Showing posts with label Cody's Army. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cody's Army. Show all posts

Monday, February 20, 2017

Cody’s Army #2: Assault Into Libya


Codys Army #2: Assault Into Libya, by Jim Case
November, 1986  Warner Books

Stephen Mertz handles this second volume of Cody’s Army himself, and he has mentioned to me a few times that he considers this the best installment of the series. I certainly liked it better than the first volume, which was by Chet Cunningham working off an outline by Mertz (who created and edited the series). But I can see why Cody’s Army never took off as strongly as Mertz’s other series, MIA Hunter, did.

For one, John Cody himself. The dude’s pretty much a cipher, and two volumes in I still don’t have a clear picture of him. While MIA Hunter hero Mark Stone is driven to find Vietnam POWs, Cody is more of your standard, run-of-the-mill action hero, with no special quirks to bring him to life. About the most we get is that he wants to stop evil and help innocents, but that’s true for practically all men’s adventure heroes. He most brings to mind the Gold Eagle version of Mack Bolan, which is unsurprising given Mertz’s tenure at that imprint.

Like Mark Stone, Cody has a group that is more colorful than he is, in particular Hawkeye Hawkins and Richard Caine, who bicker a la Hog Wiley and Terrence Loughlin in the MIA Hunter books. Not sure if it was made clear last volume, but this time we learn that there’s a bit of a Hard Corps vibe to Cody’s Army; like the Hard Corps, these four ‘Nam vets so loved fightin’ and killin’ that they just couldn’t hack peacetime, and soon enough were pulling assignments for the CIA. Their Agency contact is a man named Peter Lund, who reports directly to the President; Mertz delivers several scenes of Lund in the Oval Office and I had some fun picturing Ronald Reagan fretting over the latest exploits of Cody and team.

Another similarity to those Gold Eagle novels is that Mertz will jump around a small group of characters, not keeping the narrative eye solely on Cody. In true Gold Eagle style we have many sequences featuring Abdul Kamal, the villain of the piece, a PLO terrorist who has masterminded a plot to take the American embassy in Rome hostage. A big problem with Assault Into Libya when reading it in the modern day is that Kamal, despite his evil nature, is almost Mr. Rogers when compared to the radical Muslim terrorists of today.

While the modern terrorist kills all and sundry with impunity, Kamal is more concerned with taking hostages and bartering for demands. Indeed he fears death and doesn’t display the drive to martydom that is so sickeningly common in today’s fucked-up world. That being said, Kamal does kill a little kid, which is as verbotten as you can get in these kinds of books – a shock piece Mertz skillfully employs and uses throughout to give John Cody a little bit of a drive (but nothing too much, as he often shuts off any emotional impulses and goes back to the focus of his military training).

Mertz opens with an action scene, as Cody’s Army, outfitted in black commando suits a la Bolan himself, launch an assault on the just-taken Rome embassy. Rather than send in the Marines, Cody’s Army has been given the job due to the delicate nature of it all and whatnot. In the melee Kamal makes his escape, having killed the ambassador and abducted his preteen daughter. This is the little girl who is later blown away, right in front of Cody, and Cody blames himself because he was unable to save her.

Now it’s a vengeance mission, as Cody’s team is ordered to kill Kamal and stop whatever plan he’s clearly formenting. The helicopter he escaped in was last tracked heading into Bulgaria. Our heroes head to Greece, with the idea to sneak across the border. This part features perhaps my favorite typo of all time: “Cody had allowed himself a catnip” on the flight. I could almost picture a wild-eyed Cody chasing around his own rear like some catnip-hopping cat. Anyway, the Greece sequence culminates in a mostly-arbitrary action scene, as a group of mountain brigands ambush our heroes and are quickly butchered for their menial efforts.

Kamal is backed by the KGB, and we have many sequences devoted to him and his Russian contact plotting more KGB-funded terrorism while bickering with each other. Again Kamal comes off like a harbinger from a kindler, gentler time, despite the fact that he is a psychotic murderer. His terrorist army truly would be considered a “JV team” in today’s world. Mertz further opens up the narrative with the appearance of a female Bulgarian spy: Narda Rykov, a member of her country’s anti-Commie National Freedom Organization. She turns out to be the local contact for Cody’s Army once they make it to Bulgaria, but Mertz doesn’t play up any sexual shenanigans, despite the occasional mention of Narda’s hot-stuffness.

