Street & Smith’s pulp hero The Avenger 
is one of the few original pulp heroes to get additional stories. After Warner Books reprinted the original 24 Avenger novels, they had Ron Goulart write 12 additional novels. Now, finally we get another new Avenger novel, “The Sun King” by Matthew Baugh, from Moonstone — 40 years later!
Richard Benson, The Avenger, was S&S’s second attempt to repeat the success of The Shadow and Doc Savage, but this time combining elements of both. The Avenger also had stories that varied in style from Doc-like adventure tales to The Shadow super-crook tales. And like both characters, he had others who worked with him in Justice Inc.
This new story is set in the early period of The Avenger’s career. It’s a direct sequel to “The River of Ice,” but before “Murder on Wheels.” We actually get Cole Wilson in the story before he appeared in that novel.
We have The Avenger and Justice Inc. in a story that also include Sun Koh. Benson is on the trail for information about Atlantis (Sun Koh’s a Prince of Atlantis) that ties to the discoveries in “The River of Ice.” For those not aware, Sun Koh is a German pulp character who appeared around the time of Doc Savage, and is sometimes called a “German Doc Savage” (or, worse, a “Nazi Doc Savage”). This is emphasized a bit with the cover, which has both The Avenger and Sun Koh, with Sun Koh in a Doc-like ripped shirt — with a Nazi armband.
As some may not be aware of Sun Koh, we get an afterward that gives a good overview of the character and his history, and shows he’s not as much of a Nazi as some would like to portray him, being as he was half-Aryan (his mother was a Mayan), and his associates included a black heavyweight boxer, a Mexican, and an Italian girlfriend. Things that Nazi censors weren’t too keen on and eventually forced the end of his stories.
We also get an overview of recent uses of Sun Koh, but overlooked was his recent use in a Dillion/Jim Anthony novel that was based on Art Sippo‘s version of the character.
Moonstone has done three collections of new Avenger short stories. I hope this will lead to more new Avenger stories, ideally more novels (I saw a note by someone that they are writing a new Avenger novel, so looks like that will happen). This one is great and I’d like to see more (though I don’t care for the “de-powered” version of the Avenger, but Win Scott Eckert has a good solution for a return of his abilities that hopefully others will use). I understand that Moonstone will be collecting Win Scott Eckert’s short stories from the collections, along with a new one. Look forward to it.
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