Tag Archives: Blaxsploitation pulp

Pulp Friday: Black Samurai

“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

Pulp Friday: interview with Iain Mcintyre, author, Sticking it to the Man!

Today’s Pulp Friday is a fascinating interview with Melbourne-based social historian Iain McIntyre, author of a new book, Sticking it to the Man! Pop, Protest and Black Fiction of the Counterculture, 1964-75.

Sticking it to the Man! is a roller coaster ride through the lava lit streets of the counter-cultural pulp fiction of the late sixties and early seventies, a time when hippies, bikers, swingers and revolutionaries replaced cops and private detectives as pulp’s stable characters.

The book contains 130 reviews of pulps from the period covering all the major sub-themes: drug use, bikers, sleaze, blaxsploitation, hippies and dystopian science fiction. It also includes the covers in all their dog eared, price marked glory. It’s through books like this that the hidden history of pulp fiction is gradually pieced together. Sticking it to the Man! is a must read for every serious pulp fiction afficiando.

You can buy Sticking it to the Man! here. Copies will also be on sale at the launch of Crime Factory’s Hard Labour anthology, this coming Monday, October 8. Iain will also be talking about his book at the launch.

What is it about pulp fiction between 1964 and 1975, the period covered in your book that you find so interesting?

I’ve long had an interest in troublemakers, militants and odd-balls, and this was a period in which those normally relegated to the margins were able to have a major impact on culture and society.… Read more