If you’re stuck for gifts for the men in your life you might consider some E-Reads books that our surveys tells us are popular among males. Included are:

Sunday In Hell: Pearl Harbor Minute by Minute by Bill McWilliams
Using long established historical records and contemporary journals as well as recently-released war-time documents, Bill McWilliams has created a brand-new minute-by-minute narrative of the Day that Will Live in Infamy. Told from the point-of-view of dozens of characters from Generals and Admirals and politicians and diplomats down to deckhands and private soldiers and also innocent civilians at all levels, this panoramic overview of one of the most traumatizing and shocking events in American history puts the reader in a spot where they can understand the big picture of strategy and tactics as well as the intimate detail of what the chaos, violence and sudden death felt like to people immersed in the surprise of an armed attack on American soil.

The Great Siege by Ernle Bradford
Suleiman the Magnificent, the most powerful ruler in the world, was determined to conquer Europe. Only one thing stood in his way: a dot of an island in the Mediterranean called Malta, occupied by the Knights of St. John, the cream of the warriors of the Holy Roman Empire. A clash of civilizations was shaping up the likes of which had not been seen since Persia invaded Greece.

Determined to capture Malta and use its port to launch operations against Europe, Suleiman sent an armada and an overwhelming army. A few thousand defenders in Fort St. Elmo fought to the last man, enduring cruel hardships. When they captured the fort the Turks took no prisoners and mutilated the defenders’ bodies. Grand Master La Vallette of the Knights reciprocated by decapitating his Turkish prisoners and using their heads to cannonade the enemy. Then the battle for Malta began in earnest: no quarter asked; none given.

The Siege of Malta is not merely a gripping tale of brutality, courage, and tenacity, but the saga of two mighty civilizations struggling for domination of the known world.

The Blood We Shed by William Christie

The United States Marine Corps is a legendary fighting force. Literally thousands of books and movies have glorified its history. But now a Marine veteran has written a novel that opens up the curtain and provides a look deep inside the modern Corps: the good, the bad, and the sometimes just plain embarrassing.

Lieutenant Mike Galway takes command of his first platoon and it is not at all what he bargained for. What he anticipated was the challenge of training a unit of disciplined Marine infantrymen to go to war. Instead he finds himself responsible for a group of unruly American teenagers, for whom he has to become a combination of surrogate father, psychologist, high school principal, marriage counselor, financial advisor, conflict mediator, and drug and alcohol therapist. The results are frequently hilarious, always frustrating, and sometimes heartbreakingly tragic.

Maneater by Jack Warner
Most hunts end in a death. This hunt begins with one–Lanelle Jackson’s. A wild tiger has escaped its cargo truck and now roams the dense forests of the Appalachian Mountains. When deer and wild boar run out, the tiger turns its growing hunger towards man. Now it has a taste for easy prey. With a body-count on the rise and the media coming in, Sheriff Grady Brickhouse calls upon Jim Graham, a tiger hunter trained in India to end the man-eater’s killing spree.

In Maneater, author Jack Warner crafts a tightly suspenseful adventure novel, where death hides in the shadows of small town life. It will have you straining to hear the low growl of the wild before it’s too late…

Out of the Ashes by William C. Johnson
Ben Raines is searching for his family in the chaos that remains after devastation hits America. Thieves and gangsters take the streets in the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. Fearful American citizens band together searching for a leader. Luckily, there is Ben Raines, a rebel mercenary, soldier and patriot. Ben forges together the remains of the cities to join with the Resistance forces and create a new future for America. During their struggles, the final battle arises with an attack by government forces. Will they be able to rebuild America? And will Ben Raines find his family?
Out of the Ashes is the first novel of a gripping series that takes you further than you dare to imagine into a post-Apocalypse world

Meds by Ray Garton
One hot summer day, a man in a business suit running wildly down a busy street attacks a woman and her toddler, neither of whom have ever seen him before.

… As he waits in his pickup truck for his wife to finish shopping, a man decides to take the shotgun off its rack, go inside the mall and open fire on total strangers.

… While waiting to see her doctor, a woman takes a knife from her purse and begins stabbing others in the waiting room.

Something is making people become violent and murderous…something they all have in common. When Eli Dunbar discovers what it is, he becomes afraid, because it’s something he has in common with them–a drug prescribed to him by his psychiatrist. And now Eli is a ticking time bomb.

