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    Willing to Kill, The Executioner: Mack Bolan Short Story
    Willing to Kill, The Executioner: Mack Bolan Short Story
    Willing to Kill, The Executioner: Mack Bolan Short Story
    Ebook38 pages37 minutes

    Willing to Kill, The Executioner: Mack Bolan Short Story

    By Don Pendleton

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    About this ebook

    Willing to Kill—
    "From first word to last, Don Pendleton is in pure form—as is his creation: The Executioner!" ~Jon Guenther, Author

    At the beginning of his impossible war, Mack Bolan had not envisioned himself as the arch-foe of the Mafia world. He had simply reacted to a terribly disheartening situation—in the same way in which any man of like talents and ideals would have done—without knowing that soon he would become the most feared and hated enemy of the crime kingdoms.

    Bolan had learned to live one heartbeat at a time—with no thought beyond the next battle line—or beyond the next police trap. The men behind the badges were, in Bolan's understanding, "soldiers of the same side," but in the official book, Mack Bolan was the largest criminal of all. He accepted that, and would have it no other way.

    He had also learned early in his war that he was stronger when standing alone—and, indeed, this was how he preferred to operate. He was not "operating" at all, though, that fated morning in Dallas when he stumbled upon the Mafia hit team.

    Something large was going down, and Mack Bolan invited himself to the war!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDon Pendleton
    Release dateNov 12, 2018
    ISBN9780463225417
    Willing to Kill, The Executioner: Mack Bolan Short Story
    Author

    Don Pendleton

    Don Pendleton (1927–1995) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He served in the US Navy during World War II and the Korean War. His first short story was published in 1957, but it was not until 1967, at the age of forty, that he left his career as an aerospace engineer and turned to writing full time. After producing a number of science fiction and mystery novels, in 1969 Pendleton launched his first book in the Executioner saga: War Against the Mafia. The series, starring Vietnam veteran Mack Bolan, was so successful that it inspired a new American literary genre, and Pendleton became known as the father of action-adventure.

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      Book preview

      Willing to Kill, The Executioner - Don Pendleton

      Introduction

      by

      Linda Pendleton

      It was 1968, a time in America of civil unrest, love and flower power, psychedelic streets of Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley, the horrors of the Vietnam War, and the iniquities of the Mafia, when Mack Bolan, The Executioner, was conceived in the mind of Don Pendleton.

      At the height of The Executioner success, many publishers and writers attempted to ride on the coattails of Don's success. Some succeeded. Others did not.

      Within his Bolan stories are strong values, with an underlying theme of a higher morality that Bolan follows. More than once Don said about The Executioner novels, My biggest job throughout writing the series was to keep faith with Bolan–that what he is doing is right. I wanted an enemy beyond redemption–an enemy that all civilized procedures had failed to put down. The Mafia was ready-made. They embodied all the evils of mankind.

      Don wrote the first novel in the 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.

      So what is it about Don's fictional hero that has captured the minds of readers with diverse international social and cultural backgrounds and kept readers wanting more all these many years? Is it that yearning for a heroic figure? Is it the essence of a fictional character that brings him to life, moving off the page into the heart of the reader? If those things endear us to fictional heroes, how does the author achieve that? An unforgettable character is created by an author who writes with passion, with credibility and rational thought about the human situation. Mack Bolan does not portray the human situation in stark shades of black and white, and his quest is every man and woman's quest.

      Don elaborated on the metaphysical elements and the essence of his Executioner hero when he said, "Bolan lives large, responding to the challenge of life, remaining alive and remaining human in the process. Success in living means growth, achievement, beating the challenge and maturing toward a meaningful evolutional plateau. Bolan's killing, and the motives and methods involved, is actually a consecration of the life principle.

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