Well, that’s that. With Moonstone‘s The Avenger: Double Feature 2, we get a couple more new stories of The Avenger, maybe the last for awhile. Sad, as Street & Smith’s pulp hero The Avenger is one of the few original pulp heroes to get additional approved stories.
We had gotten the 12 Ron Goulart novels when Warner continued publishing Avenger paperbacks after the original pulp novels had been reprinted. From Moonstone, we got three collections of shorts stories, a new novel, the first Double Feature volume, and a collection of linked stories from Win Scott Eckert.
Richard Benson, The Avenger, was S&S’s next attempt to repeat the success of The Shadow and Doc Savage by 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.
In The Avenger: Double Feature 2, we get a pair of stories. One of them is a promised new novel from Matthew Baugh, the other a short story with The Avenger by Mark Justice.
“Mr. Dusk” is first up by Mark Justice. A mysterious government group is being stalked by something, as several members of the group are mysteriously killed at night. Justice Inc. is called in to help, and the whole team (before Cole Wilson joined) comes out to help put an end to things. A little more science-fictiony than the original stories, this was pretty good, and though short, made good use of all the characters.
Matthew Baugh, who had previously done a new Avenger novel with him dealing with Sun Koh, here gives us a second novel, “The Curse of Kukulkan.” Something is going on in Mexico, near where the Aztec gold horde that funds the group is held. Nellie and Cole head down there, as the rest of the team is busy. There is someone in the area taking on the name of Kukulkan and causing problems. And The Avenger is going to deal with it. This one turns out to be a sequel his prior novel and another well-done Avenger novel. Am interested to see if we would have seen more of Red Bull, a character who helps out and had known Benson before he became the Avenger.
This is probably the last new Avenger work for awhile. As I understand it, Conde Nast, who owns the rights to the Street & Smith characters, has ended all licensing of them. So no more new Doc Savage stories from Will Murray, no more pulp reprints from Sanctum Books, which had to end The Shadow reprint series just four novels short of reprinting them all. And I suspect this includes The Avenger. I had expected Baugh’s novel to come out, and suspect this book was originally planned to be it, as the cover artwork seems related to that story. But they probably had Mark’s story as well, so they included it and renamed the volume Double Feature 2. I suspect we won’t see a trade paperback reprint of the recent Avenger comic miniseries from Dynamite either, which I had been hoping for.
From what I am hearing online, Conde Nast is in financial trouble and may be thinking of selling off the rights to the Street & Smith stuff, and doesn’t want licenses out to muddy the waters. Hopefully someone will buy them that will be more friendly to allowing new reprints and new original works with the characters. But time will tell.
