Category Archives: Australian pulp fiction

“To protect her young daughter she would have to expose the truth of her own affair with their virile young boarder.”

Sounds complicated.

This Friday’s pulp offering is Open House by Joan Ellis. It was published by Star Books, Crow’s Nest Sydney, and printed by Griffin Press in South Australia. There’s no publication date.

To the best of my knowledge, Star Books was a local outfit that did Australian mass market print runs of overseas pulp authors. It was active in the late sixties and early seventies. One day I’m actually going to have to spend a bit of time and track down the details of some of these local pulp publishing houses, as I’d love to know more about them.

Through the wonder of the Internet I discovered Ellis certainly was a prolific author, mainly erotic pulps and campus exploitation tales very popular in the US in the early sixties. So prolific, in fact, I suspect it was name used by several authors to ghost under.

I’m not sure whether Joan did her own titling. If so, she certainly had an talent for creative sleaze. Some of the titles I was able to track down, included Campus Pet (“With her one-track mind and breath taking body, she was bound to be a hit on campus”), Campus Jungle (She wondered if he’d still want her once he found out about the things she’d done at a not-so-private campus party”), High School Hellions, Faculty Wife and Cool Co-Eds (“They came in search of knowledge, the kind not found in text books…”), and Third Street (The place where questions were asked, the street where few men were ever seen”).… Read more