Richard Blade #25: The Torian Pearls

Richard Blade #25: The Torian Pearls, by Jeffrey Lord

August, 1977  Pinnacle Books

I hadn’t planned to read any more Richard Blade novels after the debacle that was #9: Kingdom Of Royth, which happened to be “new” author Roland Green’s first installment of the series. Given that Green went on to write the ensuing 27 volumes of the series (a one-off author named Ray Nelson contributed the 30th volume), I figured reading more books by him wouldn’t be worth the trouble. But the other month I came across this volume and the next on the clearance rack of a local Half Price Books (which is where I do all my book shopping these days; you never know what you’re going to find!), so I figured what the hell. 

But man, reading this book wasn’t worth the trouble. At 182 pages of small, dense print, The Torian Pearls was a chore to read. And a pulp novel about a sub-Conan getting in swordfights and bedding busty babes should never be a chore to read. It was Kingdom Of Royth all over again, and it baffles me that series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel kept Green on the series. My assumption is Green was just turning in his manuscripts on time. Or maybe the series was selling and Engel decided not to rock the boat, but I’m gonna assume that if Richard Blade did sell, it was mostly due to the era in which it was printed (sword and sorcery being pretty popular in the late ‘70s), and/or the covers were drawing people in (this one being by Kelly Freas). 

Everything that original series creator Manning Lee Stokes imbued the series with is long gone. Richard Blade, while still a brawny fighter and leader of men, has lost all of the macho qualities Stokes gave him. Indeed, Green is once again at pains to point out that Blade “doesn’t kill needlessly,” and there are parts where Blade congratulates himself that he didn’t kill some foe. He also spends an inordinate amount of time worrying that the women he beds in Dimension X won’t get killed or go nuts – both things which have often happened in the past, as Green recounts in the opening pages. 

But let’s face it, by this point Roland Green had written 16 volumes, twice more than Stokes did, so Richard Blade was Roland Green’s series at this point. As evidence of this Green adds a lot of continuity to the series, with the curious tidbit that all the continuity is related to prior Green novels. The first 8 Stokes volumes are ignored, and that Richard Blade is long gone – the Richard Blade who was prone to doubt and brooding in Home Dimension, but who turned into a vicious, almost unstoppable force of masculinity in Dimension X. Roland Green’s Richard Blade is a pale reflection of that earlier character, though it must be admitted he is more of a standard hero. Whereas Stokes’s Blade would kill with impunity, in some cases just to make a point, Green’s Blade is more concerned with keeping peace and helping people. 

Interesting, sure, but the delivery leaves a lot to desire. The Torian Pearls is a sluggish, trying read, everything relayed in bland and unthrilling tones. Even the battle scenes are rendered limp by the mundane narrative style. Midway through the novel I realized what the issue was: literally everything is relayed through Richard Blade’s perspective. The novel could just as well be written in first-person. Each page is comprised of nigh-endless paragraphs of description or the thoughts of Richard Blade; there is seldom any dialog, and absolutely no other characters rise to the surface. In a Stokes novel, there would be interraction with various characters. In Green’s books, the entirety is focused on Blade and his thoughts, and the other characters he meets in Dimension X serve as his sounding boards, having at the most a handful of lines of dialog. Even the women Blade beds – with one falling in love with Blade (and vice versa) and becoming pregnant with his child – are ciphers, briefly emerging from the dense narrative murk to say a line or two before disappearing back into it. 

Seriously though, it’s 182 pages of stuff like this: 

Very seldom does another character talk to Blade and give his or her opinion on things; almost everything is relayed via the narrative, as if we were reading a history book. To add to this, the adventure lasts over several months – one holdover from the Stokes novels – so there’s a lot of “three months passed” and the sort, further making the reader feel as if he’s reading a history book about some guy named Blade, who goes to a new Dimension and starts to align the various peoples into one nation. And really that’s all that happens in The Torian Pearls. The plot is so uninvolving: Blade finds himself in a swampy world, befriends a traveling group of warriors, wins their respect, then leads them in various battles with other warlike peoples in this swampy world, with the goal of unifying the various nations. That’s it, folks. There’s no real impetus to the story nor any goal for Blade; why he’s still being sent to Dimension X in the first place is not even dwelt upon. 

That said, Green it appears has tried to work a sort of continuing storyline into Richard Blade. There’s now some stuff about the “Menel,” a race of aliens who have plagued Blade in past installments – apparently #10: Ice Dragon was the first, but I could be wrong; I’m only guessing this from the narrative. In The Torian Pearls Blade again comes across the Menel, who have spaceships and may also be able to bridge dimensions. But hey, don’t listen to me; here are two pages of typically-dense text as Blade ponders the Menel: 

 

Note that all of that is material Richard Blade could have discussed with someone else. Hell, even if he was just talking to a rock! But the above is another indication of what I’m talking about. The entire damn book is just Blade and his thoughts, which go on for pages and pages with no dialog breaks. I mean, Manning Lee Stokes certainly turned in some padded and boring volumes, but at least the guy gave Blade someone to talk to! The characters Blade encounters in The Torian Pearls are so cipher-like that I once again return to my original theory that Richard Blade isn’t really going to any “Dimension X” at all; the entire series is just the hallucinations of Richard Blade. In other words, it’s all about him because it all is him, like a dream or something. 

Well anyway, the plot itself is lame, mostly because there really is no plot. Blade’s been spending some time walking through the woods of Scotland or something when we meet him, reflecting on past Dimension X exploits (only the Green ones), and he heads on back to the Tower of London for his next trip to Dimension X. He comes to in a swampy world and gradually finds himself encountering one after another group of people who are fighting for the ever-diminishing land. The oceans are expanding and land is becoming precious, and it’s a wonder this book hasn’t been discovered and cherished by the climate cultists. But then it’s much too masculine for them…even in neutered form, Blade still gets in lots of fights, eventually becoming a leader of men. 

But it’s all so nauseatingly repetitive and bland; Blade meets one group, he befriends them and wars with them against their enemies; he meets another group, he befriends them and wars with them against their enemies. There’s also a proto-Dances With Wolves/Avatar bit where Blade is not believed to be a true warrior and must prove himself in various native rituals, culminating in a fight against the top warrior. But again it’s all so tepidly described, because the entirety is locked in Bland’s thoughts and reactions (it’s the first jpeg excerpt, above). 

The sexual material is just as bland; Blade hooks up with three women in the book, per the template, but everything is off-page. And the female characters are even more cipher-like than the men, literally only showing up for Blade to bang off-page and then disappearing back into the text. Hey, they’re the perfect women! Seriously though, what’s humorous is that Blade apparently falls in love with one of them, and indeed sires a child with her, but Blade’s gone before he finds out whether it’s a boy or a girl. If I’m not mistaken, in a future volume Blade returns to this Dimension and meets his child, and if I’m further unmistaken it’s a boy and also a grown man when Blade returns, given the loosy-goosy nature of time in Dimension X. It would be interesting to read, but given what I know of Roland Green’s novels, I’m sure it won’t amount to much, as it all will be locked in Blade’s thoughts with the other characters not having the space to breathe. 

