Category Archives: Pulp Friday

Pulp Friday: interview with Iain Mcintyre, author, Sticking it to the Man!

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

Today’s Pulp Friday is a fascinating interview with Melbourne-based social historian Iain McIntyre, author of a new book, Sticking it to the Man! Pop, Protest and Black Fiction of the Counterculture, 1964-75.

Sticking it to the Man! is a roller coaster ride through the lava lit streets of the counter-cultural pulp fiction of the late sixties and early seventies, a time when hippies, bikers, swingers and revolutionaries replaced cops and private detectives as pulp’s stable characters.

The book contains 130 reviews of pulps from the period covering all the major sub-themes: drug use, bikers, sleaze, blaxsploitation, hippies and dystopian science fiction. It also includes the covers in all their dog eared, price marked glory. It’s through books like this that the hidden history of pulp fiction is gradually pieced together. Sticking it to the Man! is a must read for every serious pulp fiction afficiando.

You can buy Sticking it to the Man! here. Copies will also be on sale at the launch of Crime Factory’s Hard Labour anthology, this coming Monday, October 8. Iain will also be talking about his book at the launch.

What is it about pulp fiction between 1964 and 1975, the period covered in your book that you find so interesting?

I’ve long had an interest in troublemakers, militants and odd-balls, and this was a period in which those normally relegated to the margins were able to have a major impact on culture and society.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Chester Himes, Gold Star Publications, New English Library, Ozsploitation, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Robert Stone, Scripts Publications, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: Model School

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

“The King’s Cross vice world taught her the other side of the profession.”

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is a wonderful example of local pulp fiction from the early sixties, Model School by Christine James, released by Horwitz Publications in 1965.

The early sixties were a turning point for the Australia’s pulp paperback industry, when publishers stopped relying purely on reprints of overseas material and stories set offshore, and started releasing locally set stories by Australian writers.

The setting for much of this work was Sydney’s Kings Cross, which during the sixties, seventies and eighties was Australia best-known center of drug use and prostitution.

Prostitutes, beatniks, con men, drug dealers, bent cops, organized crime lords, innocent tourists and American servicemen on leave all rubbed shoulders in  ‘the Cross’ as it is referred to locally. To this, local pulp authors added Chinese Triad gangs enslaving white women, witches and warlocks and a host of other less believable characters.

Like so many of the Australian pulp I feature on my site, I have not been able to find anything out about the author, Christine James, if, indeed this was her or his real name.

Model School is a fairly typical example of the Kings Cross pulp of the early to mid-sixties.

“The phoney model racket.… Read more

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

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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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Pulp Friday: Parker

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

Today’s Pulp Friday is a selection of books by one of my favourite authors, Richard Stark AKA the late Donald Westlake.

Regular readers of Pulp Curry will know that my love of Westlake and his creation, the professional thief Parker, particularly his pre-1974 incarnation, knows no bounds.

I’ve been keen for a while now to share some of my collection of Parker covers. The impetus for finally getting my act together is two fold.

First, I recently picked up a cheap copy of the very rare 1977 Coronet Books edition of Butcher’s Moon and I wanted it show it off. It’s got a great early seventies feel.

Second, I’ve been re-reading one of the earlier Parker books, The Black Ice Score. The cover of the 1986 Allison and Busby edition is among those below “Stealing the Africans’ diamonds back appeals to the arch pro in Parker. But the opposition’s clumsy double cross activates the mean machine”.

Actually, re-reading is not quite accurate. I started it years ago but never finished. The story didn’t particularly appeal to me at the time and I’ve since talked to many people who believe it is one of Westlake’s lessor Parker efforts.

But I’m enjoying it this time around. Parker gets involved in a diamond heist being staged by a group of Africans who want to use the proceeds to overthrow their country’s corrupt ruler.… Read more

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Posted in Coronet Books, Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Noir fiction, Parker, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday

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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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