The Avenger: Justice, Inc. by Kenneth Robeson

As most of you know, Kenneth Robeson was a Street & Smith Publishers pseudonym for several writers, including Lester Dent who wrote most of the Doc Savage novels. In this case, Robeson was Paul Ernst. I know next to nothing about Ernst. The Avenger is one of the late era (1939) pulp heroes. This first adventure was reprinted by Paperback Library in 1972 and coincided with the first pulp reprint craze that reintroduced such characters as Doc Savage and The Shadow to a new generation. I read about a dozen of these, and enjoyed them. New Avenger adventures were later written by Ron Goulart. In this first tale millionaire Dick Benson loses his wife and daughter on plane flight (they’re thrown out of the plane) as part of an evil plot to blackmail wealthy businessman from Buffalo, New York. Shocked, Benson loses control of his facial features and his hair turns white, a plot device that was eliminated in later stories. Forming a group called “Justice, Inc.,” Benson becomes a menacing figure of “ice and steel” intent on delivering unsympathetic justice to evildoers. It’s a great premise and the prose snaps, crackles and pops with adjectives and imagery. Well written and electric stories like this are a great example why pulp fiction is so highly regarded today. It’s the rare “best-selling” thriller today that can compete with The Avenger, Doc Savage or The Shadow for pure thrills. The later mid-70s Avenger stories by Ron Goulart (still under the Kenneth Robeson pseudonym) are equally entertaining. The first 24 Paperback Library books reprint the Paul Ernst pulps, and the Goulart stories begin with # 25. The Avenger: Justice, Inc. hails from those halcyon days when “crime’s greed turned millionaire adventurer Richard Benson into – The Avenger!”