The alien Menel only factor in randomly; Blade survives a lot of wild animal attacks, from flying reptiles to water creatures, and he hacks one open and finds a crystal in the brain – apparently the same thing the Menel did in a previous volume. There’s also a Menel UFO that crashes, but Green is maddeningly vague when it comes to describing the aliens. Indeed, Green’s descriptions throughout are maddeningly vague; even female characters are not given the exploitation that is customary of the genre. Instead the novel is like an endless sprawl of Blade thinking this and Blade pondering that as he voyages across the swampy world and unites various groups into one, eventually launching a war against the titular Torians, an empire that is headed up by a hotstuff, wanton babe in her 40s. 

But Green has squandered so much text that he rushes through all this – the queen takes Blade as her plaything and we only learn about it in hindsight, with none of the naughty stuff Stokes would’ve given us. That said, Green does deliver a memorable sendoff for Blade, having him zapped back to Home Dimension while the queen is giving him a blowjob! Speaking of rushing through things, only here in the very last pages are we informed that Blade’s bosses have taken care of a publicity matter, apparently from an earlier volume, in which Blade saved some people from a crashing train, and Scotland Yard were trying to figure out who the “mystery hero” was who’d saved them, Blade having vanished into the shadows to preserve his secret identity. This is literally brought up and dispensed with in a few lines of text on the last pages, so either Green forgot about his own dangling subplot or editor Lyle Kenyon Engel grafted it in to Green’s manuscript. 

Overall, The Torian Pearls was terrible. I went into this one wanting to think that Roland Green had improved after so many volumes, but it seems more apparent that Richard Blade should’ve ended when Manning Lee Stokes left the series.

The Ninth Dragon (Sam Borne #1)

The Ninth Dragon, by E.B. Cross

June, 1985  Pinnacle Books

This obscure late-era Pinnacle paperback was the first of two novels featuring Sam Borne, a secret agent for the mysterious US outfit “The Committee.” But then, Sam (as author E.B. Cross refers to his protagonist) isn’t just a secret agent: he’s also a ninja and he’s a world-class actor who trained with some royal thespian school in England. Sam Borne seems to act mostly in the capacity of assassin for the shadowy intelligence agency The Committee…an agency which remains a mystery for the entirety of The Ninth Dragon, but we are often assured they are devoted to preserving world peace, and Sam is often sent out to kill bad guys. 

At 280+ pages, The Ninth Dragon is clearly intended as a standard thriller and not a men’s adventure novel, yet the trappings are mostly the same. Only the narrative tone is more reserved – despite featuring some outrageously lurid material – and the pulpy conceits are less pronounced. For example, that Sam Borne is a ninja hardly even matters in the story, and the “American ninja” stuff could be entirely removed from the book and not make a difference. There is no part where Sam dons a ninja costume, wields a ninja sword, or does anything ninja-like; we’re just often reminded that he “trained as a ninja” for a few years in Japan after ‘Nam, making him an expert “in the dagger and the dirk” and also learning all the standard ninja tricks. Ninja tricks of which he does not use a single one in the course of The Ninth Dragon. 

I’m assuming “E.B. Cross” is a pseudonym, but I could be wrong. What’s funny is how much the word “crossed” is used in the book. It’s almost like an in-joke. I’m not exaggerating…one could make a drinking game out of the number of times we’re told “Sam crossed the room,” or “Sam crossed back to the other side of the road,” or etc. It’s used a lot, and just made me laugh. The dry, reserved tone also has me suspecting “Cross” was British. The book has that same polish I find in British pulp, lacking the gut-level impact of American pulp; as evidence, all of Sam’s sexual conquests occur off-page, and female exploitation is kept to a minimum. Everyone also speaks more like British people than American, though Cross does acknowledge this in the novel, having Sam reflect to himself at one point that when in a foreign country and speaking English to natives, he unintentionally slips into a formal, British style of speech. 

Cross sprinkles Sam’s background throughout the narrative, but it’s so sloppily done. For example, we don’t even learn until nearly 150 pages in that Sam’s mother was Japanese and his dad was white, an American airborne soldier killed in action in Korea, and Sam was raised from infancy in foster care in Japan. You’d think the fact that our hero was of mixed descent would be slightly relevant and relayed to the reader a little earlier. But then, we never do get a real picture of this guy. The vague backstory is almost ludicrously undeveloped; occasionally Sam will think of the training “his ninja masters” gave him, and we’re briefly told that he spent some time in the mountains learning the ways of the ninja…okay, but why? Is that just standard Committee training? Even more ludicrous is the off-hand comment that Sam is “among the world’s best actors,” given his training in acting in London, which is even less elaborated on than the ninja stuff. 

But then, Sam doesn’t even do much to acquit himself as a world-class assassin, either. Folks, over the course of the first 114 or so pages of The Ninth Dragon, Sam Borne flies to Hong Kong…and is fitted for a new wardrobe courtesy some local tailors who have been hired by the Committee (which always remains off-page, by the way). Sam also tours Hong Kong with a pretty young woman who has been sent by the Committee as his local contact…and he spends more time trying to provoke her anger, then sends her off at the end of the day. Even James Bond in the original Ian Fleming novels would do more than that in 100+ pages! But man, I don’t exaggerate when I say that a lot of The Ninth Dragon is given over to travelogue material about Hong Kong, or Chinese customs, or sundry other things that you wouldn’t expect to read about in a pulp paperback about a superspy ninja. 

Really though, this is all Sam does for the first quarter-plus of the novel. Wait, he also leaves his latest girl in the lurch; the novel opens with Sam on vacation after the latest assignment, where he’s been banging some chick he picked up and reading a whole bunch and etc while he enjoys some down-time between assignments. Then he gets the summons from the Committee and he takes off while the girl’s down at the local market, and she catches him while he’s trying to make a quick getaway, leading to her throwing a hissy fit and chasing him. From there it’s to Hong Kong where Sam gets fitted for clothes and then manages to pick up some lady at a bar, but as mentioned above the naughty stuff is left off page. 

Meanwhile, as if from an entirely different book we have the lurid doings of Dr. Sun Sun, an obese and overly disgusting drug kingpin based out of Vietnam. Sun Sun is in fact an American, an officer who went rogue during Vietnam and now runs a drug empire, his servants exclusively midgets and his fields worked by American POWs. In other words it’s Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now as played by the main Harkonen guy from David Lynch’s Dune. The midgetsploitation in this book is beyond belief; even the first-page preview is a glimpse of the climactic battle, in which Sam takes on these midgets in the tunnels beneath Sun Sun’s compound in Vietnam. We’re told these midgets came with the compound; trained for tunnel warfare by the VC, they now work for Sun Sun, but there’s no chief midget henchman, which seems a curious miss on Cross’s part. 

