Pulp Friday: Model School

“The King’s Cross vice world taught her the other side of the profession.”

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is a wonderful example of local pulp fiction from the early sixties, Model School by Christine James, released by Horwitz Publications in 1965.

The early sixties were a turning point for the Australia’s pulp paperback industry, when publishers stopped relying purely on reprints of overseas material and stories set offshore, and started releasing locally set stories by Australian writers.

The setting for much of this work was Sydney’s Kings Cross, which during the sixties, seventies and eighties was Australia best-known center of drug use and prostitution.

Prostitutes, beatniks, con men, drug dealers, bent cops, organized crime lords, innocent tourists and American servicemen on leave all rubbed shoulders in  ‘the Cross’ as it is referred to locally. To this, local pulp authors added Chinese Triad gangs enslaving white women, witches and warlocks and a host of other less believable characters.

Like so many of the Australian pulp I feature on my site, I have not been able to find anything out about the author, Christine James, if, indeed this was her or his real name.

Model School is a fairly typical example of the Kings Cross pulp of the early to mid-sixties.

“The phoney model racket. Party girls… The twilight side of an otherwise respectable profession. A girl discovers the real world of Sydney vice….”

Have a good weekend.