A running action sequence in Bulgaria calls to mind an action movie of the day as Cody’s men and Narda are chased by the Bulgarian army, and our heroes commandeer an armored truck and run roughshod over the countryside in their escape. Mertz shows a very Pendleton-esque flair for action scenes, keeping everything moving and never getting bogged down in firearm detail. He also employs what I consider Pendletonisms, ie occasional one-liner proclamations of Cody’s bad-assery or stoic resolve, etc.

Cody’s Army is a few steps behind throughout the Bulgarian sequence, trying to find Kamal on hardly any solid leads and usually tracking down those Kamal has dealt with when it’s already too late. Meanwhile Kamal himself heads to Libya where he is to open up like a new line of new, improved terrorist training camps or somesuch. While still in Bulgaria, Cody’s Army engages in one of the action highlights of the novel, staging a “soft probe” of a KGB barracks which was really housing Kamal’s Arabic army – a soft probe that quickly goes hard. In the melee Hawkeye is injured and thus doesn’t take part in the final setpiece.

Everything climaxes in Libya, Cody and team finally tracking Kamal there. They chase the “two hairbags” there (ie Kamal and Vronski’s his KGB backer), and we get a brief, sort of arbitrary part where Cody and Caine pose as terrorists who have come down here to join up with this newfangled training camp. I say abritrary because the two are exposed within a page or two. Meanwhile Rafe, the fourth member of Cody’s Army, is flying high above in an F-82 and decides to launch an aerial assault on the camp even though he hasn’t received the proper signal from Cody.

While Cody has spent the novel vowing to kill Kamal for the murder of the little girl, it’s Caine who curiously enough gets the honor of dispatching the terrorist bastard. I found this strange, like the Indian dude popping up in the final seconds to kill the Predator instead of Arnold. But I guess the important thing is that the radical Islamic terrorist is dead. Otherwise, Assault Into Libya was pretty good, and would certainly appeal to fans of the Gold Eagle novels of the era. It’s a fine piece of men’s adventure fiction, but I’m still not warming up to the series as with MIA Hunter. This is no criticism of Mertz, though, who handles the book with craft and skill – I look forward to reading the other volumes of the series he wrote.

On a closing note, I’ve been on paternity leave for the past three weeks (the baby was born on 1/26), so the blog has been running on autopilot; luckily I had several reviews scheduled to post ahead of time. I just checked out my stats and was surprised to see that I’m now at almost 1.1 million page views; over the past few months I’ve noticed the daily page views have jumped significantly. I have no idea where the traffic is coming from (the Traffic Sources is almost humorously unhelpful), but I just want to say thanks to everyone for visiting the blog.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Cody's Army #1


Cody's Army #1, by Jim Case
July, 1986  Warner Books

In the ‘80s Stephen Mertz oversaw two series, but MIA Hunter got all of the attention. However at the same time he also did Cody’s Army, which ran for seven volumes and, like that more popular series, saw a collaboration of various writers working under a house name, with Mertz outlining and editing (and occasionally writing volumes himself).

Like most other first volumes from the ‘80s, Cody’s Army #1 is focused on setting up the characters and storyline, and thus is longer than the average men’s adventure novel, coming in at 232 pages of smallish print. Also like MIA Hunter, there’s hardly any info on who wrote which volumes, so then a big thanks to Stephen Mertz himself, who told me that, for this first volume:

I wrote the opening chapters introducing Cody in action and him putting the team together. Sidebar: I asked my writer pal Joe Lansdale to please draft me one chapter where a Southern member of the team is busted out of jail. I wanted it racy but from a southern writer's viewpoint so as not to demean, much less alienate, southern readers. So Lansdale delivers a scene with a small town halfwit named Scooter who totes around a skateboard with a dead racoon nailed to it. Sigh. Joe never could write to spec, which probably accounts for his well-deserved success. Chet Cunningham picks up the narrative with the airplane hi-jacking, completing the novel based on my outline.