Indeed, the novel really focuses on just three characters: Sam Borne, Doctor Sun Sun, and Honey Pot (a Fleming name if ever there was one), a lovely Vietnamese lady who is with Sun Sun because he has her siblings in bondage or something. Otherwise there are no other characters who rise to the surface; even the American POs who toil in Sun Sun’s opium fields are faceless cardboard cutouts who do not have subplots of their own. The only time we see one of them is in a horrific sequence where Sun Sun’s midgets capture a POW who tried to escape, and Sun Sun “operates” on him, recording it all on video – gruesome stuff, like slicing off the guy’s scrotum. And, uh, feeding the bits and pieces he cuts off to the horde of rats who live beneath the compound. There is a definite lurid element to The Ninth Dragon, some of it kind of shocking at least when compared to the overall dry tone of the book. 

Speaking of Honey Pot, her intro is also lurid; she’s required to watch as a snuff flick is filmed on the compound; Sun Sun enjoys filming all of his sadistic deeds, and we’re treated to a long bit in which Cross recounts the orgy that ensues, which is followed by a guy putting a noose around the neck of each girl in a sort of Russian Roullette game. Here though we get our indication of Cross’s overly dry tone, as despite the insanely sordid proceedings, he recounts it all in a bland, placid narrative tone. The author is more concerned with Sam Borne’s errant observations on Asian culture and customs. The sadistic stuff really comes out of nowhere, and all of it features Sun Sun, who is himself a very Bond-esque villain, an arrogant blowhard given to grandiose speeches. 

E.B. Cross doesn’t do much to exploit his own setup, though. I mean, he’s got an obese psycho ex-‘Nam officer who heads his own drug empire, staffed by a legion of killer midgets, and he’s up against a superspy who happens to be a friggin’ ninja. Anyone who just read that sentence could probably come up with a better book than E.B. Cross has. The Ninth Dragon is more of a pseudo-Bond thriller, complete with the motif of the gabby villain with delusions of world domination. Even the cliched stuff where Bond will temporarily be caught in the villain’s trap is repeated here, twice: first when Sun Sun hooks Sam to a harness and tosses him out of a ‘copter in mid-air as “training,” then toward the end of the novel when he puts Sam in a human-size champagne glass that slowly fills with water. (Seriously!) 

Worse yet, Sam Borne doesn’t do much to prove his ninja badassery. He doesn’t even get into a fight until over a hundred pages in, where he takes out a group of Russians in Hanoi. His “thespian” setup is also poorly developed; his cover has him posing as a drug-runner based out of Harvard who hopes to get a job with Sun Sun’s organization, and this entails sitting around and being bullied by the brother of the latest chick he’s picked up here in Vietnam. Sam does fairly well for himself with the ladies, like a true sub-Bond, but as mentioned it’s all off-page. Well anyway, for reasons never even much explained, Sun Sun learns of Sam’s duplicity, thus resulting in the various traps he soon puts our hero through…meaning that we never even get to see Sam’s “world-class acting skills” put to the test. 

The finale is similarly muddled. For one, Sam falls in love with Honey Pot after some (you guessed it) off-page hanky-panky, and the final confrontation with Sun Sun is almost an afterthought. That said, it does at least involve those rats again, but otherwise it’s handled a lot more quickly than I would’ve assumed. Instead, more focus is placed on Sam and Honey Pot escaping the compound with the rescued POWs, taking on the underground army of midgets – a bit that includes the memorable mental image of Sam blowing scads of midgets to pieces on full auto. But yes, Sam does all his fighting with guns in this one…seriously, I almost think the “American ninja” stuff was grafted on by Pinnacle because they were trying to catch on to the fad. 

I was mightily unimpressed with The Ninth Dragon, but Sam Borne returned in the following year’s The White Angel, another paperback original, published by St. Martin’s Press instead of Pinnacle, so I figure I’ll go ahead and read it anyway sometime.

Biker Cop: Hippie Terror Thrill-Kill Cult

Good news, everyone – a new book has been listed at Tocsin Press. It’s titled Biker Cop: Hippie Terror Thrill-Kill Cult, and it’s by Paul Russ. Here’s the cover:

Terry Shelter, the titular “Biker Cop,” is of course not to be confused with Terry Bunker, the Chopper Cop! And it goes without saying that “Paul Russ” is not to be confused with Paul Ross! 

Curiously though, the events of Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert are frequently referred to in Hippie Terror Thrill-Kill Cult… 

In this one the Biker Cop takes on a cult of hippies who are randomly gunning down people across California…that is, when they aren’t slaughtering rock stars in their own homes. Lots of sex, violence, and chopper-riding action ensues. 

If you like Chopper Cop, or ‘70s men’s adventure novels in general, chances are you’ll “groove” on Biker Cop: Hippie Terror Thrill-Kill Cult!

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 19

More Jim Kelly movies: 

Mellinda (1972): I’ve long known about this movie, given that it was Jim Kelly’s first appearance in a film, and reportedly it’s this role that got him cast in the following year’s Enter The Dragon, which of course made Kelly a star. Melinda is also notable for featuring Rockne Tarkington, who was originally cast in the role Jim Kelly would ultimately play in Enter The Dragon; I seem to recall reading, when I was obsessed with all things Bruce Lee twenty-some years ago, that Bruce Lee didn’t get along with Rockne Tarkington, so Tarkington was fired and Jim Kelly got the gig. 

Well anyway, despite this pedigree Melinda has apparently been hard to see for many years. It’s curious the film isn’t more well-known, as it’s actually pretty good – even if Jim Kelly’s barely in it. He only appears in the first few minutes, then disappears until the last several minutes of the picture, where he returns for the final fight sequence. It’s clear why he would’ve gotten the Enter The Dragon role from this, given his martial arts skills on display throughout, but what’s real weird is that Rockne Tarkington got the offer first; Tarkington, who has a lot more screentime than Kelly in Melinda, does absolutely no fighting in the course of the film, and indeed is beaten up by various people! He plays a former pro footballer who is in deep with the mob, but he’s a coward and he simpers more than he snarls – curious then that he would be the first choice for Bruce Lee’s film, and not Jim Kelly. 

Loglined as “Your kind of black film,” Melinda stars Calvin Lockhart as a smooth-talking DJ on a soul music radio station who takes “I’m black and I’m proud” to a whole ‘nother level. His character, Frankie J. Parker, is one of the more arrogant “heroes” you’ll meet in a film, with his rapid-fire come-on lines and endless “I’m cool, can you dig it?” patter, but somehow Lockhart manages to be likable. The film opens with Frankie sparring with his karate teacher, played by Jim Kelly naturally, and it’s all sort of like that “urban black karate dojo” Jim Kelly briefly appeared in when his character was introduced in Enter The Dragon. But I love this stuff because it gives the impression that people just beat the shit out of each other in these inner-city karate classes, then laughed it off and hit the showers. 

