Its interesting how life sometimes imitates art.

Unless you're completely out of touch with world affairs you've heard about the poor folks who have been beheaded in recent weeks by their kidnappers in Iraq. Oddly enough this is a plot element in Hard Pursuit, a recent edition of the long running Executioner action adventure series. When the head of an al Qaeda splinter group escapes US custody he takes a bunch of American cops and airmen hostage, and intends to decapitate them on international tv. Of course unlike the real world the title character manages to catch up with the nasties in time and save the day.

Mack Bolan, the Executioner was originally created by the late Don Pendleton in 1968, and can arguably be said to have started the action adventure paperback boom of the early '70s. Most of the series that came out of that boom are long gone, but the Executioner continues, along with the spinoff "Superbolan" and Stony Man paperback series.