Interestingly enough, one can barely tell the author switch-up; the whole novel reads like the work of one writer. This is the same for the MIA Hunter books, which also seem to have the same style, even though almost every one of them is written by a different author. My assumption is this is Mertz’s behind-the-scenes editing, making it all come off with the same tone and style. But at any rate, there is little in this novel that reminds the reader of Cunningham’s earlier work; ie, none of the batshit craziness of, say, Hijacking Manhattan.

Anyway, Mertz opens the tale, and it’s all very ‘80s, as hero John Cody, a CIA agent who was in Force Recon in the Marines in ‘Nam, is down in Nicaragua, fighting the Sandanistas. Working with the Contras, Cody’s mission is to rescue a group of nuns who have been kidnapped. What starts off as a fairly routine action scene sees an unexpected twist, as Cody frees the nuns – only for them to be coldly murdered by the Contras he’s working with!

Learning much too late that this was not a rescue mission – the nuns were supposed to die, so that it would look to the media like the Sandanistas butchered them – Cody exacts vengeance on the Contras and his CIA contact, a sadist named Gorman. We then pick up 14 months later, and it’s all very Commando-esque, at least so far as the beginning of that Schwarzengger film went, with Cody living the life of a recluse in a mountain cabin in the wilds of Canada.

Cody has quit the Agency life in disgust, the memory of the nuns still haunting him. However he is of course tracked down, a trio of men showing up one day on his property. They’re lead by Pete Lund, a CIA man Cody has dealt with in the past. Lund offers Cody the opportunity to lead a new, off-the-book team that will be answerable to the President only; there will be no incidents like the fiasco in Nicaragua. Plus, Cody will be able to pick his own men. The operating principle of the outfit will be that it can do things Delta Force and etc cannot, as the outfit will technically not exist, and thus can work in the shadows.

After a page or two of deliberation, Cody agrees. Now he has to put his team together. First up there’s Richard Caine, who is basically Terrance Loughlin of the MIA Hunter series – a stoic Brit who was formerly in the SAS and is an expert in demolitions. I mean, Richard Caine is so similar to Loughlin – even coming off as a vague shadow of Cody, just as Loughlin does to Mark Stone – that I started to figure that maybe the dude is Terrance Loughlin, like maybe polygamist style Loughlin serves in two seprate action groups, and for Stone et al he’s known as Loughlin, but Cody and gang know him as Caine.

Next there’s Hawkeye Hawkins, a southern hellraiser who is similar to Hog Wiley of the MIA Hunter series, but not as bearish or oafish. To tell the truth, Hawkeye doesn’t do much to capture the reader’s attention, though he does blow off a few heads with his .44 Magnum, which is always a memorable thing. Anyway, Hawkeye and Caine are down in East Texas working as bounty hunters, so they’re easy for Cody to wrangle.

The fourth and final member of the team is another story. This is Rufe Murphy, who also comes off a clone of Hog Wiley, only he’s black. However he’s more like Hog than Hawkeye is, as Rufe is the roughian of the group, plus a pilot to boot. Rufe is currently in jail in some small town in Mississippi, having gotten there due to his banging the white mayor’s wife. Cody and team will need to break him out.

This breakout turns out to be the most memorable scene in the novel. Coming off like a redneck version of Mission: Impossible, it sees Cody and gang posing as cops from a neighboring town, who have come over to measure the size of the prisoner’s dicks! Rufe is of course massively endowed – the cops having gotten a good gander of him in the showers – and thus he’s trundled out as a sure-fire winner for this (fictional) contest Cody claims to be running. It all culminates in incriminating photos taken which make it appear that the police chief is giving ol’ Rufe a blowjob, and he’s of course let go in exchange for the negatives never being shown.

Gradually we get around to the storyline of this first volume; namely, that an American airplane, en route to Tel Aviv from Athens, is hijacked by a group of Palestinian terrorists. They’re soon taken to a deslote patch of Lebanon, just outside of West Beirut, where the captors demand various things or, in 48 hours, will start killing the passengers. It’s all very similar to the plot of The Hard Corps #2, which especially gets confusing when you realize that this novel also has a dour and taciturn character named Caine.

