Mack Bolan needs a new home

Mack Bolan #1 by Don Pendleton

On March 6, fellow blogger Evan Lewis reviewed a Mack Bolan action-thriller The Executioner 42: The Iranian Hit by Stephen Mertz on his blog Davy Crockett’s Almanack. There, thanks to a comment by Steve Lewis, I learned that Gold Eagle, publisher of The Executioner series, had decided to close down, leaving Mack Bolan homeless, at least for now.

I completely missed Gold Eagle’s announcement, June 12, 2014, on its website—“Gold Eagle will be closed down in December 2015. All of the series belonging to Gold Eagle have been cancelled. Whether Mack Bolan will find a new home with a different publisher remains to be seen.”

When Gold Eagle says “All of the series belonging to Gold Eagle have been cancelled,” I assume it includes, apart from the 400-plus Mack Bolan novels, spinoffs like Super Bolan, Able Team, Phoenix Force, and Stony Man.

Mack Bolan, universal soldier, is a fictional character originally created by American writer Don Pendleton (1927-1995) who wrote 37 of the novels before selling his rights to Gold Eagle in 1980. The latter went on to publish some 700 novels, more than half of which include Mack Bolan standalone adventures. All of these have been written by a number of ghostwriters like Stephen Mertz, Mike Newton, Thomas Ramirez, and Mel Odom.

Mack Bolan #442 by Mike Newton

I first read Mack Bolan in the mid-eighties, when I was in my teens. I saw this paperback, whose title I don’t remember now, sticking out from under a pile of books at a private circulating library. I took it out and said to myself, “I can draw this picture.” In those days drawing and painting was a serious hobby, influenced by professional artists on my mother’s side. I found the cover attractive and proceeded to replicate it in an A4-size drawing book.

I don’t know what happened to my illustration but I read the novel and was hooked to Mack Bolan—the warrior, the one-man army, the fighting machine. After that, I forgot all about The Executioner until the close of the last decade when I revived my interest in Mack Bolan and the spinoffs. The books are not easily available in India but over the years I have managed to collect some two dozen novels from used bookshops.

Even if Mack Bolan doesn’t find a new home soon, I still have plenty of his books to read and I will continue to be on the hunt for more titles from the Gold Eagle stable.