STEPHEN MERTZ
FIGHTING CODY’S WAR
Full disclosure up front. Stephen Mojo Mertz and I have been
friends since our early days of mystery fanzines. We both broke into
professional fiction writing in the mid-eighties writing men’s adventure series
paperbacks published under pseudonyms. Since those days, we’ve continued our
friendship through years of publishing successes under our own names, mystery
conventions, and marathon used bookstore crawls. We’ve also been through the proverbial
hell and high water of being poorly treated as mid-list writers by the major
New York legacy publishers who were once the gatekeepers of bestsellerdom.
We’ve also been part of the e-book revolution breaking free from those legacy
publishers and working with the new breed of smaller independent publishers.
If Steve and I had grown up together, we would have
been the terrors of the neighborhood. There would have been countless games of
cowboys and outlaws, cops and crooks, and spy vs. spy. We would have saved the
world repeatedly by infiltrating supervillains' hidden lairs and thwarting
their nefarious plans. And like our heroes, we would have gotten all the hot
babes, not that we would have known what to do with them. Still, the likes of
Emma Peel, Honey West, Cinnamon Carter, Agent 99, April Dancer, and Charlie’s
Angles became our defining definition of juvenile desires.
While we didn't grow up together, the imaginary playgrounds
we built, filled with heroes, villains, and hot babes were essentially the
same. We watched the same shows and hung out with the same imaginary friends.
Calvin and Hobbs had nothing on us.
Because we both read books, lots and lots of books, most
beyond our age level, our imaginations thrived and blossomed. The likes of Mike
Hammer, Philip Marlowe, and Conan the Barbarian gave us a whole new
understanding of manhood, while Modesty Blaze and Mike Hammer's Velda secretly
stoked our teen carnal desires.
We would have been best pals back then. And once our paths
crossed, we did become, and remain, best pals today. We recognized we are
brothers from different mothers, who unlike most of our peers, never left our
imaginary childhood friends behind. They have stayed with us, leading us both
to becoming writers—quick-draw wordslingers firing bullets on the page instead
of at high noon on Main Street.
I rode the wild west as Pike Bishop in a series about a character
named Diamondback—a wanted man who acted as a judge or go-between to settle
disputes among outlaw factions. Steve took a different route, writing
Executioner novels under the mentorship of Don Pendleton—the man who
singlehandedly began the literary revolution known as the action adventure
genre.
Stephen Mertz would go on to create one of the most
significant men’s action adventure series in the genre. MIA Hunter, featuring a three-man team of modern day warriors that
spawned imitators but none as crackerjack as the adventures Mertz created into
which to drop his characters Mark Stone, Hog Wiley and Terrance Loughlin. MIA Hunter has become iconic as it
brilliantly tied into our cultural guilt regarding captured service men left
behind after the Vietnam War.
The men’s adventure genre wound down in the ‘90s, but Stephen
Mertz was only getting started. In the next two decades, Mertz honed his craft
writing both cutting edge thrillers and more in depth and personal stories
about the music scene of which Steve was a part. Today, having become a master
of his craft, his name on a book cover guarantees a riveting read ahead for the
reader.
And now it is time to bring things full circle. The action
adventure genre has quietly begun a new revolution. New series such as Reaper and Stiletto are garnering wide response from new readers hungry for
fast-paced action. While it takes Jack Reacher or Mitch Rapp 400 pages or more
to wipe out the bad guys today, the likes of such original men’s adventure
heroes as The Executioner or The MIA Hunter did it in two hundred
pages. They were lean, mean, and lethal as hell—and now those guys are back.
With the release of the first entry in the new Cody’s War series, Stephen Mertz has
returned to his roots, and he’s brought a whole new level of deadly experience
with him. Fortunately, I was able to distract him from his blazing keyboard
long enough for a quick interrogation:
******
During the early days
of your writing career, you found yourself under the mentorship of the man who
set the standard for men’s action adventure—the legendary Don Pendleton. How
did this evolve and what were the most important lessons you took from the
experience?
My friendship with Don began when a wannabe writer guy who’d
read a half-dozen Executioner novels wrote a fan letter out of the blue to a
best-selling author. Don wrote back two months later, a long and friendly
response. A sort of pen-pal friendship grew between us over the years that
followed, a few letters per year. This was before cell phones and emails,
remember. Don offered to read one of my unsold manuscripts. Hell, they were ALL
unsold at that time! He sent me a five-page single-spaced critique of that
manuscript! The book eventually sold, incidentally, with Don’s suggestions
incorporated into it. I know now that most professional writers are broached often
by those wanting a critique of something they’ve written. I didn’t ask; Don freely
offered. That’s a mark of the kind of guy he was, generous beyond belief in
every way.
We met a few years later during one of my open-end summer
road trips. An afternoon visit turned into a layover at Pendle Hill, Don’s
spread in Brown County, Indiana. Don treated me to a whirlwind—I should say,
death-defying—tour of the area in his new fire engine red ragtop Cad (top down,
of course). Through rustic rural towns with names like Gnaw Bone, we pretty
much yakked writing non-stop.
