Monday, May 16, 2011

Vintage Able Team and The Rat Bastards Arrived Today

Thanks to Amazon's used bookseller connections, I'm able to find a lot of old titles you can't seem to find anywhere else. After reading a couple of volumes from The Sergeant series, I decided I needed to hunt down The Rat Bastards, which is apparently written by the same guy who wrote The Sergeant, just under another pen name.

I also decided I needed to get more of the early Able Team novels. Truth be told, my love affair with "Post Modern Pulp Fiction" began when, as a junior high school student, I discovered that a small lot of Able Team and Phoenix Force novels were tucked away in our junior high school library (I cannot even fathom how that'd be possible these days). I started reading the Able Team novels, and was immediately hooked. I remember giving a book report on one of them, and let's just say if that had happened today, I'd probably have been kicked out of school, only to find myself in a counselor's office the next day. Thankfully this was the late 80's, no one had yet heard of Columbine, and I could enjoy the blood-soaked adventures of Ironman, Politician, and Gadgets to my heart's content.

Once I finish the current novel I'm reading, I'm going to have to dive into that Able Team title. I'm fairly certain I read Justice by Fire back in the day (I believe it was volumes 4 through 8), but it's no doubt been at least 20 years. Good times, good times...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This reminded me of my own misspent youth. My 8th grade English teacher made the mistake of saying that we could write book reports for extra credit and get one point added to our final grade for each one we handed in. Needless to say I slacked off all semester and handed in *no shit* like 17 book reports on Mack Bolan novels I had read over the previous year.

English Teacher X said...

I found they were an excellent way to deter bullies or people who would make fun of you for reading. When you show them the cover with Bolan pointing an automatic weapon at them, they back right the F off. . .

Jack Badelaire said...

Funny how "back in the day" (which for us, was what, 15 years ago?) no one really thought anything of young teenage men reading books filled with vivid depictions of human bodies being utterly destroyed by automatic weapons and explosives.

Sadly, I miss those days...

Anonymous said...

The Rat Bastards novels are now available as e-books on the Kindle. "John Mackie" is Len Levinson.

Jack Badelaire said...

And I just bought #1: Hit the Beach!

The time of the ebook is at hand, people!