1/31/07: RightWingTrashMan: Jerry AhernThere’s a case to be made for never reading books that aren’t at least #8 in a series. That was certainly a rule for our own early years, when the only school program we cared about was Reading Is Fundamentally Violent. We were all grown up, however, while reading 1983’s
Naked Blade, Naked Gun—#13 in the popular “They Call Me The Mercenary” series. Axel Kilgore became one of our favorite authors when we came across this exchange, as titular hero Hank Frost explains to FBI Agent Kulley that The Mercenary believes in live and let live:
“Sounds rather liberal for a man in your profession,” Kulley remarked.
Something in what Kulley said bothered Frost; he couldn’t put his finger on it. “I’m not a liberal—unless you mean it in the classical sense. I believe in the free interchange of ideas, rights of individuals so long as they don’t interfere with anybody else’s rights—that sort of thing. But the way you define liberals these days—hell, I’m no liberal.”Frost will later kill Kulley with a Browning High Power Automatic Pistol loaded with 115-grain Jacketed Hollow Point ammo—partly for being a Satanist, but mainly for being a hypocrite.
Then a fellow gun nut (and former roommate of Mark David Chapman!) explained to us that Kilgore was, in fact, a pseudonym for Jerry Ahern. This was like finding out that Dr. Seuss was also Jerzy Kosinski and Herman Melville.
Ahern was already known for his amazing
Survivalist books, which had counted up to
The Survivalist #6: The Naked Horde by 1983. The
Survivalist series was about the only guy who knew what to do in the aftermath of a nuclear war. When he wasn’t taking on invading Russian troops, ex-CIA officer John Thomas Rourke was taking care of his family. He had plenty of help from his pal Paul Rubenstein, who didn’t plan to end up as a Soviet Jew.
You can’t go wrong with
The Mercenary or
The Survivalist series for sheer entertainment—especially when Ahern turns the latter entirely on its head as the franchise becomes a sci-fi epic.
But what truly makes Ahern a hero of RightWingTrash is that he later went native. In fact, he now runs Detonics USA—which manufactures the same kinds of pistols that John Thomas Rourke once brandished in the paperbacks. Ahern still writes, too. Just check out
this fine essay, which is also the source of today’s impressive graphic. And who gets the photo credit? His lovely bride Sharon Ahern. Just like Rourke, Jerry Ahern keeps freedom in the family.
Make him your own: Jerry Ahern doesn’t get royalties on used paperbacks. Maybe that makes him angry. You don’t want to make Jerry Ahern angry. Go to
eReader.com, where Ahern has seized the means of production. You can get
The Survivalist and
The Mercenary books, as well as Ahern’s
The Defender series. And can you guess who now gets a co-writing credit on
The Mercenary series? Sharon Ahern. Somebody get this couple a reality show.
And
go here if you need a gun, or want to read Ahern’s blog. You need a gun.
