Flame

Flame, by Kenneth Roberts

April, 1970  Warner Paperback Library

With its black female protagonist, focus on sleaze, and wonderful (but uncredited) cover art,* Flame was already checking most of my Slavesploitation boxes. Then I read the book…and boy, to say I was blown away would be an understatement. 

Okay. The novel starts off with a beautiful young black woman in deep dark Africa, doing a voodoo ritual with a snake as her brother watches – and he keeps telling her “they” are coming. The unnamed woman does her dance and the snake begins to slither toward the “nectar” that is her womanhood(!), but then the attackers are there in the village – and next thing you know the woman, still nude, is out in the fray, hacking and slashing with a spear. She’s an Amazon, you see, one of the warrior-women of her tribe. 

There’s a gory beheading, and then the woman is captured, and then she’s raped by twenty-seven men from the raiding tribe…and then next thing we know she’s getting branded as a slave (on the ass!) and boarding a ship for the New World, and we’re told it’s 1750. But before she’s taken aboard the ship a heavyset tribal “king” who works with the European slavers calls the woman to him – she is so famous among everyone due to her incredible beauty and body that her name, “Flame,” is known to all – and he plays with himself as one of his muscled and superhumanly-endowed tribal guards has sex with Flame…and Flame thinks to herself how it feels “soooo good!” 

But the guard climaxes too soon, and for that his head is lopped off – the second beheading in like ten pages – and then finally the king is sufficiently excited enough that he is aroused, and Flame is ordered to do him…. 

And folks, that’s only the first chapter! 

Whoever Kenneth Roberts was – and one thing that is known is that it is not the Kenneth Roberts who published several novels the decade before, mainly because that Kenneth Roberts was dead when Flame and its predecessor Blaze were published – but good gravy, folks. It’s like this guy intentionally wrote the book to upset sensitive readers, particularly sensitive readers of today. 

Mainly Flame reminded me of the contemporary novel Angelface, not in plot or narrative but in how the author was able to publish an incredibly explicit book through a mainstream imprint. I mean even Harold Robbins wasn’t writing as risque material in 1970. Absolutely no holds are barred and through the course of this novel Flame has practically any kind of sex you can think of…and she enjoys every single goddamn bit of it. 

What’s even more awesome is that Kenneth Roberts doesn’t make much attempt to explain who Flame is; she’s literally introduced in the above scene where she’s about to jam a snake into herself, followed immediately by her kicking tribal ass – and after that all we are told is how friggin’ hot white men think she is, and how incredible her body is, and it’s always on display because she spends the entirety of the novel naked…I mean the exploitation is off the charts, which is just where I like it. 

But like, how can Flame speak English? Why did they even name her Flame? And what was her real birth name? None of these things are answered. Kenneth Roberts has a sleazy story to tell, and by god he’s going to tell it…and folks his writing is very good, with great scene description, dialog, and a refusal to ever, ever fade to black when it gets to the good stuff. 

I also greatly appreciated how he writes the book in a very modern tone; characters use the f-bomb, they make jokes; one horny and drunk guy, about to have sex with Flame, even riffs a pun on her name: “We’ll have a flaming fuck!” There’s even more wild stuff on the ship to America where Flame is dragged out of the hold with the rest of the slaves so the captain can have his way with her, and then two low-lifes double-team her…and throughout our author continues to push buttons by stressing how much Flame enjoys it all. It’s truly sick, wild, and wonderful stuff – the very epitome of glorious trash. 

The first half of Flame is, at least. Because unfortunately after the crazed wildness of Flame’s capture and captivity the novel turns into a protracted sequence of dark comedy and grimy sleaze as Flame comes into her new live as a slave outside of Charles Town, South Carolina, where she finds herself caught between good-natured but weak-willed Tommy and his wife, the pudgy, domineering, and cruel Dolly. 

As mentioned Roberts published a novel titled Blaze in 1969, also a Slavesploitation, and Flame is a sort-of sequel to it; the titular Blaze, a male slave who fought his way to freedom, appears midway through Flame. As it turns out, Blaze has history with Tommy and Dolly, and also as it turns out, Flame is set five years after Blaze. Also, Flame does not appear in Blaze, and Blaze is for the most part a minor character in Flame. 

