January, 1975 Signet Books
It’s hard to believe, but it’s going on 15 years since I reviewed this sixth installment of Black Samurai. This was the first volume of the series I read, and at the time I was unaware that it had been the source material for the film adaptation. I loved the book when I read it back in 2010, and reading it again now in 2025, I loved it again.
For one, I’m a bit more familiar with the work of Marc Olden at this point, so I see how his style is so evident in The Warlock. Stuff that I might not have noticed in my first reading of his work, all those years ago. But it’s all here – the large cast of characters, the frequent cutting between perspectives, the occasional lapse into stream-of-consciousness as we dip into the thoughts of various characters.
Yes, it’s all here, but this time Olden reins it in, to the point that very little of The Warlock comes off as padded. And it’s pretty impressive because Olden clearly indicates he has not become bored with the series; six volumes in, and he turns in the most entertaining installment yet, filled to the brim with crazy characters and situations. It’s almost like he took a brief survey of the mid-‘70s men’s adventure field, saw how lurid everything had become, and decided to turn the dial of his own series to 10. (Or 11, for you Spinal Tap fans.)
But man, Marc Olden really threw in the kitchen sink with this one, and not to sound redundant, but it’s impressive. I mean it opens with Robert “Black Samurai” Sand being attacked by a pair of transvestite dwarves, for pete’s sake, with the dwarves wielding razor blades and slicing them at Sand. Not long after that our hero is attacked by “Lion Men,” brawny black dudes in leopard costumes, like they came out of a ‘30s Tarzan movie. (Tarzan And His Mate of course being the best of the lot – complete even with full female nudity in an underwater swimming scene…pretty impressive for a movie from 1934!)
Again it surprises me that Al Adamson chose this volume to adapt for his movie version of Black Samurai. Reading the book again, after having finally seen the movie a few years ago (as mentioned in my review from back then, I was waiting forever for the uncut version to come out), I see how much content Adamson changed, likely for budgetary reasons…yet, at the same time, he added a bunch of stupid shit that wasn’t in the book that certainly increased his budget. Like a sportscar for Sand. Not to mention a friggin’ jetpack a la Thunderball. And even a moronic fight with a vulture.
No, none of that stuff is in The Warlock. In fact, Adamson could’ve done a straight adaptation of the source material and he could’ve done it with the limited budget he was working with. He also toned down on the lurid element Olden brought his tale. Janicot, the titular “Warlock,” is a total freak in the novel, filming black magic snuff films for his jet-setting followers and making scads of money off the proceeds; as I mentioned in my review of the movie, the Janicot of the film comes off more like a poor man’s Uncle Arthur from Bewitched.
Femme fatale Synne also suffers greatly in the movie. I’d forgotten how much Olden puts into her character in the novel: here she is a force of unbridled sex, a hotstuff black babe with silver hair and lipstick. In fact I wish she was in the novel more than she is. She’s Janicot’s second in command, and Olden has it that she’s so blown away by Robert Sand that she jeopardizes her standing with Janicot. That said, nothing much comes of this, and Sand bluntly turns down Synne’s offer for sex – indeed, Sand goes without for this particular volume.
But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Looking at my surprisingly-short original review of The Warlock, I see that I failed to note what the plot was about. Well, in this one Sand is tasked by his boss, former president William Baron Clarke, to take down Janicot, an Aleister Crowley type who runs a satanic cult. Janicot specializes in getting politicians in compromising positions in his sexual rituals, which are filmed for blackmail purposes, and an old colleague of Clarke’s has gotten in too deep.
We meet Sand as he’s already in France, researching. As with most Black Samurai novels – and, come to think of it, a lot of Olden’s Narc books as well – the action takes place in Paris. I’m not sure if Olden lived there or was just fascinated with the place, but he constantly has stuff taking place in Paris. And that’s where Sand is as The Warlock opens, walking into an ambush courtesy a pair of leather-clad transvestite dwarves.
