Don Pendleton, Father of Action Adventure, Comments on His Creation of Mack Bolan Novels.

Don Pendleton, the "father of the Action Adventure genre."

Don Pendleton was asked by his publisher in 1988, how he believed Action Adventure had developed since he created Mack Bolan twenty years earlier. His response:  "Bolan is the first of the modern action-adventure heroes, and need I say, the most durable.  His success serves as encouragement to breed others and has everybody looking for variations on that theme—essentially, one man against some personification of evil.  Almost any situation where people put their lives on the line in the service of an ideal became a legitimate excuse for clones of Mack Bolan—and I don't begrudge that.  The basic observation is that the field broadened a lot, and as the world changed, the genre kept pace by focusing on new issues.  International terrorism, for example."

"Publishing a book like WAR AGAINST THE MAFIA, was a courageous act for any publisher.  It seemed to amount to a glorification of violence, and things like that were done only in pulp fiction.  I was glad to get away from all the psychoanalysis and endless, helpless hand-wringing popular in literature at the time. Essential to the action adventure novel is the hero with ideals, a man who feels that his actions make a difference.  This conviction is his motivation for unfailingly risking his life again and again.  He feels he can change the world, which he sees without the surface layers of the illusions generated by society.  He faces a grim world bathed in the light of a harsh reality where good and evil do battle. It is the gritty realism, unrelenting and revealing, that distinguishes action adventure.  It shows us violence, too, because the word is violent, and depicts the world as deep down we know it to be but which we avoid thinking about just to mange to survive and get on with our lives."  

 

Available as Ebooks, 1-15 and 17-38

First three books also in print,

War Against the Mafia 

Death Squad

Battle Mask.

~Linda