Kelly doesn’t have much in the way of dialog, but one can clearly see a star in the making. But as mentioned he’s gone soon and Lockhart carries the picture, doing a fine job of it. The story goes that Frankie meets the titular Melinda (a very attractive Vonetta McGee), a hotstuff babe new in town who initially seems immune to Frankie’s come-on patter, but soon enough they’re getting into some R-rated hankie pankie. Ah, the days of nudity in action films. Meanwhile some hulking black stooge watches them through the friggin’ peephole of the door to Frankie’s apartment, apparently able to see the naughty action clearly enough that he begins to, uh, pleasure himself. It’s true love between Frankie and Melinda, but it’s doomed, and within a day or two Frankie’s world comes crashing down and Melinda is gone. 

It turns out Melinda was involved with high-level Syndicate type (Paul Stevens, whose high-level Syndicate type character is given the very un-villainous name “Mitch!”), and he wants her back – particularly something she hid from him. This brings a mystery angle to Melinda, or perhaps a hardboiled vibe would be a more apt description, as soon Frankie’s being accosted by various enemies (most memorably by a busty white chick in a see-through knit top who tries to take him somewhere at gunpoint), and he learns that some of his supposed friends were involved with Melinda’s fate. In particular Tank, (Tarkington), who turns out to be a “business associate” of Mitch, though Tank’s really into it for the easy women. 

The film seems to have had a nice budget and the acting throughout is good; an hour in none other than Ross “Wonder Women” Hagen shows up, delivering a stand-up performance as Mitch’s top henchman. The way Hagen effortlessly handles the role is fun to see and another reminder that the dude should’ve become a much bigger star. Rosalind Cash also features as Frankie’s ex-girlfriend, Terry, and while her role starts off as thankless (spatting with Frankie when she sees him with Melinda), she ends up having a much larger part in the proceedings, with an especially memorable bit where Terry poses as Melinda and goes into a bank to get into Melinda’s lockbox. Initially I felt this part was dragging on too long – the suspense being whether Terry’s guise would be uncovered – but it turned out to be one of the highlights of the film, with Terry abruptly going ballistic on the bank manager. 

But then that might be why Melinda apparently didn’t resonate with audience of the day…it’s a bit too long and drawn out, coming in at nearly 2 hours. Also I think the title couldn’t have helped matters; maybe if it had been titled “Black Rage” or something similar, it might have resonated more. I mean, “Melinda” certainly doesn’t scream “blaxploitation” to me, so I’d wager this mis-titling factored into the film’s fade into obscurity. Then again, they named the main villain “Mitch,” so clearly titles and names weren’t a strong suit of the producers. This is a shame, as overall I really enjoyed it – oh, and as mentioned Jim Kelly does return, towards the very end, bringing in his karate school to help Frankie kick some mobster ass. But given that Jim Kelly isn’t the star, he’s mostly in the background, knocking down various thugs while Frankie takes on the bigger villains. 

Death Dimension (1978): A year after Black Samurai was released, Jim Kelly reunited with director Al Adamson for another low-budget offering that was destined for drive-ins everywhere, though this one apparently didn’t even cause a ripple, as it’s relatively unknown. Even if it does co-star former 007 George Lazenby. It’s fitting that Lazenby and Kelly would appear in a movie together, as their careers were so similar: starting off strong, reduced to appearing in low-budget crap in just a few years. Kelly even did a Hong Kong chop-socky (below), same as Lazenby. Speaking of Bond, Harold “Oddjob” Sakata also features as the villain here in Death Dimension…the title of which, by the way, doesn’t seem to have any relevance to the plot per se. 

Why exactly Adamson didn’t do another Black Samurai film will have to be a mystery. Maybe he just didn’t want to pay Marc Olden for the rights. Whatever the reason, it’s unfortunate he didn’t, as Black Samurai, despite its faults, is worlds better than Death Dimension. This is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, with “boom mic” audio, lousy direction, and a “soundtrack” culled from library music LPs – same as Black Samurai was, but here the music is laughably at odds with the onscreen action. Like, “smooth dinner jazz” playing in the friggin’ climactic fight scene. 

Also like Black Samurai, Death Dimension was released a few years ago in uncut high definition, though the print is as expected grainy and faded (and also strangely enough it’s sourced from a German print, though we get the original English audio). There are none of the pseudo-Bond trappings of Black Samurai, which is real odd, given that this one co-stars a former Bond, but then who among us could understand the mind of Al Adamson. Instead, star Jim Kelly is here just a cop, one with a penchant for the martial arts, and he gets caught up in a case revolving around “The Pig,” aka main villain Sakata. Lazenby has a thankless role as Kelly’s boss, standing around in a low-budget “captain’s office” with a .38 holstered in the waistband of his pants and playing the straight man to Kelly. 

Very curiously, Jim Kelly doesn’t get much chance to shine in Death Dimension. All told, there is a muddled air to the film, as if everything were intentionally half-assed. Don’t get me wrong, Kelly still gives a fine performance – his natural charisma was enough to save pretty much any film – but the jive-talking hustler of earlier films has been replaced by a dude who is more prone to sit around and brood. His karate scenes are infrequent and poorly staged, though this isn’t Kelly’s fault; hell, the movie even ends with Kelly doing an abrupt jump kick toward the camera – a surreal moment in which the fourth wall is broken for absolutely no reason – and Adamson freezes the goddamn picture before Kelly’s leg is even fully extended. So it looks like Kelly’s practicing a new disco jump for the dancefloor. 

And yes, “disco;” we’re in the late ‘70s now, friends, though truth be told there’s nothing about Death Dimension that seems too “late ‘70s.” But that early-mid ‘70s spark is clearly lost; hell, Kelly’s afro is even smaller, as if he were getting ahead of the game for the more straight and reserved ‘80s. That said, he does sport the occasional track suit in this one, likely Adamson catering to the recently-released Game Of Death travesty that had been ushered into theaters that same year. 

As for the plot…well, I had a tough time figuring it out. The movie has a memorable opening, at least: a close-up of a doctor making an incision in the scalp of an attractive brunette, then implanting a chip of some sort in the incision and sewing her head back up. Apparently this is info pertaining to the evil Pig and his plans for nefariousness or whatnot. Meanwhile, Jim Kelly is a cop teaching other cops how to karate fight, but folks the movie’s so damn lame that Kelly’s character, Lt. Ash, doesn’t even take his own advice. His opening features him teaching students how to kick the gun out of someone’s hand…and this happens to Ash himself late in the movie – someone knocks his gun out of his hand. 

