Executioner Novel ghost writer driven by coffee, the thrill of seeing his work in print & $4000 per book

Paperback writer Phil Elmore discusses the grocery store circulated action crammed novel of yore and its' formula for success

Upstate New Yorker and prolific writer-author Phil Elmore looks back fondly to the early 2000s when he was plying his craft of producing adrenalin packed adventures featuring men of action who take justice into their own hands. The standard novel format for the Executioner/Mack Bolan books of which there were over 450 titles that were between 55-60,000 words long. The secret sauce for these books was plain. Elmore reduces it to the bone:

"I mean, the standard Executioner novel is: 'There are bad men. I will now go shoot them all in the face' . And you come up with some plot contrivance to move the executioner from point A to point B to point C, and he kills everyone that he meets there, except for a few people he meets along the way because it's useful to give him someone to talk to"

Listen to the episode with Phil Elmore here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/quorum-radio-prolific-novelist-ghost-writer-phil-elmore-talks-drug-store-novels--66990769

It was as a boy that his father introduced him to the Don Pendleton series so he learned the special Executioner action writer's skill relatively smoothly. The series started thus:

"So the executioner, he was in Vietnam, and then he found out the mob had figured indirectly in the death of his loved ones. So he said, I guess I'll kill all the mob then, and for the over the course of twenty to thirty books, he did just that. He killed every mob guy there was to kill. And he got plastic surgery a few times"

After a while that plot got a bit tired and then terrorism dominated themes came into the franchise. While the objective could shift from targeting mobsters to terrorists there was a constant with the protagonist according to Phil:

"The thing about the executioner character was he was a fixed point in space. He did not evolve. He did not question his mission. He was a Paladin of sorts, who never doubted and never did the wrong thing. One of the things you can't do with a vigilante character, which the executioner essentially, was you can't have him make a mistake, because it robs him of moral authority."

Elmore penned 23 of these novels for which he was paid approximately 7 cents per word or around $4000 a piece. Concerning the tortured process of putting words to page to make a living and the grind of it and the tendency to procrastinate he comments:

" And you know that authors are like noble gasses. We expand to fill the available space. ...So my editor knew to lie to all of his authors about the deadlines. He would tell us that the deadline was two or three months before the actual deadline. And then when he retired and the new editor took over, until the Oh, no, don't worry, the real deadline for that is not until such and such date. I was like :Yeah, never tell me that again, because you I need that pressure. I need to know that I'm late. Because I would say, of the 23 books that I wrote, some the vast majority of them, I was already late before I'd even started, you know, because you just reach a point where you'd rather be doing anything else when you have to be working on a specific book. ...I think it's why JK Rowling, when she wrote the last book in the main Harry Potter series, started killing beloved characters left and right, because she resented having to sit in that luxury hotel and finish that book when she'd rather be doing something else."