Category Archives: Australian crime fiction

Interview: Australian pulp fiction historian Toni Johnson Woods

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

Dr Toni Johnson Woods is someone I’ve been keen to interview on this blog for a while now.

A Research Fellow at University of Queensland, she is passionate about Australian books. Not just capital ‘L’ literature, but the local mass produced pulp fiction of the forties, fifties and early sixties, the existence of which has all but disappeared from our collective cultural memory.

Her commitment to the cause of local pulp includes having listened to hours of popular radio serials (Carter Brown Mystery Theatre and Larry Kent’s I Hate Crime), scanned thousands of pulp fiction covers and read every nearly all 300 Carter Brown novels.

She very generously agreed to answer the following questions about her work by e-mail.

What attracted you to researching pulp fiction in the first place? 

One very unremarkable day I was chatting with colleagues in the tearoom. As you can imagine our conversations are very lofty – not.  I asked the most basic question: who is Australia’s most popular author.

Well, we batted that around for several minutes arguing about what “popular” means, i.e. best selling, most widely read, most known author.  All of these things are not the same. The discussion then turned to what is an Australian author, i.e. someone who was born in Australia?… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Horwitz Publications, Interviews, Larry Kent, Pulp fiction, Toni Johnson Woods, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime writing: the shortlist is out

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

The shortlist for Australia’s annual crime writing gongs, The Ned Kelly Awards, was released this week.

While the big publishers usually dominate the Neddies, although this year it’s a clean sweep. Allen and Unwin, Pan Macmillan, Harper Collins and Random House share the prizes. Make of that what you will in terms of the state of local crime writing.

The Neddies have three categories: Best First Fiction, Best Fiction and True Crime.Reflecting a wider trend in publishing, this year’s shortlist for best first crime novel has a distinct dystopian/fantasy feel to it. When We Have Wings by Claire Corbett is a PI story set in a world where people have the ability to fly and genetic engineering is rampant. Kim Westward’s The Courier’s New Bicycle is the story of a bike courier who transports contraband through the alleyways of a Melbourne set in the future. Word is it’s good and at the risk of being proven wrong I suspect it may be the one to watch.

The exception is The Cartographer by Peter Twohig, set in Melbourne in 1951 and dealing with a young boy who flees into the city’s sewers after witnessing a violent crime.

Best fiction is a three-way contest between Malcolm Knox’s The Life, J.C Burke’s Pig Boy and Barry Maitland’s Chelsea Mansions.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Ned Kelly Awards

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Ghost Money available August 20

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Just a quick post to let you know that my first novel Ghost Money will be released on August 20.

It’ll be available digitally through Amazon, B&N, Apple, Sony and Kobo.

Ghost Money is set in Cambodia in the mid-ninties, when the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency was fragmenting and the country’s rival coalition parties were in conflict with each other from for dominance. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan. Quinlan’s search will take him from Phnom Penh to the country’s border with Thailand and plunge him into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.

The book has got it’s first review, by none other than veteran Australian crime writer, Garry Disher. He was nice enough to blurb the book for me and said, “Ghost Money is a fast-paced, atmospheric crime novel. Its journey into a cynical and treacherous world is tense and suspenseful.”

I’m thrilled with the comments, coming as they do from someone with Disher’s statue in Australian crime writing.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Garry Disher, Snubnose Press

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Ghost Money cover

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 9 Comments

I’ve been sitting on this for a little while now and figure a lazy Friday afternoon is as good a time as any to put it out there. It’s the draft cover of my first novel, Ghost Money, to be released as a digital book by US crime publisher Snubnose Press soon.

I think it looks great. I hope you do, too.

Here’s the pitch for Ghost Money.

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of an unstable coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan. But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.

Ghost Money is a crime novel, but it’s also about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, and what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods of history, locals and foreigners, the choices they make, what they do to survive

The person behind this design and the covers of most of Snubnose Press’s growing number of releases is the incredibly talented Eric Beetner.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Snubnose Press

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Book review: City of Light

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Years ago I read a book called Big Bad Blood by a Sydney crime writer called Dave Warner.

I can’t remember much about it now, except it was set in Sydney’s vice centre, Kings Cross, in the mid-sixties and involved police corruption, organised crime and a series of grisly murders of local prostitutes. It was a dark, gritty read, set in an era I was (and still am) interested in learning more about. I thought it was great.

I didn’t give Warner a second thought until recently, when I discovered his first novel, City of Light.

Turns out, Sydney’s not Warner’s original stomping ground. He moved there from Perth, West Australian in the late nineties, for reasons which perhaps become clear in City of Light.

City of Light came after a colourful career as a front man for a punk rock band (“Australia’s first punk band” according to his website), stand up comic and play write. It won the West Australian Premier’s Award for best fiction in 1996.

The main character of City of Light is Snowy Lane, a young police constable and amateur footballer, working in suburban Perth in the late- seventies, who gets swept up in the investigation into a string of murders of young women by a serial killer dubbed ‘Mr Gruesome’.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, James Ellroy, Neo Noir

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