But this itself is an indication of how lame Death Dimension is. Okay, the guy who knocks aside Ash’s gun is a scar-faced black sadist named Tatoupa (Bob Minor), who – no spoilers – has killed someone Ash cares about. This happens midway through the flick, and Ash knows Tatoupa was the killer, given the signature killing move of a slashed throat, courtesy the special blade Tatoupa wears on his pinkie. Well anyway, the finale features Ash getting the drop on Tatoupa, the man who killed someone Ash cares about we’ll remember…and Ash puts a gun on him and tells him to freeze! And he’s standing so close to Tatoupa that Tatoupa just knocks the gun aside! I mean…wouldn’t Ash remember his own martial arts lesson and stand back a little? Or, more importantly, wouldn’t Ash just want to ice the fucker and not mess around with any “official cop business?” 

Such questions occurred to me, and many more besides. I’ve never been able to find anything positive written about Death Dimension, and now that I’ve finally seen the movie I understand why. To quote dialog from the movie itself: “It stinks!” Actually, “stinks” is a recurring word in the film, usually used in lame puns like, “Something stinks – and it’s coming from the Pig,” or something to that effect, but my hunches tell me the “stinks” line is an audio cue to Jim Kelly’s famous line in Enter The Dragon, of how ghettoes are the same all over the world: they stink. But then I could be wrong and it could just be a coincidence. 

Instead of having George friggin’ Lazenby team up with Kelly’s character and have the two handle the action together like a decade-early version of Lethal Weapon, Adamson instead gives “action co-lead” billing to some dude named Myron Bruce Lee (I kid you not), who portrays Ash’s old kung-fu pal who is a fellow cop ready to help take on the Pig. Lazenby is left on the sidelines for the most part, until an out-of-nowhere reveal in the final quarter that leaves the viewer scratching his or her (or its) head. Even this is handled ineptly; SPOILER ALERT, but Lazenby is abruptly outed as a villain…but instead of having Jim Kelly face off against him, it’s Myron Bruce Lee who takes him on. That said, we do get a humorous “fatality” when Lee’s character kicks Lazenby into a pool, and Lazenby’s character just happens to be holding an electrical cord, and Lazenby gamely contorts and twists his body in the pool as if he were being electrocuted. 

Otherwise folks, there’s not much to recommend Death Dimension. There is a bit of nudity, though, Adamson playing up to his drive-in audience expectations. Ash has a sultry girlfriend of indeterminate race who is attractive in a late ‘70s way and shows off her upper-body goods in a shower scene. But man, given that her part mostly entails lying in bed with Ash and telling him how much she loves him, the viewer can pretty much guess her fate. There’s also a random trip to some cathouse in Reno, and I’m assuming the gals who line up for Ash – likely yet another callback to Enter The Dragon, namely Kelly’s most memorable scene – are the real deal…but boy, they ain’t that attractive. At least Ash picks the prettiest one. Not that he does anything with her; the entire sequence seems to exist to pad the minutes, or for the posters at the drive-in to promise a visit to a brothel or something. Ash just goes into a room with the gal, leaves when her back is turned, scopes out the place…and politely leaves when he’s caught trespassing! Just a lame scene in a movie filled with lame scenes. 

The Tattoo Connection (1978): Released the same year as Death Dimension, and released as “Black Belt Jones II” in England, The Tattoo Connection is further proof of how far and how fast Jim Kelly’s star had wanted, just a few years after his debut. But as mentioned above, this is the same fate that befell George Lazenby. Truth be told, it’s a bit surprising that Kelly even made a movie in Hong Kong; I can’t believe Chinese audiences of the 1970s would have been very receptive to a film starring a black American. Indeed, that Kelly is black is made very apparent throughout The Tattoo Connection, with a girl at one point refusing to have sex with him precisely because he is black. 

This could explain why Jim Kelly is barely in the movie. Hell, it takes him fifteen minutes to even show up, and it’s like as soon as he’s onscreen they can’t get him off of it fast enough. I almost wonder if another version of the flick was shot without Jim Kelly in it at all. Supposedly he’s the star of the picture, but a little editing and a few new scenes and you could make an actor named Tan Tao-ling, who plays a sort-of villain named Tung Hao, the movie’s star. His character even has more of an arc; Tan Tao-ling opens the movie defending himself in kung-fu combat, harbors reservations about being a villain despite being a crime boss’s main thug, and has a change of heart in the movie’s climax. Jim Kelly meanwhile shows up fifteen minutes into the picture, has a couple random scenes, and doesn’t seem nearly as important to the plot. 

As for the plot, like Death Dimension I had no clue what it was about. The titular “tattoo connection” has hardly anything to do with the picture per se; there’s a part midway through where Jim Kelly, who plays a cop or troubleshooter or something, tracks down a gang member in Hong Kong due to the tattoos the man sports. But that’s it. Really the movie seems to be about a diamond smuggling operation, and Jim Kelly, who plays “Lucas” (though more often than not he’s just referred to as “the black guy”), is called in by an old pal to help sort things out. Or something. About the most positive thing I can say is that Jim Kelly dubs himself in the English version, but given that this is a Chinese picture his “sassy dialog” has been toned way down. But even dubbed Kelly’s onscreen charisma is apparent, and he gets more opportunity to play a typical role of his here than he did in the same year’s Death Dimension. 

For one, he smiles a lot more, and also he is clearly having fun. Given that this is a Hong Kong flick, the fight choreography is a lot better than probably any other Jim Kelly movie, with unbroken long shots of him kicking ass; none of the random close-ups and whatnot that ruined the choreography of so many American-made martial arts movies of the time. You can see where the film has been sped up occasionally, but otherwise Kelly holds his own with the Chinese fighters – one of whom happens to be Bolo Yeung, Kelly’s co-star in Enter The Dragon. Curiously, the producers make nothing of this, with Bolo playing a random thug; that said, he and Kelly do get in a fairly brutal fight in the film’s climax, giving us the matchup we were denied in Enter The Dragon. 

I also wonder if The Tattoo Connection was only produced for the international market. Meaning, if it even played in Hong Kong at all. This could explain how Jim Kelly got top billing – and also might explain the copious nudity, as if the filmmakers were catering to the US drive-in market. Now clearly there was nudity in Hong Kong films at the time, but not as much as you’d think in kung-fu movies of the era; not that I’m an expert on the subject, but at a conservative estimate I’d say I’ve seen hundreds of ‘70s kung-fu movies in my lifetime. I remember the days of scouring the racks in stores for kung-fu VHS tapes, and one of the first things I ever did “online” in the early ‘90s was to find people to trade kung-fu videos with. There were indeed chop-sockies that had lots of nudity, like for example the Bruce Li joint Image Of Bruce Lee (that’s me as “Joe909” in the linked review, btw), which is another one that could have been produced for the international market. There’s just as much nudity in The Tattoo Connection, mostly courtesy Japanese actress Nami Misaki, who plays a nightclub stripper named Nana and is one of the main villain’s kept girls, but who is secretly in love with Tung Hao. 

