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Post by zanshin4 on Mar 4, 2006 20:29:56 GMT -5
Hey, nice to see this board back up! I thought it was down awhile back. On the DM series, I'm almost certain there was a #71 - and it was with a new publisher rather than pinnacle. I will double-check that. Do you have a link to the Bolan board where Stephen Mertz comments on Rosenberger? There is so very little info about him out there, it would be cool to see it. Thanks! ps I finally found a set of "Black Samurai" by Marc Olden.
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Post by tim gueguen on Mar 7, 2006 19:51:23 GMT -5
Hi everyone. If my name looks familiar its because a few of you have checked out my blog entry where I commented on the series.
If there's a Death Merchant #71 I've never seen it. #70 seems to be the last one. In any case the last 6 or 7 Death Merchants were published by Dell. I have no idea if they simply bought the rights to the character from Pinnacle Books or if they bought Pinnacle outright.
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Post by PMP Webmaster on Mar 9, 2006 16:51:15 GMT -5
Hey Tim, I do remember reading your entry a few months back and I believe I left a note on your blog. Thanks for dropping by. One of these days, I'll have to get off my butt and pick up a few more DM books to work on my collection. I've got about two dozen now, but (for what it's worth) I might as well just try and build a full collection. At least it'll be easier than a full quota of Bolans or Destroyers.
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Post by English Teacher X on Mar 23, 2006 7:02:11 GMT -5
Wow! I've been searching and searching for information about Rosenberger and the Death Merchant online, and I have found very little, which saddens me, for despite his racism and psychotic devotion to the Cosmic Lord of Death, Camellion is very much a unique product in the world of pulp fiction, simultaneously completely ridiculous yet brutally realistic and believable. I've recently been fleshing out the Death Merchant entry on Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) -- please stop in and see if I've made any mistakes. I would give a sacrifice to the Cosmic Lord of Death to know more about the life of Joseph Rosenberger. He seems like a . . . er. . . well, let's say unique again, personality. I did see a reference to an interview with him here, in SKULLDUGERY magazine in like 1983 users.ev1.net/~homeville/fictionmag/d1028.htm#A51427Websearches for his name have turned up strange titles like "Sex Practices of Southeast Asia" and "The No-Smoking Myth". Is it the same guy? And unless I'm forgetting something APOCOLYPSE was intended to be the final Death Merchant story, because it seems to end with the beginning of a nuclear war with Russia. English Teacher X
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Django The Bastard
Junior Member
"They called him Django...he was a friend to me..."
Posts: 85
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Post by Django The Bastard on Mar 23, 2006 9:23:42 GMT -5
Greetings ETX...glad to see that this site is becoming a haven of sorts for all my fellow fans of the wacky world of Mama Camellion's blue-eyed boy...(remember that?)...there is so little about Rosenberger available on the web...I have seen mentions of that interview as well...if only someone could dig it up!
Your wiki entry on The Death Merchant is quite frankly AWESOME! NICE work! My only comments would be you left out George McCauley II in the allies section and #70 The Greenalnd Mystery, which may have been published after Apocalypse...not sure on that one...
Apocalypse did have a certain air of finality about it...as I said I can't remember if it was the absolute final one published...the timeline for the end of the world wasn't quite right tho'... Camellion firmly believed the end was coming in 2012 if I remember correctly...perhaps the war started in the one Super-DM published after the hole was blown in the Ozone layer would have led to WWIII adventures of Camellion and Co...at this point, who knows?
What other, if any, paperback series do you enjoy?
N' hope to see you and any and all other fans of crazy ol' JR and his brethren around the the Momento Mori ranch more often!
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Post by English Teacher X on Mar 23, 2006 16:17:22 GMT -5
I was a big fan of all the men's adventure pulps of the 80's -- funny to think how many complete geeks read them, rather than the he-men they were undoubtedly written for.
There were some really strange ones -- I think a lot of talented writers were writing these series to pay the bills, and they often really let their imaginations and sense of humour run wild.
HAWKER was a very good series, only 9 books as I recall, written by Carl Ramm, who is currently a best-selling novelist named Randy Wayne White (never read any of his current books, but I'd like to.) Fairly serious and dramatic adventures of a vigilante Chigaco cop. DETROIT
THE SPECIALIST series was another favorite, written with tongue firmly in cheek by one John Cutter, alias John Shirley (who wrote THE CROW film, amongst many other fine novels. I also liked THE MERCENARY series, that was a fun one. Can't remember who wrote it. The one-eyed wise cracking mercenary named Hank Frost.
Of course I read some Mack Bolan, but in retrospect, those novels were basically very half-baked. The original Don Pendeleton ones were okay, but once they got farmed out to Gold Eagle, total cookie-cutter.
They really overflowed in those days, THE DOOMSDAY WARRIOR, CASCA THE MERCENENARY, PSI-MAN (another funny one.) TNT, that was a REALLY nice one. Tony Nelson Twin, a journalist who got super-powers in some kind of H-Bomb explosion, and was always on these strange missions involving massive death traps that he could circumvent with his special powers. Not your typical shoot-em-up, again only lasted maybe 6 or 7 books. By Doug Masters, a few available still on Amazon.
