Submarine Warfare - a German Captain's Tale

Though World War II ended over sixty years ago, to all who served or simply followed it from the Allied viewpoint, books sympathetic to the Axis viewpoint make us uneasy to say the least. Such a book is Grey Wolf, Grey Sea by E. B. Gasaway, which chronicles one of the war's most successful U-Boats and its captain in savage confrontations on and beneath the sea. The U-124 was both predator and prey, and much as we hate to admire Kapitanleutnant Jochen Mohr, his courage and determination are impossible to deny.

The Ashes Series by William W. Johnstone

William W. Johnstone has long been a mainstay of the men’s adventure series business with dozens of volumes available in a range of different types of story from traditional western adventure like The Last Gunfighter and The Mountain Man to post-apocalyptic military action like the Ashes series.

What would happen to American society if the social divisiveness of contemporary political factions ran amok in tandem with the destructive instincts of international terrorists, and all of this was accompanied by the outbreak of a devastating biological plague claiming tens of millions? One possible answer is embodied in the more than 30 adventure volumes comprising the Ashes series.

Take one jaded, angry author—a retired soldier—on the outs with the government for his frankly critical, political commentary-laden series of bestselling adventure novels. Throw in a plot to subvert the American political system from within. Add a devastating, nearly untreatable disease that spreads easily and kills quickly and widely. Top off with a grab- bag of bikers, isolationists, separatist militias and opportunistic terrorist invaders. What you’ve got is a recipe for world-scale disaster, chaos and the collapse of civilization—and, fortunately, one man with the vision and the will to put together a team, an army, a new country, that can put everything back together, only better than before.

But it won’t be easy. Too many people thrive on the chaos and don’t want peace and prosperity to return to upset their own private arrangements and their raping, pillaging, murdering way of life.

Ben Raines is not happy with the world as he sees it and with the way he thinks it could be going, but he’s retired from public service (the military and a subsequent stint as a mercenary) and making a good living as a popular (but not to everybody) novelist. When the world collapses around him, friends and lovers die and neither the government nor anyone else seems to be able to do anything other than add to the chaos. He decides that the only thing to do is get together some old friends and allies, band into an independent army and implement all his Utopian daydreams to make his new world the better place he always thought the old one should be.

Starting with Out of the Ashes then Fire in the Ashes and on through another two dozen plus titles all the way to Escape from the Ashes (the last volume in the series), we follow the adventures and challenges as Ben and his army face thugs, mutants, alien invaders and everything else the world can throw at him. As a special bonus you can also take a look at From The Ashes: America Reborn, a final coda and look back at the adventures of Ben Raines.

So check out the first book in the series, Out of the Ashes, and Johnstone's biography page with all of the Johnstone titles that E-Reads currently publishes.

A Fleet of Destroyers

This week E-Reads added some two dozen titles to its list of Destroyer action adventure novels by Warren Murphy and Warren Sapir, bringing our current total to 50. E-Reads has about 50 more titles in inventory, so you may be sure the supply is not going to run out any time soon.

At last count there were over 140 Destroyer novels, not including the many books in other series that Warren Murphy (his co-creator passed away many years ago) has generated. For those of you who have written a novel, or who have labored over your masterpiece for five or ten years, it's almost incomprehensible that one writer can be so prolific. It calls for determination, discipline, inventiveness and nimble fingers to produce hundreds of books over a career (and Murphy is still going strong), but as remarkable as it may seem to the lay reader or weekend novelist, Murphy is by no means the world's champion. The French thriller writer Simenon boasted over 1000 books and there may be others of similar fecundity. Having written potboilers myself years ago I am not at all surprised. At 5000 words a day, I was able to complete a novel in about two weeks. Granting an author his or her sabbaths and a couple of weeks per year of vacation, that's still about 20 or 25 books a year. Over an effective career of, say, forty years, that puts us close to 1000 titles.

But -- are they any good? Well, Warren Murphy's army of fans thinks so, and so do we. For a more detailed look at prolific authors, read about the bet I made twenty-five years ago that I know authors who can write books faster than publishers can cut checks. No publisher has taken me up on the bet, and for good reason.

I'm tempted to bet that Warren can write a Destroyer faster than you can read it, but I don't think I'd win that one. Read one and you'll know why.

- Richard Curtis

The Destroyer Series by Warren Murphy and Richard Ben Sapir

Action adventure series -- they've been around for decades, hugely popular. Male readers eat them up, but they're also tremendously appealing to women as well. It's hard to say who was the first author to produce them, but certainly one of the founding writers of the modern genre, and arguably the best, is Warren Murphy and his Destroyer Series. E-Reads is proud to bring you the first fifty, and you can look for more as time goes by.

We’ve got your hero (maybe he’s even a superhero, even though he isn’t bulletproof—just nearly so). We’ve got your trusty sidekick. We’ve got a secret government agency. We’ve got specialized and mysterious training, with a hint of mystical stuff thrown in for spice. We’ve got a never-ending series of villains of all types, from the ordinary and merely venal to the megalomaniac Earth-conquerors in training. And we’ve got action. Boy have we got action. For books that start with a bang and never let up from beginning to end, there’s nothing that matches a Destroyer novel, except maybe a Richard Stark (that’s Donald Westlake under one of his many pseudonyms for those of you who care) novel about the professional thief, Parker, and his perennial misadventures with his crimes and the criminals whom he gets involved with.

We’re not talking finely-honed prose or literary masterpieces here, although each book is a small gem in its way. What we are talking is a perfect model of entertainment reading at its most entertaining. Start on page one and, more than likely, you’ll look up a few hours later, notice that a bunch of time has gone by, and reach for another volume so you can just keep going—and not worry to much about how late it is and when the alarm is going to ring in the morning. You might not be any smarter or more elegant than you were when you started reading but you will recall that your heart was racing and you couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out what happened next until it was all over.

You’re invited to check out what all the series readers know about how much fun it is to read a Warren Murphy Destroyer novel but don’t buy just one because when you finish the first, you’ll just have to get out of your chair, log on and buy some more.

Here's the first in the series and here's Warren Murphy's bio page with a list of available tiles. And there are more to come.

Enjoy!