Category Archives: Angela Savage

Book review: The Half-Child

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

We love a good guest review here at Pulp Curry and today’s is about a book very dear to me, Angela Savage’s The Half-Child. For readers who don’t follow Pulp Curry on a regular basis, in the interests of full disclosure I need to declare that Angela has been my partner in life (and crime) for the last 20 years. Her book, The Half-Child, is also a great read. Many thanks to Sulari Gentill, whose own crime novel, A Few Right Thinking Men, was published in 2010 by Pantera Press.

I am a greedy reader.

When I opened The Half-Child, Angela Savage’s second Jane Keeney crime novel, I looked forward to reacquainting myself with the streets of Thailand, about which Savage writes with an intimate knowledge and affection.

I wanted once again to be shown the colour, the contrast, the cultural crater of a place where West has hurtled into East.  I wanted to see past cliché: the neon, the sleaze, the confronting corruption, to the beauty of an ancient culture and a tenacious and adaptive people. On top of all this I wanted intrigue, excitement, perhaps a little romance, and definitely some humour.  I did start out by saying I was greedy.

The Half-Child completely satiated my literary gluttony and then offered me dessert!… Read more

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Posted in Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Thailand

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Book review: David Whish-Wilson’s Line of Sight

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

I am not going to let the fact that I have not read a book stand in the way of publishing a review of it, especially when the book in question sounds as interesting as the second novel by West Australian-based author David Whish-Wilson.

This review was originally appeared on the blog of my partner in crime Angela Savage, whose own book, The Half Child, has recently been released by Text Publishing.

Line of Sight is set in Perth in 1975 and is based on real events surrounding the unsolved murder of South Perth brothel owner Shirley Finn. In Whish-Wilson’s novel, the victim is celebrity brothel madam Ruby Devine whose body is found in her car, abandoned on a Perth golf course. Like Finn, she was shot at close range four times in the back of the head.

Superintendent Frank Swann formed a friendship with Ruby Devine when he worked as a detective in Kalgoorlie some ten years earlier. Though prostitution was illegal, Kalgoorlie was ‘famous for its prostitutes’ and Swann, adopting a harm reduction approach before it was fashionable, took steps to control rather than suppress the industry. However, as he makes clear to the Royal Commission into Matters Surrounding the Administration of the law Relating to Prostitution, which opens as the novel begins:

“It was not my practice to solicit monetary of sexual favours from Ruby Devine, or from anyone else…I am on the record as saying that there has never been a time in the history of this state when prostitution and some of the policemen who controlled it haven’t come to a financial understanding.… Read more

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Posted in Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, Noir fiction

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Victorian Premiers Literary Awards 2010: the results are in

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

The results are in for the Victoria Premier’s Literary Awards.

After being shortlisted in the category of Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, my manuscript Cambodia Darkness and Light unfortunately didn’t get the gong. That honour went to Peggy Frew for her work, House of Sticks.

But in a surprise announcement, Michelle Aung Thin, the other shortlisted writer in the unpublished manuscript category and myself, walked away with Unpublished Manuscript Fellowships. These include a financial stipend and a workspace at the Wheeler Centre. Supported by the Wheeler Centre and the Readings Foundation, these fellowships are new addition to the awards and I’m thrilled to have received one.

Thanks to Mark Rubbo for sponsoring the fellowships and to the Wheeler Centre for putting more flesh on the bones of the competition’s long-standing commitment to emerging writers.

And while I am at it, congrats are also in order for Peter Temple who took out the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction for Truth. It’s not every day genre fiction wins major awards and that’s two strikes Temple’s racked up. Hopefully, his success will further cement the status of crime writing in Australian literature.

The awards ceremony itself was a blast. The crowd, most of whom were live tweeting the proceedings, was great.… Read more

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Is Philip Marlowe spinning in his grave?

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

It’s official.

Yesterday my crime novel, Cambodia Darkness and Light, was short listed in the category of best unpublished manuscript by an emerging writer in the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

The judges said the following about Cambodia Darkness and Light:

Ex-cop Max Quinlan is working his third missing person’s case, and he’s already out of his depth … He’s in Cambodia, on the trail of disappeared Melbourne gem-trader Charles Avery, hired by his deep-pocketed sister. Avery is the kind of man ‘everyone had met’ but ‘no one knew’ – and he’s deeply enmeshed with the Khmer Rouge. This is a fast-paced, richly atmospheric spin on the Chandler-esque disillusioned gumshoe, keenly informed by the turbulent politics and history of Cambodia.

It’s not everyday you get your work compared to one of the masters of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler. Hopefully, he’s not spinning in his grave too much at the suggestion that my Vietnamese Australian ex-cop turned missing person’s investigator has anything in common with Philip Marlowe.

Best of luck to the other two shortlisted writers in the unpublished manuscript category. Peter Temple’s crime novel Truth is among the books shortlisted for the Vance Palmer fiction prize. Hopefully, its inclusion will continue to push crime fiction, particularly, Australian crime fiction, further into the literary mainstream in this country. … Read more

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Posted in Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Garry Disher

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