Category Archives: Pulp fiction

Pulp Friday: Narcotic pulp

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 8 Comments

Dope, smack, heroin, cocaine, the evils of narcotics have always been a central pre-occupation of pulp fiction, as can be seen by the selection of paperback covers below.

In Second Ending the victim in question was one of pulp’s favourite characters, a way ward jazz musician who starts taking drugs for kicks, “small time stuff at first”, Benzedrine, then marijuana, “and soon graduates to the killer drug – heroin.”

The main character in Nelson Algren’s classic, The Man With the Golden Arm, is a card shark and former heroin addict fresh out of jail who fights find a new life and avoid slipping back into his habit.

Open Your Hand and Close Your Eyes is a story of drug use and crime amid “a terrifying world where the razor gang rules and a teenage girl will do unspeakable things to get the drug she craves.”

Pulp’s obsession with drugs and their link with crime and changing sexual standards was often thinly dressed as sociological inquiry. A classic example is Drug Scene Kings Cross by Robert Connell, which promises to unveil the real drug scene in Sydney’s Kings Cross, including the aphrodisiac powers of marijuana or “‘pot’ as it is termed by its devotees”.

Better known is Go Ask Alice by Anonymous, an anti-drug propaganda tale about a teenage girls descent into junkie hell.… Read more

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Posted in 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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Interview: Australian pulp fiction historian Toni Johnson Woods

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 7 Comments

Dr Toni Johnson Woods is someone I’ve been keen to interview on this blog for a while now.

A Research Fellow at University of Queensland, she is passionate about Australian books. Not just capital ‘L’ literature, but the local mass produced pulp fiction of the forties, fifties and early sixties, the existence of which has all but disappeared from our collective cultural memory.

Her commitment to the cause of local pulp includes having listened to hours of popular radio serials (Carter Brown Mystery Theatre and Larry Kent’s I Hate Crime), scanned thousands of pulp fiction covers and read every nearly all 300 Carter Brown novels.

She very generously agreed to answer the following questions about her work by e-mail.

What attracted you to researching pulp fiction in the first place? 

One very unremarkable day I was chatting with colleagues in the tearoom. As you can imagine our conversations are very lofty – not.  I asked the most basic question: who is Australia’s most popular author.

Well, we batted that around for several minutes arguing about what “popular” means, i.e. best selling, most widely read, most known author.  All of these things are not the same. The discussion then turned to what is an Australian author, i.e. someone who was born in Australia?… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Horwitz Publications, Interviews, Larry Kent, Pulp fiction, Toni Johnson Woods, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: dark hungers and primitive passions

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

My post earlier this week on 50 Shades of Grey and, consciously or not, how it feeds into the rich seam of sleaze and sex pulp popular in the late fifties and sixties, generated a lot of interest.

Today’s Pulp Friday is a selection of titles from this sub-genre of pulp fiction. The following editions hail from the sixties and span pulp from the UK, US and Australia. They cover off all the main pulp obsessions.

There’s illicit young love in The Offenders and The Hot Summer (as the blurb for The Offenders puts it: “Old enough to know better – young enough not to care…”)

Primitive Passions, Dark Hunger, A Feast of Friends and Boarding House all deal with innocent women dealing with the dark sexual appetites of men. As the cover of Dark Hunger put it: “Her mind shrank from the horror that was happening to her – but her body cried for me.”

The sexual desires of wanton women also got a thorough going over in books such as House of Deceit (“She was an amateur in love – but a professional in sin”) and The Dream and the Flesh: “Into the sin pits of Paris she lured him. Into the nameless dark places of reckless thrills.”… Read more

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Posted in Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Fifty Shades of Pulp

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 8 Comments

There’s been a lot of on-line talk lately about so-called ‘New Pulp’, what it is, who’s in, etc. It’s an interesting debate and one, as a fan and aspiring pulp hack, I’m happy to see occurring. What has surprised me is how this discussion has fed into my thoughts about another hotly debated issue on the Internet at the moment, the publishing sensation known as Fifty Shades of Grey.

Don’t get how the two are linked? Here goes.

Very few commentators have been bold enough to offer up a definition of New Pulp, which is probably just as well as by its very nature it’s all over the place. I’m certainly not going to try and do it here.

The guy who kicked off the most recent round of talk, Damien Walter, a writer with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, defined it as “fiction written with the same sensibilities, linear story telling, patterns of conflict, and creative use of words and phrases as original pulp, but crafted by modern writers, artists and publishers.”

Which sounds to me a lot like ‘Old Pulp’ only it’s being published now.

Let me try and summarise what else people have had to say on the subject.

New Pulp is about pace. Not just in terms of plotting but the speed with which it’s written.… Read more

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Posted in New English Library, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s

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Pulp Friday: mercenary pulp

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

This week’s Pulp Friday is a selection of covers from the seething, sweaty, bloody, intrigue laden world of mercenary pulp.

I picked them celebrate the fact that I have a story in issue 2 of Blood and Tacos, which launches today, called ‘Bastard Mercenary: Operation Scorpion Sting’. Well, it’s not my story. It was written by a guy called Arch Saxon, one of the mainstays of the local pulp fiction scene in the seventies and eighties.

I discovered Saxon living in a down at heel rooming house in Brunswick, while researching a piece for this site. After he’d drunk his own body weight in beer and caged a hundred dollars off me, he agreed to let me submit a story of his featuring his little known creation Bruce ‘Boomer’ Kelly to Johnny Shaw’s Blood and Tacos series.

Kelly aka Bastard Mercenary is hard-bitten Bangkok-based Australian mercenary who’ll undertake any job so long as the beer is cold and the money right. Much like Saxon himself.

The rest as they say is history.

Blood and Tacos is an affectionate homage to the crazy, over the top world of late seventies, eighties pulp fiction. A time when titles such as Penetrator, The Liquidator, Death Merchant, Black Samurai and The Executioner rubbed muscular shoulders with each other on the pulp paperback rack of the local newsagency.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Belmont Tower Books, Crime fiction and film from Africa, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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