Category Archives: Pulp paperback cover art

Pulp Friday: The Tip

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

“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

Tagged Horwitz Publications, John Slater, Ray Slattery, The Trip

Pulp Friday: Notorious Women

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

“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

Tagged Australian pulp fiction, Horwitz Publication, James Holledge, Notorious Women

Pulp Friday: Newton Thornburg’s heist novel, Knockover

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

“The scheme was so perfect, the take was so big, you couldn’t ask for anything more-but one of them did.

I’ve got a little gem of a Pulp Friday today, the very rare Australian release of Newton Thornburg’s little known heist novel, Knockover.

Although he was a great success in the seventies, the peak period of his literary output, Thornburg kept a low profile in successive decades. So much so that when he died in 2011, it took a month before the first proper literary obituary appeared.

He is best known for the 1976 novel, Cutter and Bone. While I love the book and the 1981 movie version, Cutter’s Way (and which I reviewed on this site here), I have a preference for, To Die In California, a 1973 novel about a father’s investigation into the murder of his son in post-Summer of Love Los Angeles.

Knockover, Thornburg’s second book was originally published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1968. Thornburg said he wrote Knockover explicitly with the hope of a movie sale in mind. Apparently the rights were optioned but nothing ever came of it. The story revolves around a former advertising executive, Cross, who puts together a team of criminals to pull off an armoured car robbery.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Neo Noir, Newton Thornburg, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

Tagged Cutter and Bone, Cutter's Way (1981), Eclipse Books, Knockover, Newton Thornburg, Seventies Australian pulp fiction, To Die In California

Pulp Friday: Avakoum Zahov Vs 07 and Soviet spy fiction

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

“A battle to the death between two crack Secret Agents of East and West!”

This week’s Pulp Friday is one of the strangest cultural artefacts to come out of Australian pulp publishing in the sixties, the spy thriller Avakoum Zahov vs 07 by Bulgarian author, Andrei Gulyashki.

While spies first came to prominence as popular culture figures during World War One, it was the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, that really kick-started the modern fascination with spies. A host of well known authors as well as a legion of lesser know writers and pulp imitators, all followed in Bond’s wake.

These days it’s easy to view Bond as little more than a clotheshorse with a few snappy lines of dialogue and a lot of high-tech gadgets, facing off against the latest embodiment of the West’s global fears.

But in the fifties and sixties, Bond was a blunt weapon in dinner suit whose sole purpose was to smash the West’s enemies. He was also the epitome of sexual and social permissiveness, licensed to kill and swing. The casual sex, alcohol consumption, fine living and travel to exotic destinations were all potent symbols of the West’s economic and cultural affluence in the sixties.

Not only were the Soviet authorities aware of the global popularity of James Bond, they saw him as a major propaganda coup for the West.… Read more

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Posted in Horwitz Publications, Ian Fleming, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, Spies, Vintage pulp paperback covers

Tagged Andrei Gulyashki, Avakoum Zahov vs 07, Casino Royale, Cold War Soviet era spy fiction, James Bond, Scripts Publications, Yulian Semyonov

Pulp Friday: the pulp of John D MacDonald

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

“He Sold His Soul For Another Man’s Wife.”

This weeks Pulp Friday is a selection of covers from the prolific US thriller writer, John D MacDonald.

MacDonald got his start writing for pulp magazines in the late forties, then rode the paperback boom that occurred in the fifties and early sixties. He was the author of over sixties books, as well as numerous short stories and articles.

He is probably best know for creating the fictional private investigator Travis McGee, who featured in 21 of McDonald’s books.

A number of his books have been adapted for film and television. His novel The Executioners was filmed as Cape Fear, starring Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen, in 1962, and again by Martin Scorsese in 1991. One of the McGee books, Darker Than Amber, was made into a film of the same name, starring Rod Taylor, in 1970.

The following selection of covers spans the late fifties to the early seventies and include many of the Fawcett Gold Medal editions of McDonald’s work, as well as the UK Pan paperