Bookends: A thriller series that uses many different genre styles May 12, 2019

Bookends: A thriller series that u
ses many different genre styles

by Dan Davidson

July 4, 2018

– 981 words –

The John Milton Series

by Mark Dawson

self published

Back in the days of the pulp magazines, writers like Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant, author of most of The Shadow stories) and Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson, author of most of the Doc Savage stories) would sit at their typewriters and pound out dozens of short (average 120 pages) novels each year to feed the magazines that housed them. When the paperback book came along a few decades later, some, like John D. MacDonald, whom I wrote about here a few weeks back, jumped to the paperback original market. Gibson and Dent would later find their books reprinted as paperbacks, though they probably didn’t make a lot of money on them, as they were writers-for-hire and didn’t own the characters.

Writers have been pretty much at the mercy of the publishing houses for well over a century, and the flurry of mergers over the last several decades has left them with even fewer options for creative control.

Recently we have entered the era of self-publishing, and that’s changing the game. I receive a few of those actual books for consideration in this column. Others come from distribution houses that handle dozens of different imprints. Still others are pitched on Facebook and other platforms, often with an offer of some free material, sometimes in omnibus format.

That’s how I met Mark Dawson, Let’s face it; with that last name I had to give him a try. The advertising pitch he’s been using, along with a number of other thriller writers, compares his material to Lee Child’s successful Jack Reacher novels. In interviews, Dawson himself admits that this is not an accurate comparison; it’s what might be called an “elevator pitch”, something to catch your attention.

John Milton is a former assassin, who used to do wet work for the Group, a black ops branch of MI6, with possible connections to MI5. He was recruited by Control after a career in the military, including several tours on behalf of Her Majesty in some nasty places. He rose through the ranks to become Number 1 in the Group.

All of the following books arrived in one omnibus volume from Amazon, which provides the CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform on which they were produced. All have since also appeared as actual physical books. Dawson has been busy, churning out 13 of these between 2013 and this year.

In the first book, The Cleaner (314 pages), Milton final

ly faces a situation that is the tipping point for his conscience. Long sin

ce driven to drink to deal with his guilt complex, he resigns from the Group and sets out of a path of redeeming himself by helping others. Rather, he tries to resign. Control doesn’t take it well and sends one of the lower numbers to decommission him permanently. It doesn’t go well, either for the agent, or for Milton’s attempts to be a white knight. He has to flee.

Book two, Saint Death (290 pages) , finds him

working as a short order cook in a small Mexican city, keeping a low profile andstaying out of trouble. As often as possible, he attends meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous groups, and this helps to keep him away from the booze. Quite by accident, he ends sup saving the life of young female reporter who has

been annoying the local drug cartel’s leader by writing about their influence over the local authorities, and things just get more complicated. Once again, a squad from the Group comes to find him, and so he has to cope with danger from several sides. This book actually does feel a little bit like a Reacher story.

I dipped into the third book after a few months of heavier reading, just needing a bit of a break, and found myself pleasantly surprised. In The Driver(330 pages), Milton has been living in San Francisco or several months, working two jobs, attending lots of AA meetings, actually making some friends, and keeping out of trouble. One of his fares turns out to be an escort, and when something goes terribly wrong at the party she’s been hired to attend, it begins to look like she’s been killed. After the bodies of several other call girls turn up, the police start looking for suspects. Milton ends up helping his fare’s boyfriend, at least partly because both of them have become prime suspects.

There’s politics involved here, and the presidential candidate in question could actually be the source for much of Donald J, Trump’s campaign rhetoric; this is fairly prophetic for a book written two years before that campaign.

This one blends the thriller genre with a fairly straightforward mystery feel. Be warned though, there’s an epilogue which acts as a nearly irresistible teaser for the next book. I found myself turning the electronic page.

Ghosts (273 pages) changes the format entirely, delving back almost a decade in its opening chapters to Milton’s first major hit with the Group, led by the then Number One, Beatrix Rose, and told from her point of view. Dawson is canny, and this book served as what television producers would call a “back door pilot” for a second series, now up to six books, featuring this deadly lady,

Milton is rescued from the predicament that ended the previous book and is spirited off to Moscow, to be enlisted in a revenge plot that serves his own needs as well as those of the rogue Russian general whom he had failed to kill eight years earlier. Once again Dawson has switched genres for his story, bouncing the reader from Texas to Moscow, to Hong Kong, to London, to Moscow and back to London in the end. He has called his character “James Bond with a conscience” and that pretty much fits this particular story.

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