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Recommended reading
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Category Archives: Australian crime fiction
Pulp Friday: Pulp Confidential: Quick & dirty publishing from the 40s & 50s
When I first started researching the history of Australian pulp paperback publishing I thought libraries would be crammed with old papers from the various publishers who churned the books out in the fifties, sixties and seventies. I have since realised that paper takes up a lot of space to store and space is something that is at a premium at most libraries, be they public or university.
That is assuming individuals even had the presence of mind to realise that the records relating to pulp publishing were something worth keeping for future generations.
This is why Pulp Confidential: Quick and dirty publishing from the 40s to 50s, an exhibition currently showing at the State Library of NSW, is so interesting and unusual. The exhibition showcases papers, manuscripts, correspondence and artwork relating to Frank Johnson Publications, a small pulp-publishing operation active in Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s.
Johnson was member of the Sydney bohemian set in the twenties. He had high literary pretensions but moved into pulp publishing in response to the gap in local reading material resulting from the tariff placed on foreign imported printed matter in 1938.
Johnson died in 1960, after which the State Library wrote to his family, asking whether they had kept his papers. His daughter responded five years later, saying there was a considerable amount of paperwork relating to Johnson’s work in a shed at the back of her house.… Read more
Pulp Friday: Scobie Malone & “our new Errol Flynn”
Something a little different for this week’s Pulp Friday.
I recently watched the 1975 Australian film, Scobie Malone, starring Jack Thompson. Also known as Murder at the Opera House and Helga’s Web, the latter from the title of the 1970 Jon Cleary it is based on, the film was long unavailable until its recent re-release by Umbrella Entertainment.
The plot involves larrikan Sydney homicide detective Sergeant Scobie Malone (Jack Thompson) investigating the murder of a women whose body is found in the Sydney Opera House. In the course of his inquires, Malone discovers the women, Helga (Judy Morris), was a high priced prostitute involved with several important clients, including the Minister for Culture (James Workman), who she was blackmailing, and film director Jack Savannah (Joe Martin).
There are numerous suspects for her death, including the Minister’s wife and a local criminal going by the wonderful name of Mister Sin (Noel Ferrier). The events leading up to Helga’s death are told in a series of flashbacks. Most of the police work is done by Malone’s hapless offsider (Shane Porteous), leaving the title character to spend most of his screen time having sex with a bewildering variety of women, including nearly all the female inhabitants of the singles only block of flats he lives in.… Read more
Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian crime film, Australian popular culture, Ozsploitation, Pulp Friday
Tagged Helga's Web, Jack Thomspon, James Workman, Jon Clearly, Judy Morris, Movie News, Nobody Runs Forever (1968), Noel Ferrier, Rod Taylor, Scobie Malone (1975), Shane Porteous, The High Commissioner
Hit-and-run books & ‘literary’ works: true crime, from Garner to Chopper Read
In her latest book, This House of Grief, Helen Garner examines the case of Robert Farquharson, who on Father’s Day 2005 drove his car into a dam off the Princes Highway near Geelong, drowning his three young sons. It is among a number of recent works that demonstrate how true crime writing has changed over the last few years.
Others are Anne Krien’s Night Games: Sex Power and Sport, which won the 2014 Sisters in Crime Davitt award for best true crime book, and Robin De Crespigny’s The People Smuggler, ostensibly a non fiction story about the experience of an Iraqi asylum seeker, which took the 2013 Ned Kelly crime writing award for best non-fiction. Matthew Condon’s Jacks and Jokers is another example. The second instalment of a trilogy about police corruption in Queensland from the sixties to the Fitzgerald Inquiry in 1987, it has the feel of an ambitious alternative social history rather than a piece of true crime writing.
“In terms of definition,” says veteran true crime writer Lindsay Simpson, “true crime is a literary rendition of a particular crime which pays homage to veracity by researching the crime across multiple sources including interviews and primary source documents while at the same time engaging the reader through its narrative.”… Read more
Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian popular culture, David Whish-Wilson, True crime
Tagged Adam Shand, Anne Krien, Brothers in Arms, Chloe Hooper, Daniel Morcombe, David Whish-Wilson, Helen Garner, In Cold Blood, Jacks and Jokers, John Safran, Lindsay Simpson, Line of Sight, Mark Chopper Read, Matthew Condon, Murder in Mississippi, Night Games: Sex Power and Sport, Robin De Crespigny, The Frankston Murders, The People Smuggler, The Tall Man, This House of Grief, Three Crooked Kings, Truman Capote, Vikki Petraitis, Where Is Daniel?
Mid-year reading report: The Thief, St Kilda Blues, Hanging Devils, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone
My reading has been dominated of late by the need to get through a lot of pulp books and material I need to be across for several upcoming literary festival appearances (all of which I’ll also be discussing here in the coming weeks). Between all this, however, I have managed to get through a few books purely for pleasures and I thought it was about time I shared my thoughts on these.
First up is He Jiahong’s Hanging Devils: Hong Jun Investigates. I lamented on this site some time ago about the seeming absence of genuine contemporary crime fiction set in China, written by someone living there. Well, Hanging Devils is just that. According to the back cover blurb, the author is one of China’s foremost authorities on criminal justice, a professor of law at People’s University of Beijing and the author of several best selling crime novels including four featuring the character of Hong Ju.
Hanging Devils (also the slang term given to overhanging tree branches that can fall without warning, potential killing anyone unfortunate to be underneath them) is set in the mid-nineties.… Read more
Posted in Adrian McKinty, Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from China, Crime fiction and film from Japan
Tagged Adrian Mckinty, Blackwattle Creek, crime fiction set in China, Fuminori Nakamura, Geoffrey McGeavchin, Hanging Devils: Hong Jun Investigates, He Jiahong, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, St Kida Blues, The Thief