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Author Archives: Andrew Nette
Interview: James Herbert
Regular readers of this site will be familiar with my fascination with New English Library paperbacks of the 1970s, as well as my confoundment that no one has yet written a comprehensive history of the incredibly influential mass market publisher. The first of the pulp and popular fiction histories that I co-edited for PM Press, Girl Gangs Biker Boys and Real Cook Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950-1980, focused in some depth on NEL’s youthsploitation books (bikers and the skinhead and other paperbacks written by James Moffat aka Richard Allen), including re-published important material written by British critic Stewart Home. NEL was also included in my second PM Press book, Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950-1980. I’ve read bits and pieces on NEL, how they worked, their authors and their books around the place, mainly on-line, but there is nothing comprehensive I am aware of that has really pulled all this disparate information together and properly analysed the significant of NEL to 1970s British print culture.
Anyway, when award winning writer, author and horror historian Johnny Mains mentioned to me during an online discussion that he had an interview with one of NEL’s best known authors, James Herbert, that didn’t have a home, I was keen to provide one.… Read more
Posted in Book cover design, British pulp fiction, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction & Youth Culture, 1950-1980, Horror, Interviews, New English Library, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp paperback cover art, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980
Tagged Bill Phillipps, Bob Tanner, British horror fiction, Cecil Smith, Creed, Dot Lumely, Guy N Smith, James Herbert, James Moffat, Lenny Henry, New English Library, Richard Allen, Stewart Home, Survivor, Survivor (1976), Terry Harknett, The Edge, The Fog, the nasties, The Rats, The Secret of Crickley Hall, Walter Briggs
Book Review: The Real Diana Dors
One of the reasons I was interested in reading Anna Cale’s recently released biography of the late British actress Diana Dors, The Real Diana Dors, is that I was curious to test out what I thought I knew about Dors and the reality of her life. What I was pretty certain about, and Cale confirms, is that Dors was stereotyped from the beginning of her career as either the sultry femme fatale bad girl or, as she herself once wrote, ‘the flighty, sexy little thing who pops in and out of the story whenever a little light relief seems to be called for.’
What I didn’t know, that Cale’s book taught me, was what a determined, serious, and hard headed performer Dors was. She accumulated a hundred screen credits in a career that began with her first bit part in the 1947 crime drama, The Code of Scotland Yard, to her last film role, Steaming, which appeared in 1985, a year after she died at the age of just 54. She resisted attempts to stereotype when she could, and no doubt like a lot of post war actresses undoubtedly had the talent and drive to be even bigger if not for various factors, of which beginning her career in the morally conservative, sexually hypocritical Britain of the late 1940s and early 1950s, was a major one.… Read more
Posted in Book Reviews, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Christopher Lee, Crime film, Diana Dors, Film Noir, Victor Mature, Westerns
Tagged Anna Cale, Christopher Lee, Clair Bloom, David Lean, Diamond City (1949), Diana Dors, Joan Collins, L. Kee Thompson, Laura del Rivo, Michael winner, Nothing but the Night (1973), Oliver Twist (1948), Rod Steiger, Terence Fisher, The Furnished Room, The Last Page (1952), The Long Haul (1957), The Real Diana Dors, The unholy Wife (1957), Tread Softly Stranger (1958), Victor Mature, West 11 (1963)
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction 1950-1985 Kickstarter
I have written on this site before about the upcoming book I have coedited, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction 1950-1985, due for release in the US in October. For the next month of so leading up to this, the publisher, PM Press are running a pre-sale campaign for Dangerous Visions and New Worlds via Kickstarter. Other than allowing people to be the first to get their hands on the book this features various offers, including some great book packs and bonuses, even sci-fi pulp themed underpants! Due to US Postal Services rates being so high the Australians among you may want to wait until our Melbourne launch (date and venue TBC) or place an order via your local bookshop. More details when I have them.
You can check out the Kickstarter campaign and the various offers as part of it at the link here.… Read more
Posted in Black pulp fiction, Book cover design, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds Radical Science Fiction 1950 to 1985, Dystopian cinema, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction & Youth Culture, 1950-1980, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp paperback cover art, Science fiction and fantasy, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980
Tagged Dangerous Visions, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds Radical Science Fiction 1950 to 1980, Kickstarter, New Worlds, radical science fiction, science fiction
Phoenix: down Melbourne’s 1990s means streets
The recent inclusion of the 1995 Australian true crime mini-series Blue Murder as an offering on Netflix Australia provided an opportunity for many critics, present company included, to once again laud it as our best piece of true crime television made so far. While not walking back on this claim, there is another show that I would argue gives Blue Murder a run for its money in terms of being a gritty, true life depiction of policing, which I watched recently – the thirteen-part 1992 Australian Broadcasting Commission series, Phoenix.
A lot of 1990s Australian popular culture exists in a rather liminal space for me due to the fact that I spent a large chunk of the decade working in Southeast Asia. I don’t think I saw any episodes of Phoenix when it first came out, but I am pretty sure I caught parts of the first series (there were two) on VHS tapes that my partner’s mother sent us in the post when we were living in Hanoi, Vietnam. I am not even sure if Phoenix has as a current DVD release, as the discs I found were second hand and seem to have been released at least a decade ago.
Phoenix focuses on the Major Crimes squad, an elite group of Victorian cops.… Read more