Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is the sixth printing of the book from 1990, which means it was in print for at least eleven years. Which is something to note of its own accord.

This book closely follows the events of Monday’s Mob, Terrible Tuesday, and Wednesday’s Wrath. I’m not actually reading one of these per day, although it might seem like it. It’s taking me about two and a half calendar days (not, surely, sixty hours each). How’s that Gallic War that you claim to be reading coming along? you ask. I’m to the part where a couple of tribes band together and challenge Caesar. So, I’m somewhere between Book One and Book Seven.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Hours after leaving New Mexico, Mack Bolan is steeped in doubt about his future with Washington, so he asks for a little space from his government contacts. He goes to Miami and infiltrates a mob project to build undersea tunnels from the Everglades to Mexico and Caribbean islands to facilitate smuggling. So it’s the craziest plot yet.

It’s also a very segmented book, and not in a good way. The first 120 pages or so involve the set-up and then Bolan infiltrating the site acting as Frankie, a mob bigwig looking in on operations. He finds a vast complex underground where engineers are using slave labor pirated from amateur smuggling operations to build a great undersea network of smuggler’s subways in the limestone strata beneath the sea. When Mack gets out from his probe, we get twenty pages of him getting together with his Washington contacts and discussions with scientists about how such a thing could be remotely feasible enough for a book plot. Then we get 20 pages of Mack blowing it up. However, at some point after Bolan left, the mob got onto his game and redoubled patrols. A bit of whiplash there; I put the book down one night after the scientists were talking, and I opened it up and the mob was onto Bolan. I actually backtracked to see if I’d forgotten something overnight, but apparently not.

At any rate, this effectively wraps up my reading of the tail end of the Pendleton Mack Bolans; all the others out from here are the stable books. They probably lack the philsophical asides that Pendleton deftly inserted (or made into full discussions at times). And, brother, I’ve got a long way to go to clear my top shelf off.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book takes place about 12 hours after the events of Terrible Tuesday. Given the nature of the last “week” of novels that Pendleton wrote, the timing of it would be tricky: Bolan goes to different cities across the country and does his thing there within the span of 24 hours (usually less, since he does not begin exactly at midnight). If you’re reading them back to back, you go “Hmmmm.” This probably wasn’t a problem when they first came out, as the books were months apart.

In this book, the “Hmmmm.” involves people apprehended at the end of Terrible Tuesday. In the twelve hours it takes Mack Bolan to fully heal and whatnot, those mobsters are sprung from jail, transported to New Mexico, and tortured slowly–in other instances where Pendleton refers to “turkeys,” that indicates torture over the course of days or weeks, not hours. But Bolan bursts into a torture scene, executes the torturer, and then impersonates the fellow who’s involved with a paramilitary plot to steal weapons from the nearby military bases. It’s the same military fellow from Colorado Kill-Zone which I read back in 2011 when I only had 20 Executioner books on my to read shelves. The Old Days.

At any rate, Pendleton is beginning the transition in these books from the previous focus on mob activities to more military thriller sorts of plots and operations. This will ease the transition into the stable of writers to follow and how Mack Bolan starts his life as a government operative.

A quick enough read, obviously. I’m a book away from finishing the ones I’ve in this week (I’ve previously read Friday’s Feast and Satan’s Sabbath). And then it’s into the world after Don Pendleton, where the books are up and down.

We’ll see if I continue my, erm, “discipline” of reading Executioner books as I read Caesar. It might not last many of the “Don Pendleton’s” books.

But that’s okay. I have other books to choose from.

Books mentioned in this review:

I know, I know, you’re quoting back to me what I said last week: “In 2015, I hope to finish more books, and as always, I hope to read a better quality of literature….” How does it explain that the last two books I finished were this book and Monday’s Mob?

I’m reading Julius Caesar’s The Gallic War, and after every book or half book, I take a little time to read from cheap paperbacks. As these paperbacks are shorter than The Gallic War, I’m finishing more of them as I read one piece of longer work. So there.

Mack Bolan, on the second day of the last week of his free agency, swings out to California at a tip from Leo Turrin and stumbles into a plot of the new California Concept. A group of retired mobsters and the remnants of Bolan’s previous visits have gathered in a plan to build the world’s foremost data and electronic signals interception facility to gather as much information as they can for their nefarious schemes, and it’s up to Bolan to stop it.

Man, what a world that was where the plot of men’s adventure novels involved the mob doing this sort of thing. In the 21st century, it’s the government doing it, and the electronic and wireless transmission of information is much greater.

If only they weren’t the 1970s, I’d want to live in the sweet, innocent world of the 1970s.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book follows Tennessee Smash which I read in 2010 and not Washington I.O.U. which I read just a week or so back. So I’m reading the books far out of order (at least I was and should not be unless I find a bunch of earlier ones in Clever or Ozark this spring).

At any rate, the nature of the series, at least in the Pendleton years, is such that you can have an overarching knowledge of the series to kind of orient yourself, but the books themselves are episodic enough that you can pick them up in any order.

This book is the first of Bolan’s last week as a free agent before he goes to work for the government (and the last of the books Pendleton wrote for the series). He takes his war wagon (it’s the war wagon years) to Indiana to find a Chicago mobster who fled the carnage there. Along for the ride is government agent April Rose (it’s the beginning of the April Rose years). Bolan hits the mobster’s hideout, but the mobster is not there. Bolan spares the houseman from the site with the latter’s promise that he will go and sin no more.

The mobster has summoned other remaining leaders of the midwest to a secure location to talk about splitting up the territory, and the mobster gathers the fleeing head man and April Rose to the hard site while the parley occurs. Bolan has to hit the site but rescue April, and he does so by making a grisly exchange with the houseman: The heads of the bosses and April Rose in exchange for sparing the houseman and the fifty other gunsels from a watery grave.

A quick read, to be sure, and a little outlandish–Bolan in the missile-firing war wagon is less at risk than before and it’s a little less than satisfying to read this part of the series.

Additionally, Pendleton describes a “large lake” as being five or six acres in size. I ascribe this to a city man writing about rural areas, but I can’t quite pin that to Pendleton (mainly because Linda Pendleton is watching). But it’s a jarring note that echoes throughout the remainder of the book.

So if you’re into men’s adventure novels, you could do worse.

Books mentioned in this review: