Category Archives: Pulp Friday

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: Mafia pulp fiction

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

The Mafia, Cosa Nostra, the Mob, the Family, the Outfit, the Syndicate, call them whatever you like, it’s hard to overstate the influence organised crime had over pulp fiction.

My post on the Andrew Dominik movie Killing Them Softly earlier this week, got me thinking about how the Mafia have been portrayed in popular fiction and film.

One of the aspects of Killing Me Softly I found so interesting was its depiction of organised crime in the traditional sense as being just a shadow of its former glory. For the most part, the gangsters were a bunch of clapped out old men and cautious time servers, clinging desperately to the last trappings of their power base.

It wasn’t always so. Stretching right back to the late forties, organised crime was one of the central pre-occupations of pulp writers. The phenomenal success of Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather, published in 1969 and the subsequent movie version by Francis Ford Coppola in 1972, saw pulp’s fascination with the Mafia stretch well into the seventies.

In addition to novels examining every aspect of the Mafia’s rituals and existence, so all pervasive and powerful was the Mafia’s reach, pulp writers invented a series of characters that existed just to fight it.

Robert Briganti or ‘the Assassin’ as he is known, “lives only to destroy the Mafia.”… Read more

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Posted in Belmont Tower Books, Crime fiction, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Mafia, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: spy pulp part 2, Assignment Asia

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of James Bond, last week’s Pulp Friday was a selection of spy themed pulp covers.

This week’s post takes us to one of the main battlegrounds for pulp spies in the sixties and seventies – Asia.

The Cold War was in full swing and those Reds were getting up to all kinds of nefarious activity behind the bamboo curtain, everything from kidnapping, sabotaging America’s space program, developing bubonic plague, drug running, to assassination.

And secret agents like Mark Hood (The Bamboo Bomb) Butler (Chinese Roulette) Death Merchant (Chinese Conspiracy), Joe Gall (The Star Ruby Contract) and Drake (“The man with nobody’s face” in Operation Checkmate), Nick Carter (The Defector) and Sam Durell (the Assignment series, over 48 of which were written), were in the thick of it.

They usually committed a lot of violence, had a lot of sex, and travelled to exotic locations. The books below are set in China, Singapore, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan and Sri Lanka.

And, of course, there were some great covers. My favourite is the Robert Mcginnis illustration for Scott S Stone’s The Dragon’s Eye. But I’m also rather taken with the sleazy eighties feel of the photograph on the cover of Assignment Bangkok.… Read more

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Posted in Coronet Books, Crime fiction and film from China, Crime fiction and film from India, Crime fiction and film from Japan, Crime fiction and film from Singapore, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Spies, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: spy pulp part 1, death traps and dark duets

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

Over the next two weeks I’ll be commemorating the 50th anniversary of James Bond by posting some of the excellent spy themed pulp paperback covers I’ve collected over the years.

Intrigue and danger in exotic locations, sinister enemies, tough secret agents, beautiful women, the spy fiction of the fifties, sixties and early seventies had it all, as the following the collection of pulp paperback covers show.

You’ll find more spy fiction pulp covers over on my Pinterest site.

In the next week or so I’ll post part 2 of my spy pulp series, a selection of covers depicting spy fiction set in Asia.

… Read more

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Posted in Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Pan Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Spies, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: witches, warlocks and drums of the dark gods

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

“A Horrifying excursion into a world ruled by the prince of darkness”

We don’t do Halloween in Australia, but it’s as good an opportunity as any to post some of the terrific occult pulp paperbacks covers I’ve collected over the last few months.

The supernatural and occult were major pre-occupations of popular culture in the sixties and the first half seventies. I am not exactly sure why, but some observers have linked it to regular outbreaks of witch mania that historically coincided with periods of major social change and dislocation.

Occultists, witches, Satanists, ruled much of the cinema screen. As was often the case, relatively highbrow offerings, Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), coexisted along side more sensationalist exploitation fare. Devil’s Rain (1975), Brotherhood of Satan (1971), The Witches (1966) and Race with the Devil (1975), are just some of the many, many examples.

And where cinema went, pulp fiction followed. Old stories were spiced up, new ones penned in rapid succession.

Rest in Agony concerns what transpires when a husband and wife discover a little black book that reveals their dear deceased Uncle Amby lived a secret double life as a Satanist. Not surprising when some of his mates included Vandal James “Satan’s playmate” and Amora Cartwirght “Goddess of dark waters”.… Read more

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Posted in Ben Wheatley, Horwitz Publications, Monarch Books, New English Library, Pan Books, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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