Black Kidnapper (1972, James Rusk, Jr)

I’ve always been curious about reading Black Abductor, both because of its fame as being investigated by the FBI as a possible blueprint for Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, and because it is the source novel for the early Joe Zito film “Abduction” ( 1975). .

The book was originally published in 1972 and written by a Southern California engineer named James Rusk, Jr., under the pseudonym Harrison James, for which he was paid a lump sum of $500. Black Abductor would probably have been forgotten if it didn’t echo the details of the Hearst kidnapping that took place two years later. After that, Black Abductor became a big deal, with Grove Press buying the book and film rights in 1974 and giving the book a second, wider release under the new title ‘Abduction: Fiction Before Fact’.

A British edition of the book was published in 1976, essentially serving as a novelization of the Zito film, which was released in British cinemas the same year. This edition features a tasteless but striking photo of the film’s rape scene on the cover and a contextualizing article in the Daily Telegraph about the Hearst case and the two competing cash-in films, the Zito film and Robert L. Roberts Patty (1976). An unusual move, since the article provides as much publicity for Roberts’ production as the film for which the book is intended to serve as a promo.

Rusk’s story bears eerie similarities to the Heart case: a wealthy college student named Patricia Prescott is kidnapped and held for ransom by a pack of young anti-establishment radicals. Only then does the Stockholm Syndrome kick in, turning Patricia from political hostage to political ally. If you were a woman, you probably wouldn’t want to be alone in the room with the man who wrote this book. Judging from the commentaries on his later science fiction novel ‘Space Slaves’ (published in 1980, under his real name), race relations and female subjugation were Rusk’s major themes. The tone of Black Abductor initially comes across as conservative and deeply misogynistic, quickly concluding that Patricia’s kidnapping and subsequent rapes are karma because she brings her family name into disrepute by having an active sex life in college and incestuous desires for her brother. “It couldn’t punish her severely enough for this year’s dirty deeds that culminated in the worst of them all with Abe.” The nastiest act in question is cunnilingus, which Rusk seems to regard as nothing short of monstrous – it’s described as a ‘repulsive oral assault’ – to the extent that you wonder if Patricia isn’t the only one who had sexual problems here . In keeping with the mentality of punishing the heroine for her sexuality, the first rape in the book is an oral rape, committed by one of the radicals named Jacob Horowitz, a grotesque slob who is compared in the book to Tweedle-Dee. The fact that Patricia ultimately enjoys having her pussy eaten by Jacob much more than her boyfriend Abe only adds to her sense of shame and sexual guilt. Just when you think you’ve read this book as a reactionary, fist-shaking exercise aimed at female sexuality and the hippie counterculture, the book mirrors its protagonist by warming up to the radicals. In Dorian Palmer, the head of the radicals and the titular black kidnapper, a rebel with a righteous cause… man. Dorian’s motivation for kidnapping Patricia was to demand the release of a black political activist named Bolivar Gunter, who killed white National Guardsman Elvis Prouty after witnessing Elvis stab a pregnant black woman in the abdomen during a demonstration. Dorian believes Gunter did not receive a fair trial because the jury was not told that Prouty was also suspected of impregnating Gunter’s sister and then concealing their affair by stabbing her in the abdomen and to carve out their unborn mixed-race child. . As famous as this book is for its connection to the Hearst case, it is likely that Rusk himself had Manson in mind when he wrote this. There are two scenes in this book where pregnant women are stabbed in the stomach, Patricia shared her name with one of Manson’s followers, and Tate’s murder was even namechecked at one point. While the book ultimately shows empathy for Dorian’s plight, Patricia is a completely different matter. After going on the attack at the beginning of the book for being sexually wanton, Rusk then contradicts himself by piling on her for being too uptight. In a “Behind the Green Door” fashion, the book argues that being kidnapped and violated is actually a happy, sexually liberating experience for her. This allows Patricia to put aside her high-minded, middle-class obsessions about sex and instead transfer her self-destructive desires for her own brother to Dorian. I guess the moral of the story is that it’s better to love a brother than your own brother. Rusk died in 2002, so we can only speculate who this book was intended for. Black men with an eye for lily-white flesh (“she doubted there was a black buck alive who would pass up the opportunity to humiliate a white woman by having her sexually”). Racist white men, who wanted to be aroused by a book that played on the views of black men as kidnappers and molesters of white women, or sexually repressed women who harbored rape fantasies about black men (“human men just didn’t have such big dicks. Asses”) , maybe, but not men. Her vision had to play tricks on her.” Perhaps in that opportunistic, exploitative way, there is something that both turns off and appeals to everyone in Black Abductor. As Lou Reed once sang, “Remember, different people have strange tastes.” Rough, interracial sex is however, certainly where the focus of this book is, when it strays from the topic, Rusk’s enthusiasm for writing seems to falter. The ending in particular is terrible and feels like Rusk just gave up expanded the film version’s ending, adding a much-needed final moment of melodramatic oomph that is sorely lacking in the source novel.

I will say that if you go in expecting a disgusting, scuzzy, degenerate read, Black Abductor will meet all expectations. This is a dirty mess of a book, closer in spirit to a mixed combo roughie like “Hot Summer in the City.” ‘ than the Zito film.