As with most Hong Kong chop-sockies, the soundtrack is lifted from countless uncredited sources. It’s very heavy on the jazz-funk trip, as with most soundtracks of this era; one track in particular I spotted was off Mandigo’s The Primeval Rhythm Of Life. (Once upon a time I had a kung-fu movie with music stolen from The Empire Strikes Back!) The soundtrack is humorously done at times, too, with mega-fuzz guitar blaring when we get sudden extreme close-ups of a person’s face. Overall this gives the movie that “bell-bottom fury” vibe I have always liked, yet at the same time the movie is plodding because it’s more focused on that friggin’ Tung Hao guy. Seriously, he’s the star of the film, and Jim Kelly essentially has a glorified walk-on role. I would love to know more about how he even got involved with the production, and I’m wondering if it’s a case where he was only on location for a few days, hence his relatively small screen-time. 

That said, there is still some fun stuff; like when Nana is tasked with getting Lucas “excited” and giving him a “new drug from America” that will cause him to have a fatal heart attack. Nana is the girl who earlier turned Lucas’s advances down because he was black, but she dutifully takes the job. Yet, no matter what movie he’s in, Jim Kelly is always ten steps ahead of his opponents, so he turns the tables on Nana, switching their drinks. The film seems to forget that the drug is fatal, though, as instead Nana just giggles a bunch and does another strip tease, showing off her very nice upper body for us. The actress even goes all the way with it, kissing Kelly – I bet this one got a lot of gasps in theaters if the movie played in Hong Kong. 

But it’s humorous because they expressly call out the very thing that would go unmentioned in an American film: when Lucas initially puts the moves on Nana, earlier in the film, she bluntly tells him she won’t do it “because you’re black.” What’s also funny is that once she’s said this, it’s like the cat has been let out of the bag; from there on out, Lucas is constantly referred to as “the black guy.” Even the white guy who initially starts off the picture as Lucas’s best buddy starts referring to him as “that black guy!” But Jim Kelly takes it all in stride; he even refers to himself as “a sexy young black man” later in the flick, when Nana’s been dosed by her own drug. However he doesn’t score; the film wants to have a fairy tale happy ending for Nana and her beloved, Tung friggin’ Hao, so Lucas expressly notes that he and Nana haven’t gone all the way together. 

At least he gets to show off his karate skills, particularly in the end. Well, first of all the climax gets off to a bad start, with Lucas lured to a freighter where he’s beaten up and captured. One of the few times you see someone get the better of Jim Kelly in one of his movies. Then he’s let loose and, suddenly shirtless and wearing black pants, he picks up where Bruce Lee left off at the end of Enter The Dragon, even taking up a pole staff at one point and wielding it the same way Lee did. One thing missing though is Jim Kelly’s trademark “OOOO-EEEE!” karate yells; the fights are dubbed standard chop-sockey style, with a lot of grunts and screams, and it doesn’t sound like Kelly dubbed himself in the fights. 

Overall, The Tattoo Connection was interesting to see, because I’ve wondered about it for years (and it’s always been hard to track down), but it was let down by the fact that Jim Kelly wasn’t in it nearly as much as he should have been. Again I would love to know more about the production of the film and whether it was actually released in Hong Kong. Whatever its origin, it clearly didn’t make much of an impact (so to speak), and from here on Kelly would only appear in supporting roles, before retiring from the movie business. A shame, really, and an indication of how short-sighted Hollywood was at the time. The guy should’ve been huge. 

Even if Chinese audiences of the ‘70s might not have been receptive to a black American star, it would appear that Jim Kelly is more embraced by modern-day Chinese. The other month I was at a place called Andretti’s, owned apparently by Mario Andretti, and it was one of those video game/restaurant places. There was a kung-fu video game there called like “Kung-fu vs Karate” or something, and it appeared to be a Chinese production. Sort of a Mortal Kombat deal, only without the gore. One of the characters you could pick was a clear Jim Kelly tribute, even sporting the same Afro, and of course it was this character I played as while I let my seven-year-old son kick my butt as a ninja. It goes without saying that in a real-world matchup Jim Kelly would’ve kicked that ninja’s ass. But I figured he’d also be kind enough to let a kid beat him.

Robert Lory R.I.P.

Some weeks back I was contacted by a person at a talent agency looking for contact information for Robert Lory – apparently someone was interested in purchasing the rights to one of Lory’s books. (Which book in particular I did not find out). The agency rep saw that I had interviewed Lory back in 2014 and could not find any contact info for him. I sent over the email address I had for Lory, noting that I had not heard from him since 2014. 

A few days later I received a response from the agency rep, stating that she had learned from “another blogger who interviewed him” that Robert Lory had passed away in February 2020. 

I have not found this information anywhere online, so whoever this other blogger was who learned of Lory’s death, he or she has not put the info on their blog…leading to the unintentional irony that this blog will be the one to break the unfortunate news. 

But man, Lory passed away over four years ago and no one even knew…that should be an indication of how under-the-radar men’s adventure and genre writers really are. It’s a shame, as I have enjoyed all of the novels I’ve read by Robert Lory, and think he was a fine writer deserving of a wider audience…and in fact this all has made me realize I need to get back to his Vigilante series.

The Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare

The Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare, by Mike Barry

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

Boy, the title of this seventh Lone Wolf is no joke; this one’s truly a “nightmare,” even more surreal and fractured than the previous six volumes, with nutjob “hero” Burt Wulff shuffled from one bizarre situation to another with little setup or resolve. In fact he spends the majority of the text being taken into captivity by one group or another, ususally freed by some random act of fate. There is a dreamlike texture to the narrative, to the extent that I wonder if it is intentional on Malzberg’s part, even down to the title of the book, Peruvian Nightmare. 

Malzberg also plays some unusual tricks with time in this one, again furthering the “nightmare” vibe. Events will transpire, then we will go back to how they started, then we will have characters reacting to things that haven’t happened in the narrative yet, only learning later on how those events have occurred. The opening is a case in point: we meet Wulff as he’s being propositioned with an offer to run heroin across the border for a cool two hundred thousand. Wulff, we learn, has been a prisoner in a hotel in Lima, Peru for the past three days – a prisoner of syndicate bigwig Calabrese, who for reasons even Calabarese didn’t understand allowed Wulff to live at the denoument of the previous volume, sending Wulff off to some other country. 

That country has turned out to be Peru, and it won’t be until later in the book that we get the backstory on Wulff’s journey here. The narrative unfolds in such fractured fashion that it takes us a while to even learn the name of the guy looking to hire Wulff here in Peru: he calls himself Stavros, and he owns the hotel Wulff is a prisoner in. Stavros, we learn in the frequent sequences from his perspective, was a Nazi in WWII and now lives in Peru under an assumed Greek name, and he has worked with Calabrese over the years. But Stavros has gotten delusions of grandeur and misses his old days of Nazi power, deciding to start up his own drug line. And he wants Wulff to help him start it. 

So we have a recurring motif picking up from the previous volume: another old man who, for motives of his own, gives Wulff another chance at life. We learn from the many sequences from Calabrese’s point of view that the old Syndicate boss has realized his mistake and now wants Wulff dead – hence, Stavros is saving Wulff from the Calabrese thugs who will be coming for him. But why exactly Stavros would want Wulff, who has dedicated his life to blowing up the drug underworld, to transport pure uncut heroin across the Andes is something Malzberg doesn’t really elaborate on. But then, it’s just another dreamlike quirk in a novel filled with such quirks. 

The Lone Wolf is also a series filled with recurring themes and motifs; one that Barry Malzberg has done in the past, and does three separate times in Peruvian Nightmare alone, is a motif where one character holds a gun on another, and the two trade seemingly-endless “You aren’t going to shoot me/Oh yes I am going to shoot you” dialog, a running gag that always ends with Person B actually pulling the trigger and killing Person A. As mentioned, this happens three times in Peruvian Nightmare: with Calabrese, with Stavros…and with Wulff himself, in a finale sequence which seems to me Malzberg’s final word that his hero is the same as his villains, given that Wulff too toys with and teases his prey before killing him. 

But then, one reader’s “recurring thematic work” could be another reader’s “author lazily repeating himself as he meets his word count.” That accusation could also be levelled at Peruvian Nightmare, particularly given how Malzberg spends the first half of the novel trying to get the story started. We have the open with Wulff being offered the job by Stavros, then we have a flashback to how Wulff began his war on the drug world with overviews of the previous six installments, then we go back to how Wulff got to Peru, then we see how Wulff was initially approached by Stavros for the job. Only then do we pick up from the opening scene, but even then it’s a bumpy ride, with Wulff essentially a McGuffin who is exchanged from one group to another – Calabrese’s men trying to capture him and kill him, Stavros’s men trying to get Wulff up into the mountains so he can acquire the sack of uncut heroin and begin his journey north to transport it across the border. 

Regardless, The Lone Wolf is still a lot of fun, and certainly one of my favorite men’s adventure series, just because it’s so whacky and illogical. Even the action scenes have a strange dreamlike vibe. Like in the bit where we learn how Stavros approached Wulff: Wulff comes back to his hotel room, to find two thugs waiting there for him. They take out their guns, saying how they’re going to kill Wulff – one of the thugs randomly looking down the barrel of his own gun, as if this were a Loony Tunes cartoon or something. It gets even stranger, as Wulff manages to take down both thugs with his bare hands, and steal one of their guns, and meanwhile the two thugs have gotten “tangled” together on Wulff’s bed, and Wulff shoots at “the thing” they have become together, and “it” starts mewling and yelping after Wulff shoots “it.” I mean the entire series is just weird. 

And even after that, only then does Wulff notice that another person is sitting on the bed, this being Stavros; I mean the “little man” has been sitting right there on the bed this whole time, while Wulff was fighting and shooting the two thugs who became one entity after tangling up with each other on the bed, and Wulff only notices the little man is there when the man says something to Wulff. And what the man says is “I like your work,” which is a compliment I could extend to Barry Malzberg himself. It is incredible how out-of-bounds The Lone Wolf is, having nothing in common with the average men’s adventure novel yet somehow being an on-the-level spoof of the entire genre. 

Wulff loses his mojo a bit in this one, sort of shuffling from one incident to another, and another play on the titular “nightmare” is that the air is thin up in the Andes, adding to Wulff’s lack of clear thinking. This elicits another surreal “action scene,” where Wulff is on a bus filled with gasping (and puking) tourists who are trying to adjust to the thin Andean air as the bus takes them to the Incan ruins, and a thug smashes his way onto the bus, trying to shoot Wulff but missing because he too is suffering from the thin oxygen up here. But it’s really like this throughout: Wulff will be on his way somewhere, and someone will come out of the woodwork and try to kill him, and Wulff will manage to turn the tables. But otherwise Wulff himself is not the one who moves the narrative forward; he is cast more into the role of perpetual victim, thrust into one surreal situation after another – which, you guessed it, really plays up on that “nightmare” vibe. 

But this fractured, dreamlike vibe leads to something we’ve never had in The Lone Wolf: an appearance (via flashback) of Wulff’s fiance, whose murder set off Wulff’s war on the mob in the first volume. But even in that initial installment, the girl was dead as soon as the book began, and so far as I can recall we’ve never gotten any flashback material with her…until now. Randomly enough, Malzberg delivers a scene between the two, sixty-seven pages into this seventh volume, a dream sequence in which Wulff flashes back to a time when they discussed how Wulff both hated and loved being a cop, leading to an off-page sex scene. It’s strange that the scene is even here, but again it adds to the strange vibe. Or it’s more indication of Malzberg spinning wheels as he meets that word count; as further indication of this, we even get a ‘Nam flashback this time. 

Speaking of cops, we also have some stuff with Williams, Wulff’s former partner on the force; last we saw Williams, he’d been stabbed by a junkie. Now he’s out of the hospital but he’s still weak, and he wishes he could find Wulff to tell him that he, Wulff, was right – the system doesn’t work, etc. Malzberg as ever finds the opportunity to rant and rave about society in general and random things in particular; Peruvian Nightmare, in fact, features a strange bit where Wulff rages to himself how the shock systems in cars went to hell in the ‘50s…and mind you this ranting and raving occurs during an action scene. There is overall a bitter, dispirited air to The Lone Wolf, but whereas the similarly-downer vibe of Stark made for an equally-dispiriting read, Malzberg is a superior writer and there is more so an air of dark comedy to The Lone Wolf. 

I do get the feeling Malzberg had been to Peru, as he injects what appears to be real-world topical details into the sequences around the Incan ruins. But Mel Crair’s typically-great cover is misleading, as Wulff doesn’t get in a shootout right by the ruins themselves (and there’s no girl whatsoever for Wulff in the novel iself – the one on Crair’s cover doesn’t exist in the book). That said, Wulff does manage to blow up a car during one shootout. Malzberg’s “action scenes” are just as strange as ever, but this time the nihilistic “let’s stare at the corpses and ruminate on life” stuff has been toned down. Instead, the nightmarish effect of taking a life is more pronounced, with Wulff haunted throughot the novel by dreams of men he has killed. 

Not that this lends Wulff any humanity. Indeed, Malzberg seems to be at pains to illustrate how Wulff is just as vile as the “bad guys” he’s after. As mentioned, this is most demonstrated in the finale, in which Wulff taunts a man who is pleading for his life, just as villains Calabrese and Stavros did to their own victims earlier in the novel. The finale of Peruvian Nightmare features yet another of Calabrese’s thugs trying to kill Wulff, but the two end up stalking each other in the pitch-black darkness of a cliff in the Andes. The would-be killer loses his gun and spends a few pages pleading for his life with Wulff, begging that Wulff drop the whole thing and the two work together to survive their situation. But Wulff resolutely responds that he is indeed going to shoot the guy. It’s a bitter scene for sure, particularly given how Wulff, next morning, refuses to “connect” the voice he heard in the darkness with the corpse of the man he now sees…as if Wulff himself cannot face the inhuman killer he has become. One suspects this is the same process Calabrese and Stavros went through in their own journeys to villainhood. 

Even the end of the book rams this home; Wulff comes across an American helicopter pilot and bashes him in the face. “You didn’t have to do that,” whines the pilot, and the reader understands his point; a former Stavros employee, he has no reason to stay in Peru and would have taken Wulff out of the country without being bashed in the face. But then, Wulff states that he had trouble with another helicopter pilot in Cuba, and isn’t about “to make the same mistake” this time. 

Thus Peruvian Nightmare ends, with Wulff presumably on his way back to the United States – and meanwhile the subplot with Calabrese still stands, providing an effective framework into the next volume. Malzberg has developed another theme in that Calabrese seeks to regain his aggressive nature by killing Wulff, leading to a scene where Calabrese bangs his 38 year-old mistress (we’re informed he’s kept her for 15 years) and then starts thinking of Wulff and dreaming of getting hold of him. So yes, yet another dream within Peruvian Nightmare, more evidence of the surreal feeling of the novel – making it up on the fly or not, Barry Malzberg proves again and again in The Lone Wolf that he’s a gifted writer, and I continue to really enjoy this series.

Black Samurai #5: The Inquisition

Black Samurai #5: The Inquisition, by Marc Olden

November, 1974  Signet Books

The most low-key entry yet, this fifth volume of Black Samurai finds our hero Robert Sand trying to rescue the abducted daughter of Sand’s boss, former president William Baron Clarke. But as the narrative plays out, Sand spends more time investigating than he does rescuing. Also, the titular “Inquisition,” a radical group that has kidnapped Clarke’s daughter, isn’t much exploited, and there are less action scenes than any previous installment. Plus, Sand doesn’t even get any nookie. 

The villains are led by Dessalines, a black radical whose Inquisition is a terrorist group that captures wealthy people and holds them for ransom. They also live up to their name and put their captives under an inquisition, accusing them of capitalist crimes and whatnot in a kangaroo court, with a guilty verdict already in mind. (I think a lot of these former Inquisition freaks grew up to start the whole lawfare game.) Twenty-year-old Mary Baron Clarke is their latest victim, and the opening is an effective scene in which they kidnap her on the groups of her college in New York; Olden filters the scene through the perspective of two of Mary’s bodyguards, and we learn that one of them has developed a thing for the pretty young woman. 

It takes a bit for series hero Robert “The Black Samurai” Sand to appear. When we meet him he’s in Japan, where he’s testing himself against the emperor’s bodyguards, something he does regularly to keep himself in fighting prime. As if he doesn’t get enough real-world experience on the job! But then once again Marc Olden somehow manages to make Sand seem human, despite how superhumanly skilled he is. Plus we get some of the series’ mandatory black empowerment, as Sand finds himself squaring off against a racist Japanese who doesn’t believe a black American can be a true samurai. It goes without saying that Sand savagely corrects his way of thinking. 

Olden is also at pains to remind us that Robert Sand isn’t just a man of action; he does a fair bit of investigating in The Inquisition, even staying a few steps ahead of President Clarke in trying to guess what Dessalines is up to, and where Dessalines is keeping Mary. There’s also the respectful rivalry between Sand and Clarke’s top Secret Service man, Frank Pines – wow, a male secret service agent guarding a former president, imagine that! Oh and to continue with my topical real-world allusions, there is a part in this one where Sand, I kid you not, is shot in the head, but it’s a glancing blow that he miraculously survives due to having moved out of the path of the bullet in the nick of time. Sure, Sand doesn’t get up and yell “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” but I still thought it was a crazy synchronicity, given that I was reading this scene right around the time of the incidents in Butler, PA…which happened shortly after I posted a review of Butler! 

But then, Sand does relatively little fighting this time. He acts more as an investigator for the most part, working his way into the underworld to get a lead on Dessalines. The action, like the previous volume, is very urban, and one can almost hear the chocka-wocka wah-wah guitars in the soundtrack that plays in your mind as Sand takes on a roomful of black thugs early in the book; again Olden stresses how Sand is cautious here, uncertain of easy victory, despite being in a completely different league than his opponents. The only real struggle he faces is in Dessalines’ top two henchmen: Swahili, a hulking black fighter, and Machete, a greasy-haired Mexican sadist who enjoys using his titular weapon on prey. As ever with Olden we get lots of scenes with the villains and see these two brutally carrying out Dessalines’ orders on victims, but when it comes to their fight with Sand I didn’t feel that Olden exploited the potential very much. Same goes with Dessalines, whose confrontation with Sand in the finale is anticlimactic. 

As mentioned Sand goes without any tail this time, though Olden teases the opportunity: midway through the novel a female character named Michael Bianca is introduced, an investigative reporter who has a source in the Inquisition and is trying to break the story. We are told Michael is, of course, attractive, and also she’s feisty, and Olden seems to intimate that she and Sand will become an item, particularly given how Michael begins to care about Sand, even after only meeting him briefly. But nothing happens and Michael is another character who initially seems to have more narrative importance than she ultimately will. Sandy Baron Clarke also doesn’t feature much in the novel, other than infrequent cutovers to her panicked state as she sits alone in an Inquisition cell, but we do get the interesting note that she too has a thing for Robert Sand, though it is more of a crush on her part and Sand is seemingly unaware of it. 

As for Clarke himself, he appears in The Inquisition a bit more than in previous volumes. There are several scenes where Sand, Clarke, and Frank Pines sit around and discuss how to get Mary back, with Clarke always doing what Sand suggests. Marc Olden also often reminds us that Clarke, the wealthy Texan former president, has this much respect for a black man. But again, the Black Samurai series never goes to the full-on black empowerment of, say, The Iceman, and Olden’s narratorial tone is just as reserved as Robert Sand is himself. Yet despite this Sand always proves himself to be one of the more memorable protagonists in men’s adventure, and I’m starting to suspect it’s because he comes off as so relatable – at least when it comes to his lack of overconfidence. 

Olden typically tosses too many villains into his novels, and The Inquisition is no different. With the introduction of Michael, we also get the intro of a right-wing gang of ‘Nam vets who have banded together to stop Dessalines and his left-wing radicals. This is a cool subplot but unfortunately Olden spends more time showing these guys trying to intimidate Michael, and then getting their asses kicked by Sand. I was hoping for a couple of pitched battles between ‘Nam vets and leftist scumbag radicals, but it wasn’t to be. These guys turn out to be more of an inconvenience than an item of interest, and ultimately come off as a way for Olden to meet his word count. 

Ultimately I’d have to say The Inquisition was my least favorite Black Samurai yet, but that’s not to say it’s bad or anything. Marc Olden is still invested in the series, and particularly in his hero, but he likely was feeling the burn around this time, what with writing both this series and Narc at the same time. Having read the following volume, I know Olden will get back on track, and in a big way, and in fact I look forward to reading The Warlock again.