The hijacking stuff goes down just past page 80, which would mean, per Stephen’s comments above, that this is where Chet Cunningham takes over the writing duties. But as mentioned, the reader can hardly tell. The only problem is, it’s all so familiar; after some harrowing stuff, the prisoners are taken to a fortress outside of Lebanon, where the terrorists, lead by Farouk Hassan and Abdel Khaled, first murder the pilot, and then threaten to off the rest if their demands aren’t met.

Cody and team head to Beirut, where we’re at first lead to believe that a character named Kelly McConnell, a famous TV reporter, will become important to the story. Kelly provides a lead for Cody behind the Green Line of Beirut, ie the war-torn, Shiite-controlled area…and then she is promptly killed off. This is a typical “pull the rug out” Cunningham trick, and one he’s done successfully in the Penetrator books.

Cunningham does a good job of bringing to life the hellzone that is this quarter of Beirut, with innocents getting killed in the melee; there’s a bizarre subplot about some woman named Ona whose husband is killed in a blast, and she’s taken into sexual captivity by Majed Kaddoumi, a Palestinian leader who lives in a fortress, and who is the lead Kelly McConnel provided Cody. This takes us into our first major action sequence, as “Cody’s Army” stages an assault on Majed’s fortress.

Neither Mertz nor Cunningham much play up on the gore, but the latter does a little more so, with descriptions of heads exploding and guts pouring out. Hawkeye in particular has a knack for shooting people in the head with his .44 Magnum, which always results in showers of skull shards and brain matter. Just as in the MIA Hunter books, Cody is really the star of the show, though, to the point where the supporting characters sort of blur together.

Cunningham finishes the novel with back-to-back action sequences. First there’s the assault on Majed’s place. Immediately thereafter Cody’s Army (after dropping off the captured woman, Ona) attacks the remote fortress outside Beirut in which the captives are being held. Meanwhile, in a prefigure of the subplot Cunningham would write in Stone: MIA Hunter, the captives themselves are revolting, lead by a plucky stewardess named Sharon Adamson.

This action-packed finale has memorable moments like Rufe Anderson weilding dual Uzis; a total ‘80s action cliché if there ever was one. We can just go ahead and assume he’s wearing a headband. Cunningham opens it up a little with helicopters brought into the mix, including a climax in which Cody, piloting a chopper, chases after the fleeing Farouk Hassan. This part features a total Rambo ripoff, where Cody, crash-landing his chopper, plays dead, and when the other chopper comes in for a closer to look at him, he jumps up and sprays them with his Uzi!

It also looks like Gorman, the CIA sadist who was behind the nun massacre in the beginning of the novel, is to become the series’s recurring villain, much like Alan Coleman in the MIA Hunter books. Humorously enough, despite Pete Lund telling Cody that this new outfit won’t have any problems, Cody arrives in Beirut only to discover that his CIA contact is…none other than Gorman, the man Cody tried to kill in vengeance back in Nicaragua!

However, nothing at all comes of this, and Gorman and Cody don’t even meet; Cunningham writes only one or two scenes with him, cooling his heels outside of Beirut. There is no confrontation between he and Cody, all of which makes me suspect this Gorman stuff is there mostly to set us up to understand that the dude’s still around and still harbors a lot of animosity toward Cody (and vice versa), with the potential that it’ll all eventually blow up.

This first volume, while entertaning for the most part and well written, ultimately comes off as a little too standard. In his interview here on the blog, Stephen Mertz said about Cody’s Army: “Those boys kicked it for several books but they never did catch on like MIA Hunter.” I can sort of see why that is, at least given this first volume, as there’s no unusual hook or memorable quirk, as there was in the other series.

Future installments look to open things up, though; Mertz wrote the next two volumes himself, and the sixth installment, Hellfire In Haiti, sounds especially promising, with a plot about voodoo.