Olden really brings home how sadistic these little bastards are; they are the bodyguards of Janicot, we’ll later learn – cross-dressing psyco dwarves who carry razor blades. The opening of the book features a great bit where Sand kicks one of the little bastards. Olden wisely keeps the dwarves a minor presence (lame pun alert); I don’t believe he even names any of them. Nor does he name any of the “Lion Men” who also serve Janicot – burly black men in leopard costumes who battle Sand in the opening sequence, but who then essentially disappear from the narrative.
This is because Olden, as usual, has a ton of other characters he focuses on. As ever this means Robert Sand himself is lost in the shuffle, but the villains this time are so colorful the reader doesn’t much mind. I mean, there’s Bone, who serves as Janicot’s henchman, a gay albino sadist. There’s Rheinhart, a friggin’ werewolf, who was raised (as a cub?) by Janicot and is the most fierce fighter in the Warlock’s employ – and also we’re told of the creature’s various attacks on women, Olden building on the overall lurid tone of the narrative.
There’s also Chavez, returning from the fourth volume; in belabored backstory that doesn’t make much sense, Chavez has hired Janicot to capture and kill the Black Samurai. We briefly met Chavez at the end of The Deadly Pearl, where he swore revenge for his brother’s death; the dude certainly has a roundabout way of getting revenge, as he’s hired Janicot to track down Robert Sand, capture him, drug him, and kill him on-camera in a black magic ritual or something…which is the sort of thing Janicot does.
Reading the book again, I was impressed once more with how lurid Marc Olden got, particularly with Janicot…I’d forgotten the hinted-at backstory that Janicot was a Nazi in the war, one who renamed himself and gradually drew an international following as a mystic guru. Olden delivers a few jet-setter party sequences Janicot throws in Paris that could come out of a contemporary trash paperback. There are also a few scenes where Janicot kills off people who have run afoul of him or his cult, and Olden really brings to life the plight of the unfortunates; some of the material here could come out of the sweats of the era, focused on torture and suffering.
What’s interesting is that Olden has enough for a novel with this setup, but he also throws in Toki, Sand’s Japanese beloved, not seen since (I think?) the first volume. Janicot has also been hired to blackmail a Vietnamese politician who has campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, and this dude just happens to be married to Toki. Janicot is supposed to get the guy and film him in some depraved satanic orgy to use as leverage on him. And meanwhile, Janicot has learned that this guy’s wife is also the love of the Black Samurai’s life (how Janicot’s learned this is left vague), so the Warlock figures he can get double bang for his buck – kidnap Toki and use her as Black Samurai bait.
And yet even this isn’t enough for Olden; Sand is already on the trail of Janicot at novel’s start, unaware of the Warlock’s plans for Toki. This is because Janicot has pulled the same blackmailing trick on a French politician the Baron is friends with, and so the Baron has asked Sand to go over to Paris and get the goods on the Warlock. So in other words “it’s personal this time” for this particular installment; there’s no big global threat the Black Samurai is looking to stop.
Curious, then, that director Al Adamson gussied up the plot with so much fluff. For those who have seen the film but never read the book: Sand doesn’t drive a sportscar. He does not, at any point, put on a rocket pack straight out of Thunderball. He doesn’t fight a vulture(!). And he doesn’t wear a tracksuit at any point of the novel. Indeed, watching the movie again after re-reading The Warlock, it blew my mind that Adamson was too foolish to just do a straight adaptation, as the ensuing film would have been more senastionalistic…and likely cheaper, too.
One thing the movie did get right with its “fluff” is more in the way of sex and nudity. There’s little of either in the novel. Robert Sand does not have sex in this one, though the, uh, carrot is dangled – courtesy Synne, certainly the most interesting female character yet in the Black Samurai series, if not the entire men’s adventure genre. She’s a black beauty who serves as Janicot’s vassal (or something), a former hooker from the American South who was discovered by Janicot and turned into essentially the embodiment of sex; the Warlock uses her to screw VIPs, and though there is not a single sex scene in the novel, we’re informed that Synne can keep a man happy. Oh, and she has long, straight hair that’s been dyed silver, and also she wears silver lipstick and silver nail polish. This is something Al Adamson also chose to ignore in his film adaptation…but then, actress Marilyn Joi doesn’t look much like how Synne is described, anyway.
