By ERIC VAN LUSTBADER (Fawcett Crest; 1980)

Here we have the stuff of which bestsellers used to be made: a vastly overwritten sex and violence packed spectacle with a narrative and overall sensibility that are straight out of a grindhouse pic.  Yet author Eric van Lustbader (who currently writes the Robert Ludlum initiated Bourne series) is also careful to layer in a fair amount of detail about Japanese customs and history, thus lending a vague air of respectability that helped keep this book on the New York Times Best Seller list for a full five months.

The novel appeared at a time of great interest on the part of westerners about Japan’s less savory practices, which resulted in a mini-chop socky movie boom (ENTER THE NINJA, PRAY FOR DEATH, AMERICAN NINJA, etc.) and a series of novels by Lustbader starring THE NINJA’S central character Nicholas Linnear (THE MIKO, WHITE NINJA, THE KAISHO, etc.).  He’s a half-Caucasian, half-Asian who’s extremely well trained in martial arts.

That training proves extremely efficacious when a string of murders committed, apparently, by a ninja begin occurring in New York City.  Nicholas is hired by Raphael Tomkin, a wealthier-than-God oil magnate, to protect him from the ninja, who it seems is targeting Tomkin and his sexy daughter Justine—with whom Nicholas has become involved.  But as the killings continue Nicholas comes to suspect that he may be the ninja’s target, a surmise that turns out to be true, as said ninja, when his identity is eventually revealed, turns out to be a pivotal figure from Nicholas’s past.

That past is presented in the form of extended flashbacks interspaced with the present day action (doled out in five “rings” a la Miyamoto Musashi’s BOOK OF FIVE RINGS).  In this way we’re made privy to Nicholas’s Japan based child and young adulthood, where he was immersed in martial arts.  He also acquired a girlfriend in the form of Yukio, a nymphomaniacal young woman who turns out to have a definite bearing on the events of the present day.

The book, overall, works.  The sex is hot and heavy (and quite plentiful in both the past and present sections), the violence suitably nasty (particularly in the breathless, kill-a-thon climax), and there’s even some valiant attempts at character development.  There’s also a goodly amount of the type of urban sleaze that was popular at the time (with a pivotal killing taking place in an inner city porno theater).  Of course, the book could have safely lost about 200 of its 500-plus pages (the clichéd depictions of cops engaged in forensic investigations could definitely have stood to be jettisoned), but it does its job and delivers on all counts.