September, 1974 Signet Books
Marc Olden takes the Black Samurai series in a Blaxploitation direction this time; while previous volumes have been standard action stories without any true “blaxploitation” trappings, The Deadly Pearl is very much in the subgenre, with Black Samurai Robert Sand going up against a Superfly-esque pimp in the grungier areas of New York. One can almost hear the wah-wah guitar on the soundtrack.
It’s surprising director Al Adamson didn’t choose The Deadly Pearl as source material for his Black Samurai film; it certainly would have been cheaper to film than the installment he did adapt, The Warlock. Whereas that volume has a large cast, settings in Europe, and such crazy things as “lion men,” The Deadly Pearl is of a piece with standard Blaxploitation fare of the era, taking place in grungy urban locations and only featuring a few characters. There would’ve even been a part for Harold Sakata to play: one of the super-pimp’s main stooges is a hulking Asian martial arts master memorably named “Chink.”
This one’s also different from the previous volumes in that Sand operates in more of a lone wolf capacity; the previous three installments had him working at the behest of his boss, ex-President William Clarke, going about the globe to stop some world-shaking plot. But when we meet up with Sand this time, he’s already in New York, about to beat the shit out of a pimp – and he’s here due to a guy named Foster, one of Clarke’s Secret Security guards. Foster’s 15 year-old daughter Rochelle has gone missing, and Foster suspects she’s been abducted, particularly by a group known to be involved in the sex-slave trade. Foster didn’t go to Clarke because Foster is black, and assumed the rich old Texan wouldn’t be concerned, hence his going to fellow black man Robert Sand.
Olden gives Clarke the opportunity to argue in defense of his lack of racism, but this isn’t even the main source of contention between Sand and the ex-President throughout The Deadly Pearl. It’s that Sand is a free man, not a personal agent beholden to Clarke, and thus free to take up his own assignments. And only just now as I typed this did I realize that Marc Olden, himself a black man, has cagily worked in a free man/indentured slave angle with this subplot. But then, none of this stuff is really focused upon very much. The true focus of The Deadly Pearl is The Black Samurai kicking pimp ass in New York City.
This means that the action is more smallscale than previous books – but then, Black Samurai has never been an action rollercoaster. Olden is at ever at pains to make Sand seem human, which ultimately comes off as ridiculous given how superheroic he is.
This means that Sand gets nervous, or is concerned when confronted by opponents; the opening of the novel, for example, features Sand and Foster busting into a room in which a pair of drug dealers are holding a captive young girl, and Sand’s breaking a sweat over the odds, how he’s going to handle these guys, etc. Compare to contemporary kung-fu pulp like Mace, where the hero would wade through ten times as many opponents without trouble.
In these instances Sand will often flash back to some particular samurai training – always the highlights of each book – and pull off some trick outside the ability of a regular guy. But on the other hand, some of this can be too much. For example, later in The Deadly Pearl there’s a part where Sand knows Pearl (ie the Superfly-type pimp villain) has set a trap for him, with armed men waiting on a rooftop building to blow Sand away. So Sand goes to elaborate lengths to scale the building across from them, and then takes out a bow and arrow and waits patiently for the two would-be snipers to line up so he can shish-kabob them both in one go. There’s a great bit here where Sand flashes back to the grueling training under Master Konuma which saw him holding a notched bow for hours at various levels of intensity, until his arms hung uselessly at his sides.
All of which is to say, Sand can stand there in the dark on a rooftop and hold a notched arrow without a single muscular tremor for hours if need be, until he has the perfect shot lined up. It’s cool and all, and yet another indication of his samura bad-assery, yet at the same time it seems a bit ridiculous. I mean, Mack Bolan could take both these guys down in a fraction of the time, sniping them from afar with a rifle. One almost gets the impression that Robert Sand is just an anacrhonism, determined to use the old ways even when better new ways are available to him. It also comes off as foolhardy, given that he’s expending energy on the whole “notched arrow” thing…energy he could be saving for his inevitable hand-to-hand fights.
Speaking of which, hand-to-hand is the majority of the fighting in The Deadly Pearl, which again makes it interesting that Al Adamson didn’t get the rights to this volume. Robert Sand shows off his martial arts wizadry on sundry New York lowlifes, as usual greatly outmatching them. Which brings me to main villain Pearl: certainly the least impressive main villain in the series yet, Pearl is essentially a pimp with grand ambitions, well below par of the average Black Samurai villain. Olden attempts to bring him into the series mold by making Pearl a fencing adept, mostly using a sword that is hidden inside a cane. We get to see many sequences featuring Pearl – as always, Olden spends just as much narrative on his many villains as he does on hero Robert Sand – and Olden tries to make Pearl seem tough, usually cutting up his underlings or engaging in his daily fencing practice. But it’s clear the dude isn’t going to be a match for Robert Sand. I mean it would’ve been like Jimmie Walker as the villain in Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off or whatever. Actually the villain in that one was Ed friggin’ McMahon, but I digress.
This of course means that the colorfully-named Chink carries the brunt so far as “the heavy of the piece” goes, and Olden does a good job of making him seem menacing and sadistic. With a fondness for nunchucks, Chink is quite content beating people to death, setting up the inevitable confrontation between himself and Sand. One thing I’m happy to report with The Deadly Pearl is that Marc Olden doesn’t short-change us in the climax; there’s actually comeuppance for all the villains, and it’s well-handled throughout. But the battle between Sand and Chink, toward the end of the book, is sufficiently brutal, and also features a great start where Chink challenges Sand, who is holding a gun on him, and Sand cooly puts aside the gun and accepts the challenge.
While Pearl isn’t much of a match for Sand in the physical arena, he’s still a good villain in the way that he’s almost like an evil variation of contemporary Blaxploitation paperback hero The Iceman. He doesn’t have the gadgets and weaponry of Iceman, but Pearl is similar in how he’s a successful pimp with a stable of women, one that he’s launched into a lucrative global enterprise. But as mentioned Pearl’s bit is that he abducts young girls, drugs them, and then sells them on the international slave market. Setting up a scenario in future volume The Warlock, Pearl’s main customers this time are the Chavez brothers, a sadistic pair who run their own sex-slave business in South America.
Speaking of sex, poor old Robert Sand doesn’t have any this time around, but then again, Black Samurai isn’t the most sex-focused of men’s adventure series, either. Midway through the novel he does meet up with an attractive lady named Ursula who runs a shelter in the city, but Sand’s more concerned with getting info out of her. It’s only at the very end of the novel that we readers are assured some tomfoolery will be in their immediate future, as Ursula asks “little black boy” Sand back to her place(!). And yes, Olden does play on the race angle in this one (Ursula happens to be white), but for the most part it’s done in humorous fashion; as ever, there is no racism directed toward Sand, given his bad-assery (other, that is, than through Chink, who also is non-white…and, uh, who is named “Chink” himself, so he might be predisposed to racism).
Overall The Deadly Pearl moves at a fast clip, taking place over just a few days. It really brings to mind the inner-city action of Olden’s contemporary Narc series, and I still say it was a helluva miss on Olden’s part that he never had his two heroes, Robert Sand and Jon Bolt, meet up at some point. One thing I did appreciate though was Olden’s indirect reference to the Fillmore East, where a few years before Jimi Hendrix had given his Band Of Gypsys concert; there’s a part where Sand is being chased through the darkened streets of New York, and he heads into an abandoned concert hall that was once the location of big rock acts. While Olden never actually gives the name, it seems evident he is referring to the Fillmore East, which closed down in 1971.
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