Black Samurai #8: The Katana

Black Samurai #8: The Katana, by Marc Olden

June, 1975  Signet Books

To cue the old cliché, this time it’s personal for Robert Sand in this, the final volume of Black Samurai. The plot concerns Sand trying to get his hands on a priceless Japanese sword made of pure gold that is a few hundred years old and was given by Sand’s old master to the government of Japan – but someone just stole it, and they’re trying to sell it. 

So, not the most earth-shattering of plots in the series. Indeed, The Katana is by far the most grounded installment of them all, with Sand up against a humdrum group of foes. I suspect that poor Marc Olden was getting a little fatigued at this point; he wrote the entire Black Samurai series in one year, and at the same time he wrote the Narc series…so yeah, it’s not surprising some of the wind had gone out of his sails. 

Personally I think the series crested with #6: The Warlock and started its downhill slide with the previous volume. Sadly The Katana continues that slide, and we have here an altogether listless tale that has Sand getting his ass kicked by a group of villains who are completely underserving of the page count they’ve been given. Chief among this is Mrs. Thomms, a hulking German woman who acts as the sadistic henchwoman of the novel’s main villain, an effete stolen art dealer named Flowers; Olden spends way too many pages on these characters, so that once again his ostensible hero Robert Sand comes off like a guest star in his own book. 

 Another unusual thing about The Katana is that Sand works in a solo capacity for most of the tale. It opens with him homing in on a dealer who might have gotten his hands on the stolen katana, leading to the first of many fights with Mrs. Thomms and her underlings, chief among them her dimwitted brother Dieter. Man, there is a lot of bullshit about Thomms and Dieter, Olden not-so-subtly implying there is more than a sibling love between the two, but Thomms is already so grotesque that the whole taboo thing comes off as too much. 

The real issue is Olden’s tendency to POV-hop and spend pages and pages in the rambling thoughts of his one-off characters. Even the thugs hired by Thomms are given inordinate pages of rambling, like the ex-cop who just wants the money, etc. There’s also a lot of stuff about Flowers, the boss behind it all; he stays off-page most of the time, and given that he’s a British crook with sadistic tendencies he made me think of Harry Flowers from Performance. That said, we do get the humorous off-hand note that Flowers gets his kicks by dressing underaged girls up in dresses and then spanking them. 

As for Robert Sand, he’s almost somnambulant this time around. What I mean is he doesn’t have much to say, and as usual he goes without sex – Olden teases the possibility very late in the tale, when a pretty Chinese stewardess who dabbles in art smuggling on the side briefly hooks up with him…but she’s so terrified, and Sand is so beaten and worn from his latest tangle with Mrs. Thomms and crew, that nothing comes of it. Presumably that’s her on the cover; it has to be, as there’s no other female novel than Mrs. Thomms in the book. Whoever the uncredited artist was who did this and the other Black Samurai covers, he or she did a fairly good job of depicting characters and incidents within the actual books, so the artist either read the manuscripts or got very good direction from the editor. (“Show a hot Oriental broad! In boots!”) 

Action is infrequent and, like the plot itself, very grounded. Sand gets in a lot of fistfights with Mrs. Thomms and her thugs, but the veteran series reader wonders why Sand is having such a hard time with a crew of misfits like this. They nearly get the better of him again and again; as ever Olden really wants us to believe that Sand is not superhuman, that he cannot take on a few people at once, etc…but it sort of cheapens the escapist vibe of the entire series and only serves to undermine the cool character Olden created. It was like Marc Olden was always afraid to fully unleash Robert Sand. 

Eventually Sand’s boss, ex-president William Baron Clarke, comes into the tale…and there follows a weird non-sequitur bit where Sand shames Clarke for possibly having stolen art in his collection(!?), and Clarke has his people look into it. But this is what I mean when I say Marc Olden was running on empty at this point. You don’t pick up a book titled Black Samurai #8: The Katana and expect to read about art smuggling, but that’s exactly what you get. 