Monday, October 21, 2013

An Interview with Stephen Mertz


A big thanks to Stephen Mertz for doing this interview – Stephen should need no introduction, as he’s had a huge impact on the men’s adventure genre over the years. In this interview he discusses his early days working with Don Pendleton, his years with Gold Eagle, the creation of the MIA Hunter series and others…and the promising tidbit that there might be more Mark Stone adventures on the way!


Tell us about yourself – how did you get into writing, and what were you doing before?

I was born a writer. Started scribbling stories when I was 13 and never stopped. Broke away from the 9-to-5 day job world 40 years ago and have been living by my wits on back roads ever since. I’m a musician, so I’ve fronted blues bands. Managed a resort for a summer, owned a secondhand bookshop in a small mountain town and ran a used record shop in a big city. Spent much of the ‘70s and ‘80s on the road just to see what was around the next bend. Settled in Arizona. Always writing.

What was your first published work?

First pro sale was a short story in 1975. First novel was Some Die Hard, four years later. A private eye story. Rock Dugan's first and only appearance. Funny how many writers of my generation (Reasoner, Lansdale, Randisi, Shiner, etc) first emerged as private eye writers in the tradition handed down from Hammett, Chandler and Spillane. There's just something about that sort of poetic hardboiled stuff that got us, I guess. If you've never read Spillane, you must sample One Lonely Night; the first chapter of that one makes for a brilliant noir short story, and the novel itself vividly shows the literary (?!) roots of action/adventure.

How did you become involved with working with Don Pendleton?

I wrote Don a fan letter out of the blue after discovering the Executioner series in 1973. I received in return a most gracious and down to earth letter that invited a response. I revealed that I was an aspiring writer and Don offered to read the manuscript I was working on, which became Some Die Hard. He kept it for about a month, and then sent back a 6-page single-spaced critique, pointing out trouble areas in character, plot and pacing, and suggestions on how to remedy its considerable shortcomings. When the book appeared, I dedicated it to Don and in fact used a couple of his “suggestions” word-for-word.

What was the working relationship like with Don – what was an average day like working with him?

At first, not long after we connected, Don was looking for someone to help him with his 4-book-per year production schedule, which he found daunting. Don was a craftsman, not a human word machine, and in retrospect there seems in his career to be periods of high productivity and then times when he had to cool down and step back; of course, contractual deadlines have no respect for such artistic foibles. Don paid me to write a draft of Colorado Kill Zone to the best of my then-ability. I was still living in Denver at the time. When the job was done, he dutifully paid me, and then threw away everything I’d written and rewrote an entirely new novel, which is the one that was published, naturally. My only contribution to that book is its first sentence.

A few years later I was on one of my open-ended road trips and took Don up on his invitation to visit and hang out for a spell at Pendle Hill, his home in the rolling hills of Brown Country, Indiana. We got to know each other and became friends. That trip also later took me to Bakersfield, California (I did say those trips were open-ended), where Don had requested that I meet up with Mike Newton, another Bolan fan who had made contact with Don. Mike and I hit it off and not long after that, Don invited us both to resettle in Brown County where the plan was to produce Executioner novels as a team for Pinnacle. Mike and I plotted and wrote a draft of Cleveland Pipeline. We’d have weekly story conferences with Don, then Mike would go and write these scenes and I’d go write those scenes. Don then took what we’d written for the Cleveland book, used it as an outline, holed up in the A-frame he used for an office on Pendle Hill and rewrote the book word-for-word in about a week.

That was the coldest winter in Indiana since God was born, so come the first sign of spring, Mertz hightailed it back out west. Mike stayed on to write Arizona Ambush and Tennessee Smash, after which Don regained his stride and, on his own, wrote the remainder of the Pinnacle Executioner series.

What can you tell us about Don Pendleton the man? I’ve often read that he would “act out” scenes from his manuscripts in an effort to ensure realism; is this true?

