Category Archives: Pulp fiction

My Summer appearances

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

SpaceAge big shopGreetings all, just wanted to drop by the site for a quick update.

One of the most popular articles on Pulp Curry so far has been ‘The death of a bookshop: a tribute to Melbourne’s Kill City Books’, which appeared here in July last year.

Given this, I thought readers might be interested in checking out a piece of mine that appeared in the Life and Style section of Melbourne’s The Age newspaper last weekend.

It’s an ode to three of Melbourne’s great bookshops, Kill City, Space Age Books and the wonderful Carlton Secondhand Books, all of which have closed. Space Age Books closed in the late eighties. Kill City shut its doors in 2005. Carlton Secondhand Books stopped operating at the end of last year.

You can find the piece on-line here.

While I’m pulling on your coat, I also have a piece in The King’s Tribune Summer Reading Special. It’s a look at one of the best local novels I read in 2013, Infamy by Lenny Bartulin, and the the status of the Western generally in Australian fiction and film. The issue is available to pre-order in hard copy from the the site.

If that’s not enough Summer reading, the Kindle edition of my crime novel set in nineties Cambodia, Ghost Money, is still available on the great Satan Amazon for just a dollar as part of Snubnose Press’s holiday sale.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Pulp fiction

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My year in books

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

InfamyWill I ever come to the end of a year without the feeling I haven’t read nearly as much as I should have?

Unlike other years I’ve at least got a clear list in terms of my top five reads for 2013.

Here they are.

Infamy, Lenny Bartulin

Infamy is set in 1830s Tasmania. British mercenary William Burr is hired by the colonial government of Van Diemen’s Land to track down an escaped convict, Brown George Coyne. While Burr may be the hero of the novel, if one exists, Coyne and his Indigenous ‘wife’, Black Betty, steal the story. Coyne is a terrifying creation, a former convict, psychopath and cannibal, also a revolutionary working to unite a motley crew of escaped convicts with what’s left of the island’s Indigenous population, to overthrow the colonial government and rule as a self styled king of Van Diemen’s Land. 

Infamy is a superbly rendered piece of historical fiction, a dark, almost noir crime story, and a unique and unashamedly Australian take on the western. Possibly my best read of 2013.

Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary made her name in the seventies as a photographer of what was then the burgeoning New York punk movement. Thirty years later she’s a washed up, semi-alcoholic mess, when out of the blue, an old acquaintance gives her an assignment to track down a famous and reclusive photographer living on a remote island of the coast of Maine.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, James Crumley, Noir fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp paperback cover art

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Pulp Friday: On The Yard

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

On the YardOn The Yard by Malcolm Braly picks up on two themes I’ve examined in recent Pulp Friday posts.

The first is prison pulp, in this instance, written by someone who actually did time. A lot.

The second is the blurred line, particularly evident in the sixties and early seventies, between pulp fiction and literature.

On The Yard First published in 1967. The above is from the Fawcett Crest Books edition published a year later in 1968.

On The Yard, which is on my TBR pile, is the story of two characters, Chilly Willy, who heads the prison’s black market in drugs and sex, and of Paul, who is in jail for murdering his wife.

It’s generally seen critics as vivid depiction of penitentiary life, by a writer who spent many years in prisons, including Folsom and San Quentin. The New York Review of Books called it “arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison”.

Braly wrote three other novels and a biography, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and other Prisons. This detailed his slow decent into crime from relatively well off beginnings. He was never a major criminal, most of his prison sentences arose from bullshit jobs. He once robbed a dentist of eleven dollars, which he subsequently lost escaping.… Read more

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Posted in Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, True crime

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Pulp Friday: What Now My Love and the Tao of counter cultural pulp fiction

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

What Now My LoveThe counter culture and protest politics of the late sixties and early seventies resulted in some fascinating pulp fiction.

A good example is What Now My Love by Floyd Salas, published by Grove Press in 1969.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how one defines ‘pulp fiction’. As a general rule, pulp is understood to be anything that involves fast writing and that was not meant to last. The transitory nature of pulp can be seen in a literary sense, books not deemed part of our literary heritage, as well as the physical nature of the product, the cheap paper it was printed on, the often poor binding, etc.

I have a number of problems with this definition, not least of which is a suspicion of how ‘literature’ is defined by mainstream critics.

But that’s for another post.

The ‘what is pulp’ discussion is particularly interesting in the context of the sixties and early seventies. It was a time when publishers embraced subjects relating to the counter cultural and radical politics, and the distinction between high and low brow culture began to fragment.

Most obvious pulp books about the counter culture were produced by writers trying to cash in on the salacious headlines and mainstream angst generated by bikers, beats, hippies, drug use, ‘free love’, etc.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: prison pulp

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

The Ninth Hour“Gripping novel about a jailbreak – The bloody, death filled minutes while a murderous convict holds all the state of Massachusetts at bay.”

Jail breaks, prison life, men and woman wrongly convicted and languishing in hell hole jails, all these were popular themes in cinema in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. They were also popular topics for pulp fiction.

Exhibit A is this selection of prison pulps from my collection.

Between them, these books cover off on all the main themes associated with prison pulp.

There are tension filled jail breaks in Billy Braggs and The Ninth Hour (“Three desperate prisoners, armed with smuggled .45’s, were holed up in the Isolation Cell Block, with two guards as hostages”).

Wrongfully convicted men feature in The Fall of the Sparrow, Headed For the Hearse (“His address was Death Row and his lease was up in six days…”), and Patricia Highsmith’s The Glass Cell.

The travails of women behind bars, particularly their sensationalised sexual exploits, are the subject of the two Australian pulps represented below, The Lights of Skaro and Queen Rat (“From behind bars Dawn Arness ruled the lives of prisoners and guards alike. She was Queen Rat”).

Prison was particularly suited to my favourite sub-genre of pulp fiction, tabloid-style reporting dressed up as serious sociological inquiry.… Read more

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Posted in Horwitz Publications, Pan Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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