Category Archives: Australian pulp fiction

Pulp Friday: Hell is My Destination

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Welcome to the first of what I hope is going to be a weekly series known as Pulp Friday.

I love the pulp fiction of the fifties, sixties and seventies. I love the artwork and the cadence of their lurid, often totally over the top front and back cover text.

I’m particularly fascinated by Australian pulp paperback novels, how they were written and put together, the stories and themes they looked at.

I’ve amassed a pretty good collection of these books over the years, from opportunity shops, garage sales, and the like. Most were written by unknown authors, many using pseudonyms, and put out by publishing houses that no longer exist.

For me they represent a period in Australian publishing history that has been largely forgotten by the book industry’s emphasis on creating capital ‘L’ literature. This situation is only now being challenged by e-publishing, which is allowing small, niche publishers to get out there and produce genre fiction, including pulp fiction.

Anyway, as a way of celebrating my and others interest in these books, from now on each Friday I’m going to post one pulp paperback cover.

I’ll try to make most of them either Australian pulps or local reproductions of foreign books. That said, I’ve also got a hell of a lot of US and British pulps I’d just love to share with you.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Books my father read

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 16 Comments

July 24 was the fourth anniversary of the death of my father, William Nette.

He died peacefully in hospital on the Queensland Gold Coast, where he had retired with my mother many years earlier. He was 86.

Like many father-son relationships, we didn’t always get on. That’s putting it mildly. But he brought a lot of positive influences to my life.

He turned me onto the joy of jazz, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey and Dave Brubeck. He had a large collection of 78s wrapped in brown paper that he’d secreted out of Papua New Guinea, where he was an armed forces disc jockey during the war, along with cartons of cigarettes he later sold in Australia.

Only recently have I realised he’s also responsible for much of the delight I find in reading and my particular fondness of crime fiction.

I remember the pivotal moment quite clearly. I was thirteen. He came home from work one day and, to my complete horror, announced he was withholding my allowance until I started reading books (comics, which I loved, didn’t count).

He set the first two books, Robinson Crusoe, followed by Treasure Island. They were heavy looking volumes with no pictures that had belonged to my father when he was a boy.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Crime fiction, Horwitz Publications, Larry Kent, Pan Books, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Executives behaving badly: sixties Australian pulp part 2

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

High-flying corporate executives behaving badly were a staple of Australian pulp fiction in the sixties.

Coming off the drab post-World War Two austerity of the fifties, readers devoured tales of power hungry businessmen, international travel, fat expense accounts and modern, high tech business practices, mixed with organised crime, boozy parties and infidelity.

The following selection – sourced from my collection – mainly features local versions of books originally published in the US by Beacon Press.They were reprinted locally by an anonymous outfit called Magazine Services, Pty, Ltd, based in Sydney and Melbourne.

Most of the following titles don’t include the date they were republished.

The only indigenous effort, Mile Pegs, was written by political journalist, Don Whitington, who went onto be a celebrated author and biographer. Mile Pegs the story of a “King Hit” Seager who built an outback coaching venture into one of Australia’s biggest airlines while “Mercilessly disregarding the rights and feelings of the woman he loved, his illegitimate son, his colleagues and everyone who stood in his path”.

See Me Tonight! by Lee Richards is a rip off of a 1963 pulp called the Sexecutives. Subtle as a sledgehammer. The story of “high-power executives who stop at nothing to get their way – and of women who cooperate”, it bills itself as a “revealing book of today’s executive and the temptations put in his way”.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Peril in the sex jungle: sixties Australian pulp

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 9 Comments

The popularity of my recent post on the hey-day of Australia’s local pulp fiction industry in the 1940s and 1950s has provided me with an excuse for a reprise, this time with a selection of pulp paperback covers from the 1960s.These are sourced from the titles I’ve collected over the years from opportunity shops and second hand books dealers, hence the poor condition of some of the covers.

I don’t know of any history of pulp fiction publishing in Australia in the sixties and early seventies (but I’d would love to hear from any reader that does).

Although the local publishing industry was hit hard when restrictions on the import of foreign paperbacks were lifted in 1959, it was by no means eradicated.

In addition to local reprints of foreign titles, publishing houses such as Horwitz, Cleveland and Scripts continued to pump out a selection of titles, including crime, westerns, war and romance stories.

As was the case in the UK and America, in the sixties Australian pulp publishers started producing kitchen sink and exploitation fiction, often dressed up as lurid exposés of drug use and sexual promiscuity. These fed off mainstream society’s fears of youth rebellion and changing sexual standards.

Exhibit A is the following selection of locally produced pulps that expose the sleazy underbelly, real and imagined, of Sydney’s Kings Cross.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Horwitz Publications, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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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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