But even here in the turgid second half of the novel, our author can be heard cackling madly across the decades. I swear “Kenneth Roberts” had one mission only when he got this gig: “So you all want a sleazy novel about slavery? Well that’s just what you’re gonna get!” It’s insane in a way…I mean, have I mentioned yet that Flame is naked for the entire novel? She does not wear a stitch of clothing from first page to last, and folks we are so often reminded of her “mountainous breasts” and her “bushy sex” and her overall incredible body that has everyone panting in lust: male, female…and child. 

In perhaps the greatest indication of button-pushing, Roberts has a five year-old boy, the son of Tommy and a slave-girl named Ginger, who also walks around naked, and when he sees Flame he clutches himself and asks, “Think you kin handle alla this meat?” Just nuts, nuts, stuff…and that’s not including the part where Flame grabs a horse’s cock and fondles it for a bit, wondering if Blaze – of whom she has heard of from Tommy – is truly as well-endowed. Of course, she will later discover to her pleasure that Blaze is. 

So the way it happens is Tommy just happens to be on the slave ship when it docks in Charles Town, and Flame sees him and rushes to him, basically picking him up (it is constantly stressed how big and strong Flame is…indeed she is described in such a way that she comes off like a combo of Pam Grier and Grace Jones), and she insists that Tommy buy her, because she’s sensed his good nature. 

But Kenneth Roberts has a very weird – and, as I’ll argue anon, a very unique – way of telling a tale. There ensues a long sequence where Tommy rides his horse and Flame runs beside him, for like days, to get back to Tommy’s property…and meanwhile Roberts builds up this “will they or won’t they” sex chemistry between them, with Tommy vacilitating between being a kindly guy who cares for Flame and a slave-owner who reminds Flame that she’s just a slave. 

And I haven’t even mentioned all the stuff before this, where an old coot, gandering at Flame’s incredible body, starts grabbing his hard-on and dancing around…and even has Flame bend over so he can “look her square in the buttocks.” I mean it’s just insane, folks…especially when you realize that Flame did so well it went through two printings! This is why I will always say that the 1970s was the most remarkable decade of the 20th Century. 

And I also haven’t mentioned the dire “Southern vernacular” that Kenneth Roberts writes all of the dialog in for the second half of the novel. It is truly excruciating and makes for a sometimes-impenetrable read, like a sleaze paperback Irvine Welsh. What’s bizarre is that even Flame speaks in this “South Carolina hick” vernacular, and she just got off a boat from Africa! This is what I mean when I say that Roberts had his tongue in his cheek…he clearly intended to subvert the entire “plantation novel” genre, telling a tale with no actual plot but instead dwelling on explicit sex and fractious in-fighting among a small group of characters. 

Plot-wise, Flame truly is a mess. The opening capture of Flame isn’t explained until midway through – initially I thought the text was intimating that she’d had an incestuous relationship with her brother, hence her fall from grace as a warrior in her tribe – but we finally learn that she was a sort of priestess, inducted into a snake cult. But she gave in to her temptations and had sex with a warrior in her tribe, for which she was cast out…and captured. 

But none of that plays into the second half of Flame. There is no part where Flame recaptures who she was, what she once was…though, frustratingly, the author dangles the idea. There are several parts where Flame gets angry, even one part where she picks up a knife and thinks of killing someone, but it never happens. The closest we get is when two “bucks” try to rape her and she crushes one of them with her thighs and bites the member of the other so that it’s “shredded meat!” 

Unfortunately Dolly, clearly described as a fat bitch, takes over too much of the second half; she’s a wanton slut who has banged virtually all the slaves on their property, including Blaze (with whom she has a child…yes, the naked little boy who grabs himself and propositions Flame), and she has weak Tommy under her thumb. I haven’t read Blaze yet, but apparently that story featured these two falling in love and marrying…but such feelings are long gone, with Dolly getting malicious glee out of beating and whipping everyone. For that matter, we get a lot of stuff about this German plantation owner that everyone is afraid of, and apparently he was Blaze’s owner, but this guy never even appears in the book! 

As for Blaze, he’s a towering warrior who ran off in the previous book but, for reasons never truly explained, has come back…and Dolly has had him tied to the ground and orders him whipped and beaten a bunch…that is, when she isn’t having sex with him. Truly the second half of Flame is just a series of ultra-bizarre sex scenes that have no purpose or payoff, which is to say they are also the epitome of glorious trash…like when Flame has two “bucks” in a single day (one of them Blaze), and meanwhile she’s fallen in love with Blaze…which is odd because a chapter before she’s also fallen in love with Tommy (after finally having sex with him and experiencing her first-ever orgasm). 