Naw, that’s PR guff. He might have paced off positions to block out an action scene now and then, but most writers do that. I’ve heard the term Renaissance man bandied about often but hands down, Don Pendleton is the only true Renaissance man I ever knew. He was my mentor. A warm Arkansas drawl and chuckle offset eyes that glinted with steely Bolan resolve. A thinker of the first magnitude; a dynamic man, embodying all that word implies. A disciplined free spirit who could discuss Copernicus or the craft of writing and marketing commercial fiction with equal ease and enthusiasm. WWII and Korean War veteran, musician, philosopher, metaphysician, lover of life in all its many manifestations, and a gifted writer who created a genre, Don Pendleton was one hell of a guy. Anyone interested in Don or in his work will learn much about both from his book on writing, The Metaphysics of the Novel.

How did you become involved with Gold Eagle?

Don hooked me up with Harlequin’s Bolan program on the ground floor. I wrote 12 Bolan novels and one Mack Bolan short story.

What was it like, working with Gold Eagle?

It was fun at first. In the beginning Gold Eagle was concerned with sustaining the readership Don had built up to that time and so I saw myself in a sort of caretaker status, trying to preserve what Don had created. I worked hard on those Bolan books and one of them, Day of Mourning, is still ranked by the hardcore fans at mackbolan.com as one of the top ten Bolan novels ever written (over the hundreds of other titles), thirty years after I wrote it.

It’s my understanding that Sylvester Stallone bought the rights to The Executioner #43: Return to Vietnam (July, 1982), which you wrote. Three years later, Rambo: First Blood Part II came out, bearing a similar storyline of Rambo freeing American POWs in Vietnam, yet you and Gold Eagle were not credited. Do you have anymore information on this situation, and did you ever hear what drew Stallone to this particular volume of the series?

Ahem, its quality, I would presume. At the time, Stallone owned screen rights to the entire series. At first everyone thought it was because he was going to make a Bolan movie but as it turned out, he just didn’t want anyone else making a Bolan movie that would compete with his Rambo interpretation; screen rights also allowed him to dip into the GE novels for source material. Given my respect for the guy, and especially that second Rambo film which I feel is the best of the movies, I’ve always been proud that they chose one of my novels to draw from.

I’ve heard that when Don Pendleton was having trouble with Gold Eagle, you came to his defense. Could you shed some light on this situation, and what all was going on?

I’m no lawyer and you’re talking 30 years ago but off the top of my head, it went like this. When Don sold the Bolan franchise to Gold Eagle, apparently the contract included a non-competition clause; i.e., Don could not write action adventure novels for anyone else. Well, Don was a writer and writers write, so sometime in the mid 1980s, his agent placed the Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective series with a competing publisher. The pinheads at Harlequin decided this was a breech of the non-competition clause and took Don to court. In truth, for anyone out there who hasn’t read one, the Ashton Ford novels are paranormal New Age allegories involving flying saucers, time travel, metaphysics, and stuff like that. There aren’t even action scenes in the books! But as I recall it, GE’s position was that there are only two types of fiction, romance and adventure, and since the Ford books weren’t romance novels, they were obviously adventure novels and therefore violated the terms of the contract. It was a greedy, nasty thing for a publisher to do. They were basically trying to keep Don from ever writing and selling again. Anyway, he needed a wingman and I was privileged to join the team. I flew back to NYC and testified in court as to the specific elements of action adventure, which clearly did not apply to the Ashton Ford books. Long story short, Don won what was essentially a nuisance suit. Naturally, my participation lowered the curtain on my work for GE but I was glad to go. I’m a restless sort. I’d gone into the program promising myself that I’d write no more than ten of the things and I ended up writing twelve because the money was good. In those days, Mack Bolan authors received a cut of the royalties, unlike today. But I’d grown bored being someone else’s product.

Please share some insight into the origins of the MIA Hunter series. It was always my assumption that it was intended to capitalize on the “POW-rescue” aspect of First Blood Part II, but it would seem that the series was already planned and being written a year or so before that film even came out.