Do you know all of the risks your prescription drugs might pose? Does your doctor? Or has the manufacturer hidden them from the public in the interest of profits?

Meds…a thriller with deadly side effects.

Though World War II ended over sixty years ago, to all who served or simply followed it from the Allied viewpoint, books sympathetic to the Axis viewpoint make us uneasy to say the least. Such a book is Grey Wolf, Grey Sea by E. B. Gasaway, which chronicles one of the war’s most successful U-Boats and its captain in savage confrontations on and beneath the sea. The U-124 was both predator and prey, and much as we hate to admire Kapitanleutnant Jochen Mohr, his courage and determination are impossible to deny.

A man’s will is the wind’s will, and the dreams of men are long, long dreams.

I humbly apologize to Longfellow for this presumptuous restatement of his great line (from My Lost Youth) but that’s what jumped into my head after reading Robert Lipsyte’s thought-provoking essay on the back page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Lipsyte attempts to “demystify…the testosterone code that would get teenage boys reading.” And the code is packed into the male’s need to be part of an us-against-them team. But that  condition is fraught with anxieties about hierarchy, performance, approbation, triumph and shame.

Both as agent and publisher I have devoted my career to understanding what boys and men like to read and introducing male readers to books they will enjoy. Unfortunately, hard statistical support for any thesis is meager and anecdotal. My own choices, whether representing a writer or publishing him (or her, for many women write wonderfully for men), are based more on instinct than on market surveys and are rooted in what I myself like to read.  And what I like to read as a man is what I loved to read as a boy – stirring fiction and nonfiction about gallant, righteous warriors conquering wicked scoundrels and overcoming daunting odds. And when I finish such a book I wonder whether I could adequately explain to a woman, without feeling a touch – or more – of embarrassment, what it is about it that spoke to me.

In publishing lingo the nickname for books for male readers is “boy books”, but believe it or not this is not a term of opprobrium; the editors I know and work with utter it with an indulgent smile, as they might talk about such boys-will-be-boys activities as beer blasts or belching contests or drag races. As I pointed out in an article called Chick Lit and Boy Books, these distinctions “arose in the 1980s as a large, capable and influential cadre of female editors took charge of the mass market paperback industry. Their attitudes were feminist and, after decades of second class citizenship in editorial management they wielded their influence on every category of popular fiction. ‘Chick lit’ was one of the terms coined at the time; ‘boy books’ another.”

And if you’re looking for someone to blame for gender stereotyping in the book business, you might as well blame BISAC. BISAC, an acronym for Book Industry Standards and Communications, is a Dewey Decimal-like system of codifying books by subject matter. As I explained in Chick Lit and Boy Books, “The titles you see on the spines of paperbacks are governed by types of literature and are so designated to help bookstores place their titles in the most effective way possible. General women’s fiction and romance tend to get stocked in a female oriented part of the store, whereas stuff like western fiction, military science fiction, and male action adventure go into the male part of the store.”

Now for the heart of Lipsyte’s article: he is worried that boys are becoming disinclined to read and the quantity and quality of books they like are dwindling. To understand why,I’m afraid there’s a touch of cherchez la femme in his analysis. “The current surge in children’s literature has been fueled by talented young female novelists fresh from M.F.A. programs who in earlier times would have been writing midlist adult fiction. Their novels are bought by female editors, stocked by female librarians and taught by female teachers. It’s a cliché but mostly true that while teenage girls will read books about boys, teenage boys will rarely read books with predominately female characters.”

“Children’s literature didn’t always bear this overwhelmingly female imprint,”  says Lipsyte. But rather than paste his entire essay into this column, I urge you to read Boys and Reading: Is There Any Hope?. There you may rediscover the profound truth that Longfellow penned over a century ago:

A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the dreams of youth are long, long dreams.

Richard Curtis

The fantasy swordsmen that populate Dave Duncan’s novels are among E-Reads’ bestselling books. Now comes Longdirk, a Highlands outlaw whose blade slices through foes like a farmer’s scythe.

