Welcome to 2024! I hope the first few days have the month have treated you well!
Let us bring in the new year with a bit of a curveball. Instead of talking about the previous year again, we will instead discuss something entirely different.
I'm sure if you're reading this at all, you are very aware of Harlequin Books. Formed in the frozen wastes of Winnipeg way back in 1948 (That's a quarter of a century ago, folks) as a paperback reprinting company, they didn't stop there. Harlequin eventually grew into a titan of paperback books in the women's romance arena, where they still remain to this day. If you are a female, or know any who read, then you have certainly encountered this company before. They more or less own the entire market.
But that isn't what I want to talk about today.
Back in 1971, the Gold Eagle line was born. Harlequin created it after the huge success of The Executioner books by Don Pendleton and wanted more of it. Ostensibly a men's adventure line of books, Gold Eagle existed to cultivate males in the same way Harlequin had so clearly captured females with their own books. Such a move made sense, who wouldn't want both halves of a demographic, after all. And it ended up being a great success.
Now, I would like to tell you more about Gold Eagle itself, but finding any information about the line online is tough. Considering the nature of the internet, that should say something. There is no wiki entry, no oral history, and no traces left of it online except lists of published books. When it was closed down it feels like there was an attempt to go scorched earth of its existence entirely. So much of this you are reading today might well be based on generalization or speculation. I apologize for that, but there is little I can do on the matter.
For whatever reason, it is as if the Gold Eagle imprint, and everything about it, were deliberately erased from the timeline we live in. So we will just have to go off assumptions today. All I can tell you for sure is that The Executioner lasted from 1969-2020, outliving Gold Eagle itself, before the industry stomped out even that.
Regardless of all of the above, I have decided on this topic because this year is the tenth anniversary of the closure of Gold Eagle. Back in 2014 was when it was announced that the line is dying, being shut down nearly the second Harlequin itself was bought out by HarperCollins. Because, as you remember, that is how Cultural Ground Zero works and how OldPub operated back then.
Here is the original announcement on the James Axler (the co-creator for Deathlands) forums a decade ago:
For those unaware, Gold Eagle was the premiere men's adventure line of books since it was first properly established in 1971 up to the announcement of the closure in 2014. For over 40 years, nearly half a century, it was the premiere place to find men's adventure books, even when the genre was abandoned by the mainstream back in the '90s. Gold Eagle clung on long past the death of its own niche.
One might figure this would be a bigger deal, attracting some sort of in depth lamentation or funeral service online, but the most that exists are posts after the fact speculating on why it died. Aside from the above short thread, there is little commentary to be found. As said before, it is as if they were just wiped clean from the industry.
But what exactly was the sort of men's adventure Gold Eagle published? Well, they most invested themselves in series. Much like The Executioner series (the most popular men's adventure book series ever created), Gold Eagle focused on a franchise crafted around a character, or small cast, that dealt with episodic adventures of daring and doom. They had ghost writers writing under one pseudonym (think the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew), who frequently rotated which books would be written and when they would be released in what order. This, as you might imagine, led to series with as many as several hundred books in them each.
No one can ever say these fellas didn't produce!
There were no consistent "genres" here, either. The Mack Bolan books were action movies before the film genre fully formed (and the series itself lived decades after it died), the Deathlands books were post-apocalyptic adventure tales of survivors after the end, and there were also a whole slew of series that didn't make it beyond their initial three book launching stage, some of which are better than you might think. These books all had varied ideas and premises from time travel, war stories, spies, mysteries, and even Tomb Raider style of adventure tales. If you want to know more about some of what Gold Eagle, and other publishers of the time, put out then be sure to check out the Paperback Warrior site. They go heavy on men's adventure book coverage.
Regardless, the point is that adventure mattered first. You bought a Gold Eagle title to be thrilled, not to check boxes to be allowed into special literary clubs.
Entertainment came first.
It should also be noted that Gold Eagle were not alone. You can fine all sorts of such series from the time period (some of which are out of print now) such as the cult favorite Casca series. The point is that there was an entire industry of men's adventure once upon a time. Gold Eagle were simply at the top of the heap.
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| An example of some of their output |
So what happened for HarperCollins to shut the line down, ending around a century of work overnight? No one really knows the reason, but there has been plenty of speculation, from competing mediums (video games and movies are always the scapegoats, despite any conclusive proof or data), to shifting tastes of the times, to publishing's abandonment of particular reader demographics, to the very real problem of falling male literacy rates thanks to poor education. Though one could agree they all have their contributions to make, the real problem is that the 1990s were where a lot of things died. We've covered this before.
It merely took one of the titans of OldPub getting around to buying up the last of the little guys and finally putting a stop to them before the final domino fell. Since 2014, men's adventure in OldPub no longer exists. It's dead.
