Death Squad by Don Pendleton

First published in 1969; published digitally by Open Road Media on October 11, 2016

Death Squad is the second novel in the Executioner series. Mack Bolan, having started his war against the mafia in War Against the Mafia, takes his show on the road. About three pages in, Bolan has arrived in LA, admired several women in bikinis, and killed three guys in a shootout. A couple pages later, three more are dead in a second shootout as Bolan gets an assist from his Vietnam buddy Zitka.

At that point, I stopped counting the bodies.

There’s a six-figure price on Bolan’s head (in 1969 dollars) so every thug with a gun wants a piece of him. Bolan decides if he’s going to fight a war, he needs an army. A small army, a band of ten brothers, all Vietnam veterans. Bolan recruits a demolition expert, a scout, a couple of snipers, a weapons expert, a “mass-death” expert (he’s good with artillery), an electronics expert, and other veterans who believed that “manhood’s highest expression” involved “a big gun and a twenty-power scope.” They are happy to join Bolan’s death squad since civilian life lacks excitement and the promise of easy money beckons.

Death Squad is the novel in which Bolan forms a relationship with LAPD Detective Carl Lyons, one of the cops who is charged with stopping his rampage. Lyons doesn’t like what Dolan is doing to his city, but respects Bolan’s code. Mafia killers are fair game, but civilians and cops are never Bolan’s targets. Lyons eventually becomes a key part of the series.

Death Squad gives the impression that Bolan will never again work as part of a team, although that changes later in the series (and in spin-offs). There isn’t much substance in Death Squad, but there are lots of explosions and gun battles and chase scenes. The pace is relentless. Unlike many modern thriller writers, Pendleton doesn’t waste words describing his favorite gun in loving detail. Nor does Pendleton waste words on the political rants that mar so many modern thrillers. Pendleton doesn’t waste words on anything.

Pendleton was developing a formula in the early Executioner books but Death Squad is too early in the series for it to seem formulaic. If you like violent novels about men with a mission taking on bad guys against impossible odds (and really, who doesn’t?), it’s hard to beat the early Executioner novel’s. They are among the classics of the genre.

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War Against the Mafia by Don Pendleton

First published in 1969; published digitally by Open Road Media on December 16, 2014

When Mack Bolan's father goes nuts and shoots Mack's sister, brother, and mother after learning that Mack's sister was turning tricks to pay off the father's mob debt, Mack decides that the police are too hampered by quaint notions like due process and proof of guilt to obtain justice. Trained as an Army sniper, Mack decides to use his skills to start his own war against the Mafia. Just like Vietnam, it's an unwinnable war, but The Executioner intends to fight it anyway. What follows is a series of 37 or 38 novels written by Don Pendleton and hundreds more stories by other authors in which Mack Bolan advances his war by taking "direct action, strategically planned, and to hell with the rules."

I was young when The Executioner books came out. Whenever I saw an Executioner novel on the supermarket paperback rack, which was pretty often, I bought it. I didn't read all of the Pendleton-penned Executioner novels but I read quite a few of them. I remember that there was a certain sameness to the stories after a time, but the series as a whole is fun, if a little trashy.

Rereading War Against the Mafia, I was surprised by the prose, which is of a higher quality than I remembered. When I first read the novel, I was probably more interested in the sex scenes and the mayhem, both of which are plentiful (but not so plentiful as to make the novel lurid or distasteful, at least by my admittedly relaxed standards). This isn't great literature but the writing is of a reasonably high caliber when compared to current action novels.

Mack Bolan regards his war against the mafia as a holy war, a war of "ultimate good versus ultimate evil." Like any holy warrior, he is not subtle. The novel is at its weakest when Pendleton introduces philosophical discussions (as when Mack argues about the righteousness of his cause with the virgin he has just deflowered). The inability to recognize shades of gray in the good vs. evil perspective bothers me when I encounter it in modern vigilante justice novels, but Mack makes a more eloquent attempt at justifying his savagery than most vigilantes manage, and that counts for something.

The women in this novel are either whores or desperately in love with Mack or both. The ex-virgin's attitude ("I don't care if you're a killer, just come back to me, you've ruined me for other men") is ridiculously unrealistic. The misogyny I failed to recognize when I was a kid in 1969 stands out now, but the macho attitude is a product of the novel's time. For that reason (and because the novel really isn't meant to be taken seriously), I'm willing to cut it some politically incorrect slack. Readers who are tired of current vigilante novels might want to look at War Against the Mafia to gain perspective on one of the originators of the subgenre.

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