Disposable Lit Reviews

Warner Paperback Library, 1974
141 pp.
ISBN 0-446-75611-3

Out of Print
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It doesn’t look like the Avenger was ever in the top tier of pulp action heroes, where the Shadow and Doc Savage reside. Nevertheless, in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s when publishers found new life for their pulp heroes by reprinting their thirty-year-old adventures in paperbacks designed for the male-adventure market, second-string characters like the Avenger and the Spider were resurrected and repackaged right alongside the Big Boys.

Dick Benson, young intelligent millionaire, had seen his family put to death by a crime ring, and suffered a peculiar affliction: His skin became ghostly white and his face frozen in an impassive stare. Taking upon himself the name of “the Avenger,” he assembled a small force of like-minded crimefighters (you know the drill: the black guy, the girl, the ladies man, the bruiser, the savage with blades in his hands — wait, that’s X-Men imitators; never mind) under the title of “Justice, Inc.” and pointed his resources toward being the scource of evildoers. Touted as being written by Kenneth Robeson, creator of Doc Savage (all of the Avenger’s pulp adventures were actually written by Emile C. Tepperman — but that’s okay, because Doc Savage’s adventures were written by a number of ghostwriters too, not a one of them named Robeson), the exploits of Justice, Inc. usually took them up against crime syndicates, nefarious conspiracies, Nazi agitators, spy rings, etc. — a little closer to home than the fantastic adventures of Doc Savage, who usually discovered a lost civilization every other week.

In this particular outing (published as #27 of the paperback series), suave Justice, Inc. alum Cole Wilson is in California visiting a director friend, currently in the middle of lensing The Purple Zombie for the wartime B-movie crowd, complete with a past-his-prime spook star, Lazlo Grimm, and an up-and-coming starlet, Heather Braille. Cole frankly has more than enough reason to watch Heather closely when she becomes embroiled in a mystery: Her uncle shows up on her doorstep while she’s out and frightens the maid, mainly because her uncle is two months dead!

Cole noses around and finds that Heather’s uncle had been interred in a mausoleum, only a few slots over from a famous recently-deceased scientist who had been working on a remote-controlled flying bomb technology for the war. Cole checks and discovers that this coffin, too, is empty.

Sensing a bigger web of intrigue, Cole summons the Avenger and cohorts from their New York headquarters… and the chase is on.

As you would expect, the plot us full of chases, captures, escapes, and gadgetry. A spy ring is trying to get the knowledge of the flying bombs from the brain of the revived dead scientist, and it’s up to Justice, Inc. to stop them, in 141 pages of loosely-spaced type!

As is standard for the genre, character development is scarcely a consideration. But that’s really to be expected; compare pulps with their modern analogues, comic books and action-oriented TV, and you’ll note a similar need to keep the continuing characters fairly stabile as they go through different scenarios. Nobody has any epiphanies, but think how annoying The A-Team would have been if someone had to learn and grow a little bit each episode. If anything, this novel concentrates too much on the sidekicks of Justice, Inc., and gives very little time to the Shadow-like force of nature that is Dick Benson.

Though it’s not great literature, I was surprised that the prose was not as “breathlessly stilted” as other pulp writing tends to be, especially the crank-em-out title-character novels that had to be written in a single draft at breakneck pace. So I did a bit of research (see, that’s what marks a professional, kiddies), and found that the reprint paperback series did so well that, after exhausting the headline novels of the original pulp run (it only lasted three years), Conde Nast Publications hired genre workhorse Ron Goulart to provide another dozen novels under the “Kenneth Robeson” name. Aha! I said. That explains not only the more accomplished prose style, but also the uncommonly sympathetic treatment of Josh, the black member of Justice, Inc., as well as the resemblance between Lazlo Grimm and the later life of Bela Lugosi (aside from the fact that Lugosi never was a Nazi plant and secret leader of a spy ring).

Not bad for second string, says I.

Nathan Shumate