed fantasy hero wreaks unremitting havoc on the forces of evil in modern society.

Within a decade of Boland's first appearance, the action-adventure genre was a publishing phenomenon, for a while rivaling if not eclipsing its women's counterpart, romance novels.
As surely as Owen Wister's "Virginian," gave the world William S. Hart, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and the rest, Mr. Pendleton brought forth Rambo, and scores of other copycat heroes. (Curiously, although there have been two projects, "The Executioner" has never made it to the screen.)

Indeed, a 1988 survey found a total of 66 separate action-adventure series in print. But the genre has been in a sharp decline recently, and only a half-dozen or so survive, "The Executioner" among them.

To read the rest of the obituary go Here