I’ve been knowingly reading the work of Stephen Mertz
for nearly a decade; unknowingly since I was a teenager—all the way back in the
late-1980s and early-1990s—devouring men’s adventure series novels like The Executioner and M. I. A. Hunter. He wrote some of the better non-Don Pendleton
titles of the former, and created, writing many of the books, in the latter. In
recent years he has broken away from series work and produced several high
quality novels in a variety of genres—The
Korean Intercept, Dragon Games, The Castro Directive, Fade to Tomorrow, Hank & Muddy, and others.
Mr. Mertz is primarily a novelist, but his career
began with the sale of his short story, “The Busy Corpse,” in 1975 to the
short-lived The Executioner Mystery
Magazine. In the forty years since, and including that first sale, he has
published “a mere twelve stories”—his words, not mine—and each is included in
his collection, The King of Horror &
Other Stories. The stories are as varied as his novels. There is an action
story, “Fragged,” three featuring a P. I. named O’Dair, and an old-school pulp
adventure yarn, “The Lizard Men of Blood River,” which is aptly dedicated to
Lester Dent.
The best story in the collection, and they are all
very good, is the title story, “The King of Horror.” In the Afterword Mr. Mertz
describes it as “[a] cautionary tale for writers.” It features one Rigby Balbo,
an aging writer angry at his irrelevance. Rig believes he is blacklisted by the
industry and his fellow writers intentionally ignore the influence of his early
work. But he has a plan to get even. A plan that turns blackly ironic for him,
and darkly satisfying for the reader. I reviewed this story back in 2009.
“The Basics of Murder” is a straight P. I. story.
O’Dair—no first name—is on vacation visiting an old friend who made the Army a
career after Vietnam. O’Dair’s leisure time is cut short when an officer is
killed on the firing range, and his friend asks him to look into it. What he
finds is something altogether unexpected for both O’Dair and the reader.
The Afterword is worth the price of admission alone.
It details Mr. Mertz’s thoughts on each of the stories, and illuminates a
little of the personal Stephen Mertz. A few of my favorites:
“The King of Horror” was
written as “an open letter to” Michael Avallone; a popular writer of the
paperback era, and close personal friend of Mr. Mertz, whose markets were gone
and who felt some bitterness about it.
Stephen Mertz worked as a
touring musician for seven years playing “the beer bar circuit.” He played the harp—“blues lingo for amplified
harmonica”—and vocals.
The
King of Horror & Other Stories is pure entertainment. It
showcases the work of an underappreciated writer whose talent and excitement is
present in each tale. The style is quietly smooth, and the plotting is sharp
and surprising. Mr. Mertz may not be a prolific writer of short stories, but
what he does write is damn good.