There was only one that I found that was even more bizarre and brutal than The Death Merchant, and that was one known as THE CRIME MINISTER. I was only able to find two (in, of course, the used book shop!) Amazon tells me there are five; by one Ian Barclay.
The first one was extremely bizarre; at one point the Crime Minister (a hitman) goes to a gay bar to pick up a guy to use as a patsy corpse after an assassination he's planning. He makes out with the guy before he kills him -- there were a lot of homoerotic themes in these men's books, but this was the most blatant that I saw. The Crime Minister and The Death Merchant surely would have had a fun evening out together, although the Crime Minister was considerably more interested in getting laid. (Loads of heterosexual sex in the books, too.)
The .357 VIGILANTE series was nice, too. Written by a college student, I understand, whose real name was Lee Goldberg and went on to write for DIAGNOSIS: MURDER and various other TV shows.
Another favorite was the TRACKER series (maybe spelled TRAKKER?) which was so obscure I can't find anything on Amazon about it -- it was about a Navy hotshot who was blinded in an accident, but had special bionic radar eyes (or something!) installed so he could see far better than most. Really bizarre, they had in one a transvestite hitman trying to assassinate George Bush (senior) at a basketball game with an M-79, and in another Tracker became a professional wrestler to kill a hitman (and part-time wrestler) who had given him some grief. (He fries the guys brain with his special laser finger.)
Ah, and there were so many more. . .
I encourage anyone to add some stuff to my Death Merchant entry on Wikipedia -- I especially would like to throw in some quotes, but all my Death Merchant books are in my mother's attic. Ironically, I've grown up to be an English teacher in the hated land of pig farmers, which, despite Camellion's wishes to the contrary, never got turned into a sea of radioactive glass. . .
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Django The Bastard
Junior Member
"They called him Django...he was a friend to me..."
Posts: 85
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Post by Django The Bastard on Mar 23, 2006 17:12:57 GMT -5
I thought I had a good knowledge of a lot of series but The Crime Minister is one I have to admit I have never heard of...and after that description it sounds like one I most likely won't be picking up any time soon! It really almost sounds stranger than The Death Merchant...if that's possible!
I recall seeing Tracker in the used bookstores, but again have never read any...I seem to recall the character wearing BIG googles on the cover.
TNT and .357 Vigilante are ones I have also seen in the store and are on my list to pick up!
I have to disagree with you on the Bolan books though...they have been having a resurgence of late and with writers like Chuck Rogers, Jon Guenther, and Doug W have really shown why the character is probably the king of the paperback heroes.
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Django The Bastard
Junior Member
"They called him Django...he was a friend to me..."
Posts: 85
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Post by Django The Bastard on Apr 5, 2006 15:54:45 GMT -5
Came across this cover to a entry in the Tracker series... Yup...BIG googles...
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Post by English Teacher X on Apr 6, 2006 5:53:40 GMT -5
Yeah, he didn't actually have big goggles in the series, he had all the bionic junk inside his fake eyes. I guess they just wanted to make a point with the cover art.
I read that one, he's tangliing with a crazy arsonist. I like the one where he fights the Yakuza (GREEN LIGHTNING might have been the title) where some ninjas come after him in his mountain home, and after some fighting he ends up hanging off a balcony naked with a ninja below him about to stab him -- and he urinates in the ninja's eyes to stop him, then drops and shuto chops him into oblivion.
A ploy worthy of The Death Merchant himself.
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Post by English Teacher X on Apr 6, 2006 6:19:04 GMT -5
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Post by Todd on Apr 17, 2006 15:57:08 GMT -5
has anyone read the Murder Master series, also by Joseph Rosenberger? I have a couple at home and they are much in the same vein.. the funniest thing is that the hero has sex in one of the books and it uses the exact same description of the "action" as in Death Merchant's The Billionaire Mission!
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Post by Todd on Apr 17, 2006 16:02:46 GMT -5
oops sorry, just went to the root of the forum and see there is a topic about it already!...
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Post by Guest on May 26, 2006 2:29:26 GMT -5
Okay, you guys convinced me to try Death Merchant... Picked up #8: Billionaire mission today for $1.80 at the used bookstore. Hope the Death Merchant is as hilariously hateful, politically incorrect and ridiculously violent as you guys seem to think! Hard to top Frank Garrett's Killsquad in that department, though... LOL
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Post by Guesty McGuest on Jun 10, 2006 8:36:22 GMT -5
Oh, man. I tried reading Billionare Mission; my first time reading DM or Rosenberger. It was written so badly I couldn't get more than a couple chapters in. Every once in awhile, I'd see little flashes of creativity, but mostly, it was just junk. I especially hated how he seemed to end every sentence in his action sequences with an exclamation point. But the capper was when he said "whatever he shot at, he always hit." Then a few pages later, he misses! LOL. I will NEVER, EVER read Rosenberger again. My action novel series faves so far are The Executioner (even though it's often the same old song and dance), The Destroyer, Killsquad and The Penetrator. I like a sense of humor and DM doesn't seem to have one, at least not intentionally...
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Post by PMP Webmaster on Jun 10, 2006 15:26:17 GMT -5
Keep in mind, you also read the 8th book out of a 70 book series. They do get better over time, but hey, there are plenty of other fish in the sea.
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