Category Archives: Crime fiction

Butcher’s Moon

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Regular readers of Pulp Curry will be familiar with my obsession with Parker, the fictional master thief created by Richard Stark, AKA Donlad Westlake.

Well, guess what arrived in the mail yesterday?

Yep, it was my long awaited copy of Butcher’s Moon, the last Parker book Westlake wrote before he took a 23-year rest from the character.

Butcher’s Moon, written in 1974, has been out of print for a quite a while and the only copies of the book I have been able to find have been very expensive second hand ones.

So, you can imagine how happy I was when University of Chicago Press, which has been gradually re-leasing all the Parker books, announced Butcher’s Moon would be available. If you’re interested, you can buy it here.

I’ve read reviews that have described Butcher’s Moon as the best Parker book Westlake ever wrote. It takes Parker back to the familiar territory of his earlier books The Hunter and The Outfit, hot on the trail of money owed him by the mob.

A failed heist sends Parker to an amusement park where he stashed $73,000 during a previous caper (depicted in the novel Slayground), several years earlier.

Parker enlists the help of his only friend, another thief called Grofield.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Coronet Books, Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Noir fiction, Parker

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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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In China, crime fiction and social harmony do not mix

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

Something was confirmed for me over the last couple of days that I’ve long suspected: crime fiction and authoritarian governments do not mix.

But before I explore this further, a little background is required.

On Friday night, I and over a thousand other people crammed into the Melbourne Town Hall for the Gala Night of Story Telling 2011: Voices from Elsewhere, organised by the Wheeler Centre.

Of the eight writers who spoke, my favourite story was Chinese writer Murong Xuecun’s parable about the power of traumatic historical events, in this case Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to distort the individual psyche, even long after they are over.

Murong was 28 and working as a sales manager for a car company in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and China’s fifth most populous city, when he started posting his first novel on the Internet.

The book, originally titled Chengdu Please Forget Me Tonight, focuses on three young men in newly capitalist Chengdu, their dead-end jobs, and relationships, their drinking, gambling and whoring.

It became a cult sensation among young middle class Chinese. It also landed him in a lot of trouble, especially when Murong refused to join the Chinese Writers Society, the state sponsored writers organisation.

In addition to selling through the roof in China, the book has been translated into English as Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from China, Qui Xiaolong

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Top tens and spent casings

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Pulp Curry is going to be taking a break for a couple of weeks over the Christmas/New Year period while the family and I brave the monsoon-like conditions of Queensland.

But before I go, there’s a few spent casings lying around the place I’ve got to clean up.

First up, my list of top ten books for 2010 is up at Day Labor, the official blog of the online magazine, Crime Factory.  No surprises that Garry Disher’s Wyatt is right up there, as is Martin Limon, whose books featuring two military police on the beat in seventies Korea, along with Megan Abbott, are my big finds for this year.

My top ten is part of Day Labour’s Best of Whatever for 2010 series, put together by Keith Rawson. When Keith says whatever, he means whatever. There’s some great posts, not only on books, but comics, film and, well, whatever. Kudos to you, mate, for all your work and thanks to you and your Crime Factory co-editors, Liam Jose and Cameron Ashley, for making me feel so welcome in the Crime Factory family. I really appreciate it.

My recent post Parker and the art of hard-boiled crime writing generated a bit discussion on and off-line. That’s great, because if you haven’t picked up by now, I can talk the leg off a chair about Parker and his creator, legendary crime writer Donald Westlake.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime Factory, Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Garry Disher, Parker

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Book review: The Half-Child

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

We love a good guest review here at Pulp Curry and today’s is about a book very dear to me, Angela Savage’s The Half-Child. For readers who don’t follow Pulp Curry on a regular basis, in the interests of full disclosure I need to declare that Angela has been my partner in life (and crime) for the last 20 years. Her book, The Half-Child, is also a great read. Many thanks to Sulari Gentill, whose own crime novel, A Few Right Thinking Men, was published in 2010 by Pantera Press.

I am a greedy reader.

When I opened The Half-Child, Angela Savage’s second Jane Keeney crime novel, I looked forward to reacquainting myself with the streets of Thailand, about which Savage writes with an intimate knowledge and affection.

I wanted once again to be shown the colour, the contrast, the cultural crater of a place where West has hurtled into East.  I wanted to see past cliché: the neon, the sleaze, the confronting corruption, to the beauty of an ancient culture and a tenacious and adaptive people. On top of all this I wanted intrigue, excitement, perhaps a little romance, and definitely some humour.  I did start out by saying I was greedy.

The Half-Child completely satiated my literary gluttony and then offered me dessert!… Read more

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Posted in Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Thailand

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