20. The Executioner #24: Canadian Crisis by Don Pendleton

The Executioner books do little for me but I had to pick up #24 for $10 from S.W. Welch because of the Canadian content.  And not just any Canadian content, but Quebec and Montreal.  This one will go in my glass display case next to Iceman #6: Canadian Kill.  

Just as a concept, the Executioner books are hard for me to understand.  Mack Bolan is unstoppable. There is little suspense in his campaigns against various mafia headquarters.  There is also not a wide range of interactions to be had in stories whose main purpose is to deliver scenes of mafia goons being gunned down.  I guess there is creativity in the ways in which they get set up.  The actual gunning down can take place in a range of locations.  But overall there is just not a lot to these books. They are almost poetic.  Mack Bolan goes to a new place, assesses the situation, has some plan (where he can also call upon any government agency and all their resources) and then kills everybody.  We get really bizarre conversations and narrator musings about questions and answers where the answer was already written and the answer it is always death.  You can't even really tell what political world these books are in.  Something about extreme individualism but so muddled up with Bolan's weird life (death) philosophy that it is almost meaningless.  The theme of these books is that The Executioner must be constantly killing mafia people and they must keep being there to be killed.  At least in the two books I've read, the mafia don't even actually do any crimes or harm anybody. 

Canadian Crisis sends Bolan to Montreal where he has learned of a global crime summit where somehow the American mafia will launch a crime invasion of Quebec, taking advantage of the current political instability (this book was written in 1975 a few years after the FLQ crisis, which is mentioned). The crossing to Canada, the drive to Montreal and the stealth approach into Montreal (via Rivière des Prairies) are all geographcally acurrate.  I was hoping we would get more of that in Montreal but unfortunately the rest of the book takes place in a hotel so we never get to see the rest of the city.  It's a cool hotel because it has a network of secret shafts and tunnels, which the Quebecois Francais (the new separatist society following the footsteps of the FLQ) has discovered and retrofitted to use to start their revolution. I guess the plan is to kidnap and kill a lot of rich people in the hotel but before that it serves as a perfect way for Mack Bolan to kill more mafiosa.

Pendleton does a decent job of giving some colour to the mafia who actually get names and roles and there is a well done reveal when the bodyguard finds his boss with his throat slit.  Bolan meets a hot revolutionary quebecoise who is named Betsy Johnson because her father was American.  Her conversations with Bolan are the weirdest. One could believe that Don Pendleton had never actually spoken directly with a woman, certainly not a French-Canadian revolutionary. She has all these questions and he keeps telling her the answer is death but she doesn't get it until she has to.  And then he gets to go off camping with her to fish and have sex until he has to go back to killing mafia again.