The main gist concerns Mrs. Thomms wanting Robert Sand’s head, as early on in the book Sand beats her brother Dieter nearly to death, so the hulking German woman has a mad-on for Sand. But as unfortunately is his wont, Olden page-fills so much that he robs us of the very climax he’s been building toward: during the climactic fight in the desolate French countryside, Mrs. Thomms throws a rock at Sand and it hits him in the head and he falls down – and she thinks he’s dead(!). Then the action moves to London, and Sand slips through Flowers’ estate, offing people one by one (including surprisingly savage stuff for the Black Samurai, like chopping off heads), but the confrontation with Mrs. Thomms never comes! The last we see of her, she’s “terrified,” but unfortunately very much alive. 

The veteran reader also knows this is common in Marc Olden’s work. As in The Warlock and the other series highlight, #3: Killer Warrior, Olden gives us a great villain, allows the villain to escape…and never brings the villain back. Now, Mrs. Thomms is not a great villain, not by a helluva long stretch, but it’s just an indication of Olden’s recurring schtick. She’s another one that gets away; Narc too was filled with main villains who escaped at novel’s end, never to return. 

I mean, imagine how cool The Katana would’ve been if it featured the return of the Warlock, or the crazy Indian guy from the third volume. Unfortunately such ideas did not occur to Olden, thus he gives us a slow-moving affair that constantly has Robert Sand getting his ass kicked by characters who would’ve been killed by Sand within a page or two in earlier, superior volumes. 

There’s no indication this was the last volume of the series – Signet did not market it as such and the novel itself ends with Sand still acting as William Baron’s Black Samurai. However, intentional or not, there is a fitting conclusion to the series overall, as Sand honors his old master by anonymously giving the katana to the Japanese delegation in London, thinking to himself that he has honored his master – a nice callback to the first volume.

So then, why did Black Samurai end? Likely low sales, the killer of most every men’s adventure series. Or the changing whims of an editorial board. Or, if Michael Newton was correct in his How To Write Action-Adventure Fiction, it was the oil crisis of the mid-‘70s that killed off so many men’s adventure series; per Newton, publishers had to cut back on publications, and men’s adventure was always deemed the lowest of the low, so it was the first to go. (I’m making that my new personal slogan!) 

What’s also curious is that two years later the film adaptation was released…and meanwhile the series ended in 1975. As mentioned in my review, the movie is copyright 1976, but even then that was still a year after Black Samurai concluded. Obviously the film made little to no impact at the time, but it is curious that director Al Adamson pushed forward with his adaptation of a series that was no longer in print. Maybe if it had been made by a half-decent director, the film version of Black Samurai could have brough the book series back to life. 

But it was not to be, and after this Marc Olden turned to The Harker File (also published by Signet), as well as standalone novels, before finding a little more fame in the ‘80s and ‘90s as the writer of Eric Van Lustbader-esque crime novels with “Oriental” overlays…which of course I intend to read someday. 

Overall I did very much enjoy Black Samurai; when I started this blog back in 2010 it was one of the first series I meant to cover, but I ended up only reading and reviewing The Warlock (Here is my original review, from August 2010), and then I focused on Narc. 

With this series Marc Olden created a memorable, powerful protagonist…a sort of more believable and more human Remo Williams, but as mentioned a problem with Black Samurai is that too many of the books don’t really feature the Black Samurai. Olden’s strange tendency to focus on one-off characters for pages and pages is one of my biggest frustrations with his writing…yet oddly enough, he’s one of the better writers in the genre, capably bringing characters to life and delivering gripping action scenes. 

Oh, and I forgot to mention: yes, The Katana also follows the Marc Olden template with an action scene in Paris. For whatever reason, Olden has had a “let’s go to Paris” scene in literally every book of his I’ve read…the dude must’ve been obsessed with the place! And it’s the one place the globe-trotting movie version of Robert Sand didn’t go in Al Adamson’s film!