Even Robert Sand is taken back by her staggering and exotic beauty; we are told that his stern, “samurai!” façade is tested by Synne. But it’s all simmer and no boil. Synne catches sight of Sand, and – in the frequent cutovers to Synne’s perspective that occur through the novel – we learn she’s developed a thing for the Black Samurai. He’s a real man, she can tell, and not like the sadistic brutes she has to screw to keep Janicot happy. Men like Chavez…who, by the way, engages Synne twice in the novel, off-page, as does another guy Janicot is keeping happy, a stuffy British doctor.
As I mentioned in my original review, the Sand-Synne stuff is ultimately anticlimactic. They have a “meet cute” early in the book, when Sand, dressed like a movie cowboy with a Lone Ranger mask, crashes a Paris party of Janicot’s. He runs into the silver-haired Synne, and there’s a clear mutual attraction. But when they have their actual face-to-face, later in the novel, not much comes of it. Synne offers herself to Sand, but as usual he’s all business – plus at this point he’s learned that Toki is in danger – and Sand turns Synne down. Something that makes the silver-lipped beauty freak out in rage, as no one spurns her. But man, that’s it – there’s never another meeting between the two.
Olden does deliver on the action front, though. And not since that first volume has Sand been so put to the test; he must rely on his samurai resolve quite often in the narrative, being outnumbered and outgunned at frequent points. There’s a fight with the werewolf late in the tale that’s pretty cool – again, shocking that Al Adamson, who made schlocky, low-budget horror movies, didn’t include the werewolf in his film adaptation – and, though brief, the fight is brutal, with the additional element that Sand is injured at the time, with a broken wrist.
There isn’t a big fight with Chavez; indeed, Olden follows his usual template in that the novel is so busy that he must hurriedly bring everything to a close in the final pages. Chavez is for the most part a secondary character; in his frequent cutovers we see him mulling over how whacko Janicot is (which of course makes the reader wonder why Chavez hired Janicot in the first place), and also chomping at the bit for “the black man to die.”
The action takes place for the most part in Paris, including an extended action sequence where Sand tries to kill Janicot at a small airport – leading to a tense capoff where Sand commandeers the plane on the tarmac. This leads to a strange bit where the Baron, all the way back in Texas, somehow knows that it wasn’t really Janicot at the airport, and it was all a fake-out to get Sand. Another strange miss is all the stuff with Toki; this is another bit Al Adamson made more of a deal of. But in the novel itself, Sand and Toki don’t even really have a moment together; Sand saves her, but she’s out cold at the time.
Since I’m on a spoiler kick, skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens. But the resolution with Synne is also lame. She’s killed off-page…by Chavez! Olden delivers one of his customary rushed finales with Janicot’s people all holed up in a remote house once the action has moved Stateside, and Sand leads a team of the Baron’s men into the compound to kill everyone. When Sand storms into the house, he catches Chavez as Chavez is coming out of a room. Sand kills him without much fuss – there’s no big dramatic payoff – and then Sand discovers Synne’s corpse in the bedroom. Material from her perspective has already hinted that Chavez is rough and sadistic in the sack, so this turns out to have been foreshadowing on Olden’s part; Chavez apparently killed Synne during some rough sex. Still, it’s a bit of a letdown. I wanted more from this unusual character.
As mentioned in my original review, Janicot is still around at novel’s end; there’s a horror-esque finale where his ghostly voice calls to Sand in the dark of the night, and we’re to understand the Black Samurai is properly bugged out. But I do not believe Janicot returns; the series only lasted for two more volumes, and looking at the back covers I see no mention of the Warlock’s return. But then, villains not getting their comeuppance was a staple in Olden’s Narc series.
Overall though, I enjoyed The Warlock just as much on this second reading, and I was very impressed with the level of insanity Marc Olden injected into it – comparatively speaking, it’s a lot crazier than the previous five volumes of Black Samurai, and displays a more pulpy side of Olden than those familiar with his work might expect.
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