Rise of The Death Merchant

So back a few years ago, when I started collecting these "Post-Modern Pulps" as I began to call them - men's adventure novels from the late 60's into the 90's - the Death Merchant series by Joseph Rosenberger became the focal point of my little project. Here was a series of SEVENTY novels published over the course of more than a decade (the exact years escape me at the moment), and at the time I was looking online, there was nothing out there. No fan websites, no author information, nothing. A few used bookstore websites caries copies of the novels, but there was no real information about who the author was, what else he had worked on, reviews of his novels...not a damn thing out there.

I was amazed.

Now several years have passed, and it looks like things have picked up just a little. The rise of wikipedia has given us:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Merchant

A pretty good resource of general information about the series. Even more recently, someone has gone and created this site:

http://www.death-merchant.com/

Just cover thumbnail photos at the moment, but it's a start.

Now, I don't exactly claim to be the catalyst for getting the whole Death Merchant internet movement going, but I would like to note that back in the day, if you were looking for this series on the Net, my site was really the only thing you'd hit, and there's still a good amount of chatter about the books on the PMP Message Board.

Now that the main PMP site is defunct, I'll be porting over my reviews of the Death Merchant books and other titles to this blog. If you're like me and have a soft spot for completely and utterly non-politically-correct action / adventure fiction, you might just like Rosenberger's blue-eyed Texan psychopath, Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant.

Go See "Death Sentence" RIGHT EFFIN' NOW.

This movie gets back to what a "revenge movie" SHOULD be. It's not filled with a huge puddle of angst or the protagonist spending a lot of time on wishy-washy moralizing over what he should or shouldn't do. Yes, there's some buildup of "oh shit what have I gotten myself into", but when the gloves come off, oh my god. We're suddenly back to the days of Coffy, Foxy Brown, Death Wish, and Sudden Impact.

And it's a good thing, too. I am so goddamn sick of "action movies" that are PG-13. I grew up in the 80's where, by god, an action movie had a double-digit body count, excessive amounts of special effects wound prosthesis (everyone remember the tool shed scene in Commando?), and there were, in fact, sometimes nude women in the movie for no particular reason except that the sort of people who watched these movies also tended to like nude women.

These movies were rated R, and it was a great time to be alive.

This movie might not be able to cover all those bases, but damnit, it comes close. Do yourself a favor and indulge in what it has to offer you.

The PMP Shall Rise Again...

...or, well, now. The PMP Reviews Page has been down for a few months when the URL registration expired, and frankly, I was tired of trying to manage it. I didn't have the time or the energy to keep putting up webpages, dicking around with website design and troubleshooting little formatting errors and the like. At the time that was also my job, and it just felt too much like work to be enjoyable. And although I have switched jobs since then, the advantages of a post-from-anywhere blog as opposed to needing a computer with Dreamweaver and such are pretty big.

So, here we go. This blog will probably be a little more wide-ranging than the original PMP reviews page - more of a mix of the message board (which is still up and running, and I encourage people to use) and the PMP review page than the original website. Also, since my reading tastes don't stay completely within the realm of 70's - 90's men's adventure fiction, I want to talk about other books (and TV, movies, etc.) that might not be precisely defined as "post-modern pulp" but still have a strong Pulpy feel to them.

And with that, on to the Pulps...