In Demon Sword, the first novel in the “Years of Longdirk” trilogy, all of Europe is under the control of the Khan, whose conquering armies swept across the West in 1244. Scotland, in addition, lies under the heel of England. Young Toby Strangerson, a half-English bastard, reared by a witchwife, wants only to shed his hated “Sassenach” blood and free his beloved highlands.

Toby wields a sword as the outlaw Longdirk. The sword can cut down men like so many stalks of corn. But stranger winds are swirling and howling across the lochs, eldritch winds that are ridden by “hobs” and “wisps” and demons. The enemy Sassenach king is also a sorcerer. His demon soul needs a body and his Black Arts can free Europe from the Khan’s Golden Horde.

Demon Sword and its sequels Demon Rider and Demon Knight were originally published under the pen name Ken Hood but Duncan is stepping out from behind his shield.

Watch the Dave Duncan author page for release information about Demon Rider and Demon Knight. You’ll also see some two dozen fantasy treats from a brilliant master available for download or print paperback..

In Survivor, the coda to William W. Johnstone’s bestselling “Ashes” series, Jim LaDoux, the grandson of the legendary General Ben Raines, has seen his grandfather and the last of his family die in the beginnings of the plague that sweeps the world, leaving many millions dead and a civilization struggling to survive and re-build after yet another in a what seems like an endless series of crippling blows.

LaDoux, having stayed alone for six months in the isolated Idaho cabin built by his ancestors, realizes that he must get out and find life and hope or he will surrender to despair and death. As he starts traveling, he finds a young woman, Bev, who had been on a Believer mission and who has barely survived an attack by Rejects. The Rejects are a chaotic and violent movement of outcasts who have seen all the destruction and horror of the last few years and have formed a single belief: that there can be no God in a world such as they’ve lived in.

As they travel together, they find love for each other and they have to deal with members of both sides of the struggle and then encounter yet a third faction, the Rebels, who believe that Ben Raines’s set of beliefs is still alive and that faith, courage and firepower combined can beat back the evil that threatens to end the world.

When ex-New Jersey cop Remo Williams is electrocuted for the murder of a dope-dealing goon, CURE, a super-secret government agency that doesn’t really exist, schemes to resurrect Remo as the ultimate killing machine that will carry out most of its dirty plans. Under the direction of expert assassin Master Chiun, Remo is transformed into the Destroyer and launches a series of secret plots to dissolve the underworld.

That’s how the incredibly successful Destroyer series by writing partners Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir is launched, and as there are over one hundred adventures in print, Murphy (who took the series over solo after Sapir died in 1987) has obviously found a way to keep his protagonist in action despite executing him in Volume #1, Created: The Destroyer. So, beginning writers, don’t try this fictional technique at home.

E-Reads has reissued fifty titles in the series in both print and downloadable formats and there are more books on the way. Check out the selection and fill in the gaps in your collection.

And just to reassure you that any given Destroyer is as compelling as any other, check out Volume #50 and you’ll see that Remo and Master Chiun are still going strong. In typical Murphy fashion, Killing Time is about a fad diet with the potential to destroy Western civilization.

RC

William W. Johnstone has long been a mainstay of the men’s adventure series business with dozens of volumes available in a range of different types of story from traditional western adventure like The Last Gunfighter and The Mountain Man to post-apocalyptic military action like the Ashes series.

What would happen to American society if the social divisiveness of contemporary political factions ran amok in tandem with the destructive instincts of international terrorists, and all of this was accompanied by the outbreak of a devastating biological plague claiming tens of millions? One possible answer is embodied in the more than 30 adventure volumes comprising the Ashes series.

Take one jaded, angry author—a retired soldier—on the outs with the government for his frankly critical, political commentary-laden series of bestselling adventure novels. Throw in a plot to subvert the American political system from within. Add a devastating, nearly untreatable disease that spreads easily and kills quickly and widely. Top off with a grab- bag of bikers, isolationists, separatist militias and opportunistic terrorist invaders. What you’ve got is a recipe for world-scale disaster, chaos and the collapse of civilization—and, fortunately, one man with the vision and the will to put together a team, an army, a new country, that can put everything back together, only better than before.

But it won’t be easy. Too many people thrive on the chaos and don’t want peace and prosperity to return to upset their own private arrangements and their raping, pillaging, murdering way of life.

