Category Archives: Pulp Friday

Pulp Friday: Night Squad by David Goodis

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

Night Squad“They gave him back his badge – and sent him down into the brutal throbbing heart of the slums.”

The first Pulp Friday for 2014 needs no introduction, Night Squad by the legendary US noir writer, David Goodis.

The cover above is from the first printed edition of the book, by Gold Medal Books in 1961.

I love the seamy noir atmosphere created by this cover. I also love the back cover blurb:

“The loneliest man on earth.

The Night Squad wanted Corey on its team, and the racket boys wanted him, too.

The trouble was that Corey wanted them both. But the cops had offered Corey only a badge, while Walter Grogan had bribed him with big money. Both sides were brutal, both knew as much about the slums as the rats infesting it. And Corey Bradford walked a tightrope between them, not knowing whether the man who smiled at him one day would be aiming a bullet at his head the next.”

Enjoy.

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Posted in Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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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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Pulp Friday: Island of Flames

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Island of Flames

“Nine people were on the island, so conflict erupted into a conflagration of sex, jealously and death. Then there were seven.”

Here’s a quick Pulp Friday offering before I retreat to the bunker I’ve dug in the backyard to await the results of Saturday’s federal election.

Island of Flames was published by Horwitz Publications in 1967.

According to the Austlit database, Geoff Wyatt quit high school at 14 and joined the Royal Australian Navy at 17. He also worked as a labourer and factory worker before becoming a journalist.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he published stories and articles in the skin magazines that had popped up in Sydney in the early sixties, before going on to write a dozen or so books for Horwitz.

The plot line for Island of Flames is a deranged, counter-cultural version of the hit show, Survivor, featuring every archetype in the arsenal of sixties pulp fiction. But the back cover blurb can explain it way better than I ever could.

“Nine men and woman isolated on a tropical island.

Kay Perry – a prostitute.

Miles Nash – an editor, fire from his job.

Leon Hudson and Arthur Fell – two petty criminals.

Rex Hamilton – a journalist with ambitions.

Eric Rigby – an artist from the Cross.… Read more

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

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