Category Archives: Crime Factory

The death of a bookshop: a tribute to Melbourne’s Kill City Books

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 26 Comments

KC 4

I love poking around in second-hand bookshops. The more disorganised and dishevelled, the better. I can’t remember the last time I found one with a curtained off section where they stashed the adult stuff, the pulp fiction and true crime, but those ones were best of all.

It’s always sad to hear about the closure of a second handbook shop and they’ve been closing with alarming frequency in Melbourne over the last few years.

The latest casualty is Flinders Books, which had operated out of the basement at 119 Swanston Street, for 18 years. Before that it had reportedly been a trading card shop, and going back even further, a rest and recreation area for military personnel after World War II.

Basement Books, located at 342 Flinders Street is, as far as I know, the last second-hand bookshop in the Melbourne CBD.

The reasons behind the closure are nothing new: changing book buying habits, including the rise of e-books, coupled with a massive rent increase, all of which, according to the owner, made the business impossible to sustain at its current location.

As if the end of a good second-hand bookstore is not sad enough, the passing of Flinders Books has a wider historical significance. For the last eight years of its existence it also hosted the remnants of Kill City Books, once Melbourne’s premier bookshop specialising in crime fiction and true crime.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Chester Himes, Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Crime fiction, Forgotten Melbourne, James Ellroy

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LEE, an anthology inspired by Lee Marvin, now available as e-book

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Lee-Marvin-Gloria-Graham-and-Glenn-Ford-in-The-Big-Heat-1953Just a quick heads up to let you all know that Crime Factory Publication’s latest publication, LEE, an anthology of short fiction inspired by iconic US actor Lee Marvin is now available as an e-book for Kindle.

You can purchase LEE for your Kindle here for $2.99. The dead tree book is also available from the Crime Factory site for $15.00.

Regular readers will have heard me go on about the LEE anthology a few times on this site. I helped edit LEE, along with my fellow Crime Factory editor Cameron Ashley and founder of the original Crime Factory Magazine, Dave Honeybone, and I’m particularly proud of it.

It features seventeen crime writers, including established pros and newbies such as myself, riffing on various aspects of the fictional life of one of our favourite cultural icons, Lee Marvin.

There’s what Lee got up to off the set of the little known 1955 film, Shack Out on 101, Lee dealing with Apartheid during the filming of Shout at the Devil, Lee at the 1966 Oscars where he won a gong for Cat Bellou, fishing form marlin off the coast of Queensland, lending a helping hand to the props man on the classic Point Blank, coming off second best from an encounter with Andy Warhol at Studio 54.… Read more

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Posted in Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Lee Marvin

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Orders open for LEE, a fiction anthology inspired by Lee Marvin

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Lee-Marvin fishing

A heads up that you can now order LEE, Crime Factory’s anthology inspired by iconic American actor Lee Marvin, from our the site.

There’s been a bit of buzz around the traps about LEE and at the risk of sounding immodest, it’s all justified. Seventeen stories ranging from gonzo to literary noir, penned by some of the hottest crime writers around. Here’s what others are saying:

“This collection of short fiction puts legendary actor Lee Marvin smack dab in the center of the action where he belongs.”
Dwayne Epstein, author of Lee Marvin: Point Blank

“This collection delivers. The writing is pungent, sly and muscular, dark and comic, and all of it has a tremendous energy. A love of film and love of noir is evident in every story. This does Lee proud.”
Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap and Dead Europe

I’m excited to say I’ve also got a story in the anthology. I won’t give too much away about it, except to say it titled ‘Gone Fishing’, hence the theme of the photo above.

If you want a sneak peak of LEE, ManArchy is running a excerpt from Irish crime writer Adrian McKinty’s contribution to the anthology, ‘Hospital Ship’, which you can find here.

And if too much Lee Marvin is not nearly enough, you might light to check out my review for ManAnarcy of the recently released Marvin bio by Dwayne Epstein, Lee Marvin Point Blank.… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Lee Marvin

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LEE, an anthology of fiction inspired by Lee Marvin

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

LEE cover-I am a HUGE Lee Marvin fan.

Survivor of the carnage of World War Two, drinker, larger than life character, enduring icon of masculine cinema, the star of some of  my favourite films, including The Big Heat, The Killers, Point Blank, Prime Cut and The Dirty Dozen. The man who, in the words of his most recent biographer, “cemented the most purposeful and consistent portrayal of man’s violent and primal inner demons in the history of modern American cinema”.

Well over a year ago myself and fellow Marvin fanatic and Crime Factory editor in chief Cameron Ashley, were sitting in a bar drunkenly bullshitting about future projects, when we stumbled across the idea of doing an anthology of stories inspired by the life of one of our favourite movie stars.

The final product of that conversation, LEE, will be unleashed onto the world in a few weeks time. In the meantime, I thought readers might get a blast out of feasting their eyes on the cover above.

While putting together the book was not without its challenges, finding fellow crime writers who shared our passion for Marvin and who where prepared to put pen to paper to celebrate him and his movies, was not one of them. … Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Lee Marvin, Roger Smith

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Summer reading report back 2013

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

As the summer holiday’s draw to an end and the business part of 2013 kicks off, it’s time for a little run down of what I’ve read over the Christmas/New Year period and how I’m going to approach my reading in the year ahead.

fc3I’ve seen the 1972 movie Fat City, directed by John Huston, many times but never read the 1969 book of the same name by Leonard Gardner. It was hands down my read of the summer. Indeed, I’ll go as far as saying it’s one of the most beautifully written novels I can remember reading in a while.

Set in the fifties, Fat City is the story of two amateur boxers, Ernie Munger and Billy Tully. Tully is the older of the two, a former fighter who wants another shot at the big time. The fact he’s an alcoholic means he’s got no chance. Munger is a young man with potential, but you know from the first time we meet him, he’s not going to amount to much. The book follows the hopes, dreams and most of all, anxieties of these two men through a series of bars, flop houses and dead end jobs. As I said, there’s never any doubt the two won’t amount to much, the question is just how far they’ll slide.… Read more

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Posted in Crime Factory, Crime fiction, James Ellroy, Lee Marvin, Noir fiction

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