Ben Raines is not happy with the world as he sees it and with the way he thinks it could be going, but he’s retired from public service (the military and a subsequent stint as a mercenary) and making a good living as a popular (but not to everybody) novelist. When the world collapses around him, friends and lovers die and neither the government nor anyone else seems to be able to do anything other than add to the chaos. He decides that the only thing to do is get together some old friends and allies, band into an independent army and implement all his Utopian daydreams to make his new world the better place he always thought the old one should be.

Starting with Out of the Ashes then Fire in the Ashes and on through another two dozen plus titles all the way to Escape from the Ashes (the last volume in the series), we follow the adventures and challenges as Ben and his army face thugs, mutants, alien invaders and everything else the world can throw at him. As a special bonus you can also take a look at From The Ashes: America Reborn, a final coda and look back at the adventures of Ben Raines.

So check out the first book in the series, Out of the Ashes, and Johnstone’s biography page with all of the Johnstone titles that E-Reads currently publishes.

This week E-Reads added some two dozen titles to its list of Destroyer action adventure novels by Warren Murphy and Warren Sapir, bringing our current total to 50. E-Reads has about 50 more titles in inventory, so you may be sure the supply is not going to run out any time soon.

At last count there were over 140 Destroyer novels, not including the many books in other series that Warren Murphy (his co-creator passed away many years ago) has generated. For those of you who have written a novel, or who have labored over your masterpiece for five or ten years, it’s almost incomprehensible that one writer can be so prolific. It calls for determination, discipline, inventiveness and nimble fingers to produce hundreds of books over a career (and Murphy is still going strong), but as remarkable as it may seem to the lay reader or weekend novelist, Murphy is by no means the world’s champion. The French thriller writer Simenon boasted over 1000 books and there may be others of similar fecundity. Having written potboilers myself years ago I am not at all surprised. At 5000 words a day, I was able to complete a novel in about two weeks. Granting an author his or her sabbaths and a couple of weeks per year of vacation, that’s still about 20 or 25 books a year. Over an effective career of, say, forty years, that puts us close to 1000 titles.

But — are they any good? Well, Warren Murphy’s army of fans thinks so, and so do we. For a more detailed look at prolific authors, read about the bet I made twenty-five years ago that I know authors who can write books faster than publishers can cut checks. No publisher has taken me up on the bet, and for good reason.

I’m tempted to bet that Warren can write a Destroyer faster than you can read it, but I don’t think I’d win that one. Read one and you’ll know why.

- Richard Curtis

Action adventure series — they’ve been around for decades, hugely popular. Male readers eat them up, but they’re also tremendously appealing to women as well. It’s hard to say who was the first author to produce them, but certainly one of the founding writers of the modern genre, and arguably the best, is Warren Murphy and his Destroyer Series. E-Reads is proud to bring you the first fifty, and you can look for more as time goes by.

We’ve got your hero (maybe he’s even a superhero, even though he isn’t bulletproof—just nearly so). We’ve got your trusty sidekick. We’ve got a secret government agency. We’ve got specialized and mysterious training, with a hint of mystical stuff thrown in for spice. We’ve got a never-ending series of villains of all types, from the ordinary and merely venal to the megalomaniac Earth-conquerors in training. And we’ve got action. Boy have we got action. For books that start with a bang and never let up from beginning to end, there’s nothing that matches a Destroyer novel, except maybe a Richard Stark (that’s Donald Westlake under one of his many pseudonyms for those of you who care) novel about the professional thief, Parker, and his perennial misadventures with his crimes and the criminals whom he gets involved with.

We’re not talking finely-honed prose or literary masterpieces here, although each book is a small gem in its way. What we are talking is a perfect model of entertainment reading at its most entertaining. Start on page one and, more than likely, you’ll look up a few hours later, notice that a bunch of time has gone by, and reach for another volume so you can just keep going—and not worry to much about how late it is and when the alarm is going to ring in the morning. You might not be any smarter or more elegant than you were when you started reading but you will recall that your heart was racing and you couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out what happened next until it was all over.

You’re invited to check out what all the series readers know about how much fun it is to read a Warren Murphy Destroyer novel but don’t buy just one because when you finish the first, you’ll just have to get out of your chair, log on and buy some more.

Here’s the first in the series and here’s Warren Murphy’s bio page with a list of available tiles. And there are more to come.

Enjoy!