That Bolan novel, Return to Vietnam, pretty much knocked people out when it first appeared. The book was a tremendous success and made several trade bestseller lists. An editor at Berkley saw the potential and asked me to sketch the MIA concept as the basis for a series. They liked Mark Stone, Terrance Loughlin and Hog Wiley, and so The MIA Hunter was born. By the way, those books ended up resonating with a broad audience of readers beyond the general men’s series readership. In the 1980s, there was a genuine concern among many that there were living American MIA/POWs left behind after the end of the Vietnam War. Anecdotal evidence kept filtering out that we’d left men behind who were still alive, though nothing ever materialized to the best of my knowledge. You can still see the black MIA/POW flags flying.

MIA Hunter wrapped up right around the time the genre was dying so ignobly, so I'm curious if Mark Stone's adventures ended or if you got word from the publisher that the series was over and thus never wrote a final volume?

It was the ever-changing marketplace what done in the original MIA Hunter series. This is why I’m so jazzed about the whole ebook revival of Mark Stone. He will remain at the age when he’s in his physical prime, in the time honored tradition of Mack Bolan, Mike Shayne, etc.

While The MIA Hunter was being published you were also writing the Cody’s Army series, correct? What was the background on that series?

That would be John Cody, honcho of a badass commando unit operating with White House sanction; Cody’s men are Richard Caine the Brit and big Rufe Murphy. Those boys kicked it for several books but they never did catch on like The MIA Hunter. I wrote the Cody books as “Jim Case,” and they’re all available under that name as ebooks. Cody’s my second string guy; good, but he’s no Mark Stone. With both series, I brought in co-writers to help when the deadline grind got to be, well, too much of a grind; pretty much for the same reason that Don had originally brought me into the fold. I’ve always admired, and sometimes envied, those prolific writers who seem to effortlessly turn out a dozen or more books every year, but I’ve never been able to do that. For a couple of years there I was as much a book packager as I was a writer. I was buying time, using income from the series work to subsidize development of my first “real” novel, Blood Red Sun (i.e., the first hardcover published under my own name).

What other series fiction did you work on in the ‘80s and ‘90s?

There was a two-book Vietnam deal called The Tunnel Rats, a couple of westerns in the Trailsman series, some ghost work that I can’t cop to. Contract writing paid the bills and, as I say, subsidized more ambitious, less formula-bound work efforts.

What led you to make the decision to leave series fiction/ghostwriting and to write and publish under your own name?

I hooked up with Writers Digest Magazine as an instructor in their on-line writers’ workshop program, which has really been rewarding at several levels. I’m able to share what I know about the craft with new writers, and the income that provides freed me up to get off the series treadmill. I now write mostly without those looming deadlines. This strategy has hardly made me a brand name author, but I have managed to sell everything I’ve written and for the most part I’ve been published to good reviews, so I’ll take that. Not that I’ve in any way lost my affection for pulp fiction. Since leaving the series field I’ve written a couple of short stories that are pure pulp. I mean, does it get any pulpier than “The Lizard Men of Blood River?” With my own work, the intent is to retain the vigor and immediacy of pulp fiction while delivering more than formula cliché in terms of character and plot.

Which of your own novels, both standalone and series, stand out in your own mind, and why?

The Castro Directive, my latest, is available from Crossroad Press in paper and ebook format. I suspect most writers of my generation have a Kennedy book in them and this is mine. It’s about the Bay of Pigs. A reviewer called it, “a kick-ass history lesson.” I like the sound of that. Of the others, Hank & Muddy comes straight from the heart: Hank Williams and Muddy Waters bump into each other one August night in Shreveport in 1952. Misadventures ensue. I guess that’s my favorite so far. Two others that did pretty much what I wanted them to would be Blood Red Sun, a WWII thriller, and Night Wind, a novel of dark suspense. Of the series work, an MIA Hunter novel, L.A. Gang War, is the best.

What projects are you currently working on?

Writing-wise, I’ve just finished a novel about Jimi Hendrix. As for the writing business, I’m busy promoting The Castro Directive and the resurgence of interest in the MIA Hunter, thanks to Crossroad Press republishing the series as ebooks (except for the three I wrote with Joe R. Lansdale, which will be published together as an omnibus from Subterranean Press). I’m enthused about the vibrancy of the ebook market and if the current demand keeps up, there will be new Mark Stone adventures to come. Stay tuned for details…