I’d been writing like crazy in those days all
through high school, the Army and working the road as a musician. It’s a hard
business to break into and I hadn’t sold a word. That summer I was 29. Don was
49. As I was also to learn later, turning out four books per year like he was
at the time, about the same hero doing more or less the same things, it can drain
a guy creatively. For a while after that I served at Don’s request as his
assistant on the periphery of some of the Bolan titles while he was still with
Pinnacle.
When the franchise was sold to the Harlequin imprint, Gold Eagle, it
was only natural that I’d be one of the writers Don recommended for their
program. I wrote a dozen books in the GE Mack Bolan series. After Don moved to
Arizona our friendship only deepened through the years until his passing. I can
honestly say that after my own father, Don Pendleton was the most influential
man in my life both as a writer and as a man.
Besides Don, are there
other writers who have inspired you?
Ouch, that’s always a tough one. The honest truth is that as
a new writer and even today, every really good novel leaves its mark. For the
modern action adventure genre that Cody’s War falls into, well, Clive Cussler
in his prime, that’s as good as it gets. Cussler is the gold standard. As far
as writers I read coming up who are now out of print and mostly forgotten, I’ve
always wanted to write as well as Edward S. Aarons. His Assignment series is a
personal favorite. But let’s not forget the movies! Cinema has always been a
strong influence on my prose going back to action directors like Walter Hill
and Jon Woo. Love or hate ol’ Tom Cruise, you’ve got to admit the last couple
of his Mission Impossible flicks are totally kickass, delivering at every level
of heroic fiction. That’s the vibe of Cody’s War.
You have long lobbied
for a change of emphasis from the label of the men’s action adventure genre to
simply the action adventure genre. Why do you feel this is important?
Why make a genre gender specific? The gender of my readers
does not concern me. My novels are driven by interesting, dynamic men and women. What I have to offer is for
everyone, not just half the species. It’s a mistake to limit a genre’s appeal
by being so specific in its labeling.
Do you approach a
series novel different to a standalone thriller?
The physical process never changes. Three to five hours a
day. Four or five days per week. I’m a creature of habit so the process is well
in place no matter what I’m writing. But yeah, it’s different in another way.
The challenge of the standalone is that you’re only going to get this one
chance to tell these characters’ story so you’d better get it right. Make sure
you get everything in while not letting the book become overly long and
ponderous. A series provides more room to swing. The characters have more than
one book for their story to breathe and unfold. With a series I’m reuniting
each book with characters whose company I enjoy and ideally that feeling is shared
with the reader.
What draws you to a
good story—what do you look for first, character, plot, theme?
All three! The perfect combination is a strong plot with
strong characters who have something to say. That’s a hard combination to beat.
Works every time. But too much of so-called pulp fiction is populated by static
characters that eventually grow stale because they never change. You asked
earlier about lessons learned from Don Pendleton. Don’s original Executioner
novels relate not merely a series of encounters but a clear progression in
character development that connects and transcends the individual episodes.
Bolan is not the same guy at the end of Book #38 as he was when going into Book
#1. He kept growing and changing as a real person would throughout a series of
encounters. That was a lesson learned. A general rule of writing is that
memorable fiction stems from great characters. The essence of pulp fiction is
rapid plot development. The name of my game is bringing those two elements
together the way Don did.
With the resurgence
of lean and mean action adventure series reaching a new generation of readers,
what is it about the genre you believe speaks to them?
Thrillers have over the years become too damn long. It started
decades ago with Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy and is epidemic today. Fat is the
only word that comes to mind. Most of these guys are decent writers but even
when they start out with an engaging premise . . . too damn long! Sure, every
novel should be as long or short as needs to be. But at its best the writing of
action adventure is as lean and mean as the characters, without unnecessary
padding. When someone tells me they’ve read a good thriller but it could have
been cut by 100 pages--and I read that a lot these days in Amazon
reviews--well, that’s not a novel I’d care to read. The trend to scale down
action adventure back to its basics indicates that I’m not the only reader who
feels that way.
When you decided to write
the Cody’s War series, what were your goals and aspirations for it?
I’ve had the good fortune to join forces with Mike Bray and
his hardworking crew at Wolfpack Publishing. They’ve repackaged and are successfully
marketing the MIA Hunter series, and my entire backlist is available online through
them in e-book format with sharp new paperback editions as well. Cody’s War is
slanted for a concept in e-book publishing that’s not unlike the trend of binge
watching TV shows. The first five novels are dropping as a Rapid Release
series: a new novel will appear every three weeks. Dragonfire! and each of the subsequent Cody’s War book is a
complete storyline unto itself set against an overreaching arc of plot and
character is only resolved in the final volume.
What can readers
expect now that Cody’s War has begun?
Not to be too coy about it, but I’m not sure . . . that’s
part of the adventure! Could be a beginning of a series that will continue for
years. I’ve delivered the first five novels to Wolfpack. I like this guy, Cody.
He’s dealing with a world of heavy personal shit but that doesn’t stop him from
seriously kicking ass around the world. He only takes on suicide missions. By
the second book he’s partnering in the field with his CIA control officer,
Sara. They make a great team. Sara’s the yin
to Cody’s yang. Wait until you see them
team up in Afghanistan in Book #4! Oh, yeah. It’s going to be a hot five-book
ride. After that, we’ll see . . .

Thanks to Steve for
hanging out. I’ll now release him from custody to get back to writing the next
chapter in his thrilling exploits...
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