Review: ‘Day of the Destroyers’

“Day of the Destroyers” is a New Pulp linked anthology from Moonstone Books. It stars Jimmy Flint, Agent X-11 of the Intelligence Service Command as he fights against a conspiracy by the Medusa Council to take over the United States.

Jimmy Flint is your typical spy/secret agent character from the pulps, fighting a secret war against enemies, foreign and domestic, of the U.S. A veteran of WWI, a master of various forms of unarmed combat, as well as having various weapons to help him, including a special gun, various items described as pens, and others. He answers to his boss, Number 6, and is aided by his uncle Jack Flint, who is a retired spy known as Falcon-7 who has gathered other former spies as the “Shadow Service.” Later in the series he gains a young sidekick. (However, one writer flubbed and referred to Jimmie as “Jack” in his story.)

The Medusa Council is a shadowy group of plutocrats who plan to overthrow FDR‘s government in a bloody coup. They have bring in Col. Lucian Starliss, who Jimmy had served with in WWI, to lead this effort. The Colonel was maimed in the war, and now has a mechanical arm and a scarred face. The Medusa Council has people from other countries in the ranks, including mad scientists and more. Interesting, the group is inspired by an apparently real group that planned to do the same, and even tried to recruit Major Gen. Smedley Butler, who turned them down.

In addition to Jimmy, some stories have other pulp heroes “cross over.” The Green Lama appears in Adam Lance Garcia‘s tale. The Black Bat and Phantom Detective show up in a couple of others, the Bat working solo with the Phantom teaming up. And we get a new pulp character, Gray Face, who is a counter-spy and takes out some of the Council’s agents.

As noted, this is a linked anthology, not a short story collection or a novel. The 12 parts were written by different authors, all under the direction of Gary Philips, who edited the book and wrote some of the parts. So I would recommend reading them in order, which is what I did.

Now, if Jimmy Flint seems familiar, that’s a fair assessment. This work stated with the plan that this would be an Operator #5 collection, and announced as such. But Argosy Communications decided to pull the rights for all their characters from Moonstone to take them to Dynamite. I felt that the new prose works from Moonstone of The Spider and others were great, but, sadly, the characters have not been well served at Dynamite, and Dynamite doesn’t do prose works, only comics. Thus I feel this was a mistake. They should have at least left the prose rights with Moonstone. So to make this work, they changed the characters. Jimmy Christopher became Jimmy Flint, his father became Jimmy’s uncle, and so forth. Gray Face was clearly created as a stand-in for the Red Finger, a character who ran in a backup series in Operator #5, and has been collected by Altus Press (see my review on him).

But despite these setbacks, I’m glad they came out with this work. It is pretty good. Argosy missed a great opportunity to get Operator #5 out there. Instead of new Operator #5 stories, maybe we’ll see new Jimmy Flint, Agent X-11, stories. And hopefully also more Gray Face.