But in a way Flame is like an X-rated Three’s Company, as literally all conversation is about sex and the need for sex, but here characters will openly grope themselves or others while they’re talking…seriously, there are multiple scenes of men either whipping themselves out or of women whipping them out while in public (or at least, while not in the privacy of their homes), or going down on each other; Dolly at one point even jams her fingers up Flame, notes she isn’t a virgin, and then asks why she’s not pregnant…it’s almost like Kenneth Roberts had a checklist of every kinky sleazeball thing he had to put in the book, up to and including a part at the very end where Tommy buries his face in Flame’s ass and starts lapping away. 

Indeed the finale is clearly the work of an author who has chortled drunkenly to himself over 200 pages of madcap sleaze and then suddenly realizes he’s met his word count. Dolly, as ever going between whipping and screwing, has a rum-fueled orgy that sees everyone screwing everyone else, and then the house burns down. Warming to his dark theme, Roberts even has the unexpected death of an innocent…but he’s gone so far off course that “big” stuff, like Blaze breaking free of captivity and killing four men, is relayed via off-hand dialog, not actually shown. 

Even here Flame doesn’t get to assert herself as the warrior she is, though her wrath is sufficient to cause a character to fall into a lake and get eaten by alligators(!). Really cackling now, Roberts even gives Flame a Happily Ever After, having her go off with Tommy…and meanwhile also knowing that she is pregnant with Blaze’s child. 

Now the question on everyone’s mind is: who the hell was Kenneth Roberts? There’s no verifiable evidence I could find, but friends the narrative style felt very familiar to me as I read Flame; as mentioned, it is a very unique style. So unique that I suspect with a high degree of probability that “Kenneth Roberts” was none other than James Dockery, who shortly after this was writing the Butcher series as “Stuart Jason.” 

Dockery is often credited with a bunch of Savesploitation novels that were published under the name Stuart Jason in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, however it turns out these books were actually written by an author named Saliee O’Brien; the confusion stems from the fact that “Stuart Jason” was a house name used by the outfit that owned the copyright on both The Butcher and those slavesploitation novels: Script Associates. 

But that doesn’t mean James Dockery didn’t write any Slavesploitation novels, and I argue that Blaze and Flame were his. The books are not copyright Script Associates – they’re actually copyright Kenneth Roberts, but that doesn’t mean “Kenneth Roberts” was a real person (but of course it could also mean it was) – but I’d imagine Dockery had to have had some books to his credit to get the Butcher gig in the first place, just like Lyle Kenyon Engel required writers to have previously-published work to their name before they could submit manuscripts for the Nick Carter: Killmaster series. 

Now, Dockery’s recurring “bitter-sour taste of defeat” from the Butcher books does not appear in Flame, but otherwise the narrative voice is very similar. A sort of highbrow literary approach mixed with a truly sardonic vibe. There is also the lackadaisical approach to plotting; just as Dockery’s Butcher books drift along without much rhyme or reason, so too does Flame; and also, the would-be rapist “bucks” are quite similar to the freakish Syndicate hitmen who try to kill Bucher at the beginning of every Butcher novel. 

The only difference is the sex does not fade to black in Flame as it does in The Butcher, but I’d argue that’s because sex was part of the requirement from Warner Paperback Library. And the way in which Dockery (if it was truly he) treats the sex – with such sadistic glee – it seems evident to me that he was subtly mocking the tropes of the genre, giving the publisher exactly what it wanted plus a whole lot more. 

Overall, Flame is a terrible novel with no plot and a singular focus on sleazy sex, filled with unlikable characters…which is to say it is something of a masterpiece of trash. There can be no other novel like it, except possibly Blaze, and it is truly astonishing to me that the novel did so well that it was even reprinted. Perhaps one of these days I’ll read Blaze, once I’ve recovered from Flame. 

*The back cover illustration of Flame also appeared on the cover of the Slavesploitation novel Black Velvet, credited to Joseph Chadwick and also published by Warner Paperback Library in 1970; that’ll be the next Slavesploitation I read. 

And speaking of which, here is the (superior) cover to the second printing, dated August 1974, in which Flame’s pose is reversed and we see more of her body and her awesome boots (and you’ve really gotta wonder what her hand is up to under her blouse – with the added humor that Flame is clothed on the cover but spends the entire novel naked!), plus Steve Holland was added to the background:

And here’s the back cover art, which as mentioned also served as the front cover art for Black Velvet: