Tag Archives: Black Samurai

Pulp Friday: Black Samurai

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

“The Black Samurai tangles with a human Satan in a hellish den of torrid sex and deadly violence.”

Today’s Pulp Friday is a series of covers featuring one of the best characters of US seventies pulp, Robert Sand aka Black Samurai.

Black Samurai was the creation of Black American writer Marc Olden. Olden wrote a total of seven books featuring Black Samurai, a US GI stationed in Japan who gets trained by a Japanese martial arts master and unleashed in to a series of bizarre adventures.

As was often the case with seventies pulp, Black Samurai’s plots were a mash up various hard boiled popular culture themes, including Eastern mysticism, the occult, organised crime, as well as lots of sex and bone breaking martial arts action.

My favourite of the covers featured in this post is The Warlock, in which Black Samurai tangles with an occult mastermind and his army of killer dwarfs.

Another of the releases featured in this post, The Katana sees Sand having to recover an ancient Samurai sword stolen by a army of thugs commanded by the Mafia and financed by Arab oil wealth.

The Black Samurai series were among the approximately 40 books, mainly suspense and thrillers, written by Olden, himself an expert in Akaido and Karate.… Read more

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Posted in Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday

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Pulp Friday: mercenary pulp

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

This week’s Pulp Friday is a selection of covers from the seething, sweaty, bloody, intrigue laden world of mercenary pulp.

I picked them celebrate the fact that I have a story in issue 2 of Blood and Tacos, which launches today, called ‘Bastard Mercenary: Operation Scorpion Sting’. Well, it’s not my story. It was written by a guy called Arch Saxon, one of the mainstays of the local pulp fiction scene in the seventies and eighties.

I discovered Saxon living in a down at heel rooming house in Brunswick, while researching a piece for this site. After he’d drunk his own body weight in beer and caged a hundred dollars off me, he agreed to let me submit a story of his featuring his little known creation Bruce ‘Boomer’ Kelly to Johnny Shaw’s Blood and Tacos series.

Kelly aka Bastard Mercenary is hard-bitten Bangkok-based Australian mercenary who’ll undertake any job so long as the beer is cold and the money right. Much like Saxon himself.

The rest as they say is history.

Blood and Tacos is an affectionate homage to the crazy, over the top world of late seventies, eighties pulp fiction. A time when titles such as Penetrator, The Liquidator, Death Merchant, Black Samurai and The Executioner rubbed muscular shoulders with each other on the pulp paperback rack of the local newsagency.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Belmont Tower Books, Crime fiction and film from Africa, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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