Six Gun Samurai no 1 by Patrick Lee

Pinnacle Books 1980

Cover art by Bruce Minney

Pseudonym of Mark K Roberts

I couldn’t find much about the author. He was born in 1936. He wrote The Liberty Corps series and several entries in The Penetrator series, Soldier for Hire series, and The Black Eagles series. Probably many more but this is all I could find.

The Six Gun Samurai series had 8 entries. The first six are under the title Six Gun Samurai and the last two are inexplicably changed to Six Gun Warrior. The series was adorably written under the, somewhat Asian-ambiguous, house name of Patrick Lee.

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Video review in case you don't feel like readin:

The basic premise: 12-year-old Tommy Fletcher is a midshipman in the United States Navy and is stationed in Japan. One night a group of ninjas attack and kill everyone at the base except Tommy who escapes into the streets of Japan. He remains there as a street urchin until a Samurai adopts him and teaches him the way of the Samurai. Years later he returns to the US to enact revenge upon the Union soldiers who killed his estranged Southern family.

The Civil War ended in 1865 and now a rogue Union Colonel and his criminal cavalry terrorize the West by violently stealing claims, money and even whole towns. Bad news for them though because Tanaka Tom is back in the US and out for blood.

We start in Washout, Nevada. Two white gunslingers are in town to rob the place. They're at the bar drinking when a strange man wearing Asian garb shows up. Dumb crackers are never a fan of foreigners, so they decide to have a little fun. They verbally berate him with racial slurs. He calmly states he is Tommy Fletcher, whips out his sword and starts chopping off body parts. Heads literally roll. It is explicitly described in wonderful bloody detail.

Instead of just stating what Tommy looks like, it’s clever the way the author used the outlaws insults to describe his appearance. Tommy is half Native American and half white, so everyone thinks he's...Japanese?? “Especially when he has a tan.”

At the end of the fight the bartender clunks Tommy over the head and he wakes up in jail. We get a reminiscing flashback to his time In Japan and what happened after the night of the ninja. With no way to get home and in a foreign land he survives on the streets doing what he has to to survive. He gets in a fight with some other street kids and runs into a samurai while chasing them. The Samurai learns he is an American and he was a survivor of the infamous massacre of the naval base. The Samurai wants him to testify at a hearing that will help the Shogun because people say it was the Samurai’s fault the US navy people were killed. Long story short Tommy goes to live with the childless Samurai and his wife and Tommy is adopted as their son.

It's a very convoluted back story but I appreciate that it was so complex and in depth. You usually don’t see such effort in foreigner-learns-a-form-of-martial-arts stories.

At the end of the flashback Tommy is released from jail as he was defending himself.

From here on out we get snippets of the bad guys being bad and holy shit, the author really goes all in. In one scene there is a group of families mining a claim. They strike gold. Two of the men go to town to get supplies and instantly the claim jumpers attack the family remaining at the claim. They beat the men to get them to sign over the claim. Still, they refuse. Among the gang of outlaws is a pedophile who takes the man’s son into the bushes and rapes him. The sounds of the boy screaming torment the father into signing. What?! Good Lord. I’ve seen some fucked up shit in these old books, but this was hands down the worst and it blindsided me. I did not see that coming. And after the men sign the papers, they execute them, and the leader tells his men to do whatever they want with the wives and children.

We jump right back to our hero Tanaka Tom and that's good because I’m ready for some more bloodshed. But unfortunately, we go into our first adult western style sex scene. Bad timing. Tom is now in Globe Arizona trying to get a clue about the Colonel’s whereabouts. At a bar he is approached by a prostitute. He is immediately all in and humps the ever-living shit out of her. And in case you were wondering, yes, he has a giant dong, yes, he can bang it out for over an hour and is ready to go again in a few minutes and yes, this is the best sex this hooker has ever had.

Bad guys do more bad things. Tommy catches up with a few of them and hacks them to pieces. He bangs another hooker. Another child is violated. Damn it. We get lots of Samurai moral code of ethics and the loophole that is vengeance. Tommy meets good local working men and families along the way who are sick of these outlaws and willing to help him in his journey.

One aspect I really liked is that Tommy pretty much sticks to his Samurai fighting style and weapons throughout most of the book. Unfortunately, he caves into the Western fighting style and even though he's been taught guns are without honor he all of a sudden realizes that they are actually really great and teaches himself to use them. Ha! First off, his rationalization about how guns are actually wonderful was corny and total propaganda. Second and to add to the first point, this author loves guns because we get four pages of the most descriptive gun shooting ever written. Don’t get me wrong, I love shootouts in Westerns, in fact, usually the more the merrier, but the fact he doesn’t use guns is what makes this stand out. He's a samurai fighting with a sword and throwing stars and other Asian stuff in a western world. If he uses guns, it's just another western.

Epic showdown. I was kind of disappointed to see the book’s main conflict wasn't going to be concluded in this one. I would rather have had each book be its own complete story than a huge series.

Take out the unnecessary brutal attitude towards children in this book and I found it to be a fun first entry. Very pulpy. Very men’s adventure. I especially loved the stranger in a strange land, East meets West, genre fiction mash up.