Category Archives: Australian crime fiction

The dying trade? Private investigators in Australian crime fiction

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 11 Comments

In the 1940s and 50s, some of the biggest names in Australian fiction were authors unknown today. People such as Gordon Clive Bleeck, Carter Brown, Don Haring and KT McCall were the leading lights of a huge local pulp fiction industry. It produced countless cheap westerns, science fiction and above all crime novels, printed cheaply with lurid covers and sold at news-stands on the street and in train stations. This piece was originally commissioned by the Wheeler Center and appeared on their website here.

In 1938, the federal government decided to levy foreign print publications. As a result of this decision, local publishing houses sprang up to fill the void, releasing hundreds of novels a month, including Westerns, racing and boxing stories, science fiction and crime. Hard-boiled and not so hard-boiled PIs became a standard feature of the pulp crime scene that flourished in Australia for two decades thereafter.

The authors are unknown today, despite some selling in the millions in Australia and abroad. Gordon Clive Bleeck wrote over 200 novels, including PI stories, while working full time for NSW Railroads. Carter Brown, the alias of UK immigrant Alan G Yates, is associated with nearly 300 titles.

Starting off as a hugely popular radio program on the Macquarie Network, the PI Larry Kent inspired a series of novels by Don Haring, an American who lived in Australia or a time, and Queenslander Des R Dunn.… Read more

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Posted in Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Horwitz Publications, Kerry Greenwood, Larry Kent, Lindy Cameron, Peter Corris, Pulp paperback cover art, Toni Johnson Woods, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Interview: David Whish-Wilson, part 2

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Below is part two of the interview with David Whish-Wilson, the WA based author of Line of Sight. Part one of the interview can be viewed here.

Is the history that you based Line of Sight on well known within WA? What was the reaction locally to the book?

The murder of Shirley Finn is probably Perth’s most notorious unsolved murder, notorious because of the persistent (and correct) rumours of police involvement. You might even say that Shirley’s murder has achieved the status of myth – the kind of myth that develops when there’s so little on the public record, and which functions to fill in the gaps left by unanswered questions. As a writer, of course, that frontierland between truth and fiction and myth and legend is an interesting region to explore. The good news is that Line of Sight has been very well received over here, and it’s gratifying to have been contacted on a number of occasions by ex-policemen and ex-prostitutes and others from the period who have expressed their satisfaction that finally this story has been told in a fairly truthful manner, even if it’s a work of fiction.

I did toss up whether to write the murder of Shirley Finn as a work of fiction, or of non-fiction, and in the end decided for a couple of reasons to write it as a novel, primarily because there’s so little on the public record about her murder, and specifically because people are still very afraid to speak on the record.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, Interviews, Noir fiction

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David Whish-Wilson Interview part 1

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

David Whish-Wilson’s Line of Sight was one of my favourite crime fictions reads of 2010. A re-telling of the events following the murder of a notorious Perth brothel madam, Shirley Finn, the book deals with crime and corruption in seventies WA. It’s a fantastic piece of hard-boiled noir writing, unusual for the Australian scene. I’m obviously not the only person singing it’s praises, as Line of Sight is in the running for best first fiction book in the upcoming Ned Kelly Awards.

A review of Line of Sight appeared on Pulp Curry last year. Since then, I’ve been hassling David for an interview. A few weeks ago we finally pulled it off. As finding a time to talk by phone proved difficult, David very generously agreed to provide written answers via e-mail to my questions. His detailed responses are fascinating, particularly to someone such as myself with little knowledge of life in the West. Instead of cutting them back, I decided to run the interview in two parts. Part two will appear tomorrow.

Line of Sight takes as its starting point the real life murder in the seventies of a Perth brothel madam called Shirley Finn (known as Ruby Devine in the book). How did you come across the story of Finn and what made you think it would make the premise of a good crime story?… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, Interviews, Noir fiction

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Book review: A Beautiful Place to Die

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

NunnMalla Nunn’s 2008 book A Beautiful Place to Die has been on my reading list for ages. It’s great. Pretty much as damn near perfect a first crime novel as I’ve find.

The book’s strengths – fantastic writing, an amazing sense of place, a wonderful less is more quality – are established in the first paragraph.

“Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper switched off the engine and looked out through the dirty windscreen. He was in deep country. To get any deeper he’d have to travel back in time to the Zulu wars. Two Ford pick-up trucks, a white Mercedes and a police van parked to his right placed him in the twentieth century. Ahead of him a group of black farm workers stood along a rise with their backs towards him. The hard line of their shoulders obscured what lay ahead.”

A Beautiful Place to Die is set in South Africa in the early fifties at the dawn of the Apartheid system. Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper has been sent to investigate the murder of prominent Afrikaner policeman Captain Willem Pretorius, in the small town of Jacob’s Rest on South Africa’s border with Mozambique.

Not only does Emmanuel have to deal with Pretorius’s angry sons, two very nasty special branch detectives are sniffing around the case, sure that the murder is a political killing, the work of communists.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Africa, Malla Nunn

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View from the transit lounge

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

I spent ages trying to think of a snappy heading for this post.

In the end I settled on ‘View from the transit lounge’, because as an aspiring author it’s easy to feel like you are always stuck in the transit lounge, feverishly clutching your manuscript like a boarding pass, watching other writers start or continue their literary journeys, while you… well, whatever, you get my general drift.

Moments of doubt aside, 2011 is shaping up to be a good year for me writing-wise.

Exhibit A is this website. If it’s your first visit, welcome. If you’ve been here before, you may notice that I’ve had a bit of work done. Actually, a lot of work.

Thanks to Rowan McKnaught from Studio Skiing for doing such a high quality, reasonably priced job, and for putting up with all my technologically illiterate questions.

I started Pulp Curry in mid-2010 to publicise the manuscript for my unpublished crime novel, Cambodia Darkness and Light. While that’s still a big part of why I’m doing it, the site has taken on a life of its own, getting quite a lot of traffic and giving me the opportunity to sound off on various obsessions about crime film and writing.

Time permitting (I’ve got a day job, you know), hopefully, it’ll go onto bigger and better things.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime Factory

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