My article, "A Meeting of the Minds: Don and Linda Pendleton," is published in the latest issue, #101 of Paperback Parade, which just came out by Gryphon Books, Gary Lovisi. I write about my late husband's long writing career, our books, our writing, paperback covers and lots more.
A short look at author, Don Pendleton:
"Fifty
years ago, in 1968, The Executioner, Mack
Bolan was conceived in the mind of Don Pendleton. It was an unsettling time in America with the
Vietnam War, civil unrest on our city streets and college campuses, love and
flower-power in the psychedelic streets of San Francisco's Height-Ashbury and
Berkeley, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, while
grief and disbelief had barely healed from the earlier assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, and the long and troubling iniquities of the Mafia
and organized crime.
"Don wrote the first novel in his Executioner series, War Against the Mafia out of his desire to express his discomfort
with the reaction of many Americans to our soldiers who were dying for our
country in the jungles of Vietnam
and those coming home to outrageous verbal and physical abuse. So Mack Bolan
became Don's symbolic statement. He also became every soldier's voice. Don
created a heroic character in Bolan, a true hero who was dedicated to justice.
The enemy that Bolan had to fight was no longer on the battlefields of Vietnam
but right here on American soil, and that enemy was the Mafia.
"With the March,1969 publication of the first
paperback, War Against the Mafia, the
response was great and not only was it the beginning of a long-lasting
best-selling international series, The Executioner: Mack Bolan, but the launch of a new literary genre, Action/Adventure, a term Don Pendleton
coined for the purpose of marketing his books."
-Linda
Don and Linda Pendleton