If I could offer my own theories as to why this happened, I think it is because the publishers have always been a bit misguided in why they were being read in the first place. They also never thought to course correct, either stubbornly clinging to antiquated ways or chasing trends to keep up with other mediums. In other words, they fell into formula head first.
I don't believe either movies or video games were a major factor in this. These mediums always get brought up, despite the fact that, as stated earlier, The Executioner was a high selling blockbuster before, during, and after, the action movie boom. It outlived that entire peak. Movies had no bearing on the success of men's adventure, if anything it attracted more readers to the books.
As for video games, Goosebumps was the biggest thing in the world when kids were running around 3D space for the first time in Super Mario 64 and when Quake was blowing people's minds. Let us not forget that video game franchises such as Resident Evil and Halo had very successful book tie-ins years after this. Not to mention there is the very successful Warhammer 40K universe which has tie-in video games all the time as well as many books on top of it. More than likely, video games also had little effect on the literacy issue. Once again, it just simply doesn't look to be the case.
So what was the cause? It would obviously have to be the industry itself.
It's more likely kids stopped buying books because OldPub deliberately stopped making any books for boys. By the time they hit the age to read there was little left for them being made, and their tastes had already been soured by schools pushing emasculating slop on them for so long. It's no wonder younger generations never moved on to what little men's adventure was even left by the 21st century (almost none) and never got into reading as a hobby at all. (Speaking of Goosebumps, that was also sabotaged not long after its commercial peak. OldPub really didn't want males to read anything.) How are males supposed to get into a hobby that doesn't want to appeal to them?
At the same time as all this, men's adventure fell prey to the same problem comic books did. Ongoing overly-corporate stories without ending points kills any sense of drama or excitement out of a story when you know nothing really matters in the end. While this doesn't effect characters like Mack Bolan or James Bond, characters that are made for standalone, pick up and read fare, it does effect ongoing stories meant to carry on into epic book lines. And most of what men's adventure was putting out at the time were ongoing stories in the mold. Imagine how it must feel like to read all 125 books of Deathlands to find there is no ending and that the survivors will most likely be doomed anyway. That was part of the dwindling interest, I'm sure. Stories need endings, and they have to matter. At a certain point, it's almost like collecting brand merch for the funko pop wall instead of reading stories. And that's a problem.
Now those old men's adventure stories are all gone, relegated to the corners of used book stores and marked up in online stores. Or they can be found on Amazon with new eBook versions that contain, of course, far inferior cover art to what came before. It's a bit of a sad end to the men's adventure era in OldPub, but that's where it is at today. Considering the entire field is now run by old urbanite women, it is no surprised they didn't see the appeal to selling to half the population that isn't them. OldPub has had an ego problem for decades.
In case you forgot:
In other words, men's adventure is dead as far as OldPub is concerned, and it isn't coming back. That era is over.
But it's not dead in NewPub.
All over this very blog are examples of signal boosts from authors concentrated on putting the story first. Men's adventure is very much alive. Here you can also find ideas that no one would have tried back when OldPub was the only game in town. You can find series, trilogies, short story collections, and evens standalone novels, all of which were thought taboo in the old industry. You will no longer find this level of excitement and fresh creativity on the racks of the dying chain book stores. And that is why they are dying in the first place. Readers simply have too much choice now to settle on what the people in charge tell them they can have.
We don't live in the 20th century anymore. New ways are here.
It's been a decade since the last vestiges of male-oriented storytelling was wiped out of OldPub. Ae they doing better now? Have sales increased? Are more kids reading than ever before? Are new chain book stores opening up? Are people on the street excitedly talking about the new big bestselling book? You know the answers to all those questions. OldPub is over.
Even as just one simple example, StoryHack has turned to putting out Sidearm & Sorcery anthologies (with a third one currently in production), focusing on hot blooded adventure masking up urban legends with sword and sorcery of the old sort. That is just one project. There is no more tired formula to be found in NewPub, it's all uncharted territory.
Cirsova is one of the more infamous examples of putting Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense first, even beyond its magazine releases. As a publisher they release off-kilter books of the sort OldPub can only dream about. DMR Books is yet another example of this as is the recently launched Anvil Magazine.
These are also only the publishers. I haven't mentioned the cavalcade of authors pumping out new worlds and fresh characters for you to follow.
And that's just the very tip of iceberg.
So ten years after the death of Gold Eagle, the last bastion of men's adventure in OldPub, where are we now? In a better place.
If you need more signs of things turning around, you can find them. It's just not always in the places you expect. Things do not always stay the same forever.
Before we leave I wanted to share this one last post from a poster on the above James Axler blog ten years ago. You can judge for yourself if things have improved after reading this ancient post. Trust me, it's a good one.
And this is exactly what ended up happening.
Have a happy new year, everyone!
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