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.