Category Archives: Pulp Friday

Pulp Friday: Outback Heiress

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Outback Heiress Horwitz 1963

“Her past was a secret but she couldn’t hide her feelings for this daredevil cropduster!”

It wasn’t just men who wrote for Australia’s burgeoning pulp publishing industry in the fifties, sixties and seventies, many women did, too.

One of these was Irena Dickman AKA Rena Cross, the author of today’s Pulp Friday contribution, Outback Heiress, published by Sydney company Horwitz in 1963.

Biographical details for Dickman, like many local pulp authors, are thin on the ground. She was born in England and arrived in Australia in 1950. She appears to have been one of the stable of local writers put together by Horwitz in the early sixties.

The Austlit site credits her with twenty books. Her subjects included nurse and doctor yarns and torrid tales set in Sydney’s Kings Cross. The latter include Model School (publishing in 1963 under the pseudonym Christine James) and Flat 4 Kings Cross (three editions of which were published, in 1963, 1965 and 1966, under the name Geoffrey Tolhurst).

The Keys of Corruption another of her books (written as Rena Crane), was an Australian take on one of pulp’s favourite obsessions in the sixties – wife swapping.

If this post has piqued your interest about Australian pulp, join me on August 30 at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Federation Square, for an illustrated talk about the hidden history of Australian pulp publishing in the fifties, sixties and seventies, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Horwitz Publications, Melbourne Writers Festival, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: The Country Club Set

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

“When married life started to bore her – Virginia turned to a teenager for kicks.”

Today’s Pulp Friday is a wonderful example of early sixties pulp sleaze, The Country Club Set by Elaine Dorian.

The story is about a devious middled aged woman who engages in an affair with a young male tennis player she picks up at the local country club. It was published by Beacon Books in 1963, the same year as the Charles Webb’s blockbuster, The Graduate, appeared, and was perhaps an attempt to cash in on its success.

‘Elaine Doran’ appears to have been a pen name for a writer called Isabel Moore, who wrote for a couple of decades, including penning a number of sleaze pulps for Beacon in the early sixties, titles like The Sex Cure, Second Time Wife and Double Trouble.

She appears to have made no secret of her writing activities and a November 2, 1962 article in the Schenectady Gazette, the local paper of Schenectady County in the US state of New York, reported, “obscene words and threats” where painted on her house after The Sex Cure appeared in print. The book was a take on the behind the scenes sexual activities of the upper strata of her local area, Cooperstown.”… Read more

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

Pulp Friday: The Hands of Orlac

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

The Hands of Orlac“Had a brilliant skin graft left him with a murderer’s hands? A tense and eerie film starring Mel Ferrer.”

French writer Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac concerned a concert pianist called Paul Orlac who loses his hands in a terrible accident and is given new ones in a transplant. Unbeknownst to him, the donor was a recently deceased murderer. Not only is Orlac unable to play piano with his new hands, but he slowly starts to assume the deceased murderer’s predisposition for killing.

The Hands of Orlac was filmed as a movie three times. A silent movie, The Hands of Orlac, was made in 1924 by Austrian director Robert Weine. A US version appeared in 1935 as Mad Love. A British/French production starring Christopher Lee and Mel Ferrer was made in 1960.

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is the 1962 local Horwitz edition of the Four Square Books paperback tie in to the British/French movie.

The name of the author, which you might not be able to discern from the cover scan, was Robert Bateman. Bateman was a UK writer who worked in radio and TV. He also wrote a number of novels, including this one.

And please note, I will be giving an illustrated talk on Australian pulp fiction from the fifties, sixties and seventies as part of the upcoming Melbourne Writers Festival.… Read more

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

Pulp Friday: The Tip

Posted on June 27, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Ray Slattery“A scorching novel of horse-racing and desperate men and exciting women and big gambler Johnny Broadway’s bid to parlay the killing of all time.”

Ray Slattery must rank as one of the most prolific of the in-house hacks employed by Australian pulp publisher Horwitz Publications in the sixties and early seventies.

He is also one about which the least is known. Despite his incredible output, very little information is available about him. Austlit credits him with 118 titles, including our featured book today, The Tip, published in 1965, but has no further biographic information about him.

His books cover all of Horwitz’s staple obsessions, including bikers, bondage, sleaze and sex books, war stories, surgeons and what I have seen referred to as “Nazi romance novels”, books with titles such as Camp of Terror (1963) and Women of Warsaw (1964), Buchenwald Hell (1967), Prisoner of Dachau (1967), Valley of Slaves (1967), to name but a few.

In addition to writing under his own name, he worked under at least six pseudonyms, including Roger Hunt, Frank O’Hara, Terry West, James Bent, Frank F Gunn and John Slater (the name he used for most of his sleaze and Nazi-themed pulp, of which he wrote 84).

There’s a little bit more information on Slattery here, as well as a full bibliography.… Read more

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

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Pulp Friday: Notorious Women

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Notorious Women

“They were beautiful, dangerous and shocking – high voltage wantons who stopped at nothing to get their men.”

This week’s Pulp Friday, Notorious Women, is another offering from former clerk turned prodigious pulp hack, James Holledge.

Holledge, who has featured previously on this site, wrote approximately 45 books between 1961 and 1970. Most of these were heavily sensationalised, salacious examinations of social issues such as prostitution and the occult, which he dressed up as serious sociological expose.

Notorious Women, published in 1962 by Horwitz Publications, Australia’s premier pulp publisher in the fifties and sixties, is fairly typical of Holledge’s work. Purporting to be an examination of “a few of the Wantons of the World who have been branded forever as Notorious Women,” the boom is divided into 13 chapters.

These include ‘Wanton on the beach’ (“A reckless, sensation-seeking Bohemian, she had a mania for performing unrehearsed striptease dances”) and ‘Women with the serpent’s tongue’ (“The police actually feared this heartless hussy who was obsessed by money hunger”). But my favourite is ‘Edward who was really Ellen’ (“One of Australia’s most baffling sex masquerades was was finally exposed in startling circumstances”).

The one undeniable fact about Holledge’s books is that they sold, presumably to working stiffs eager for a few cheap thrills.… Read more

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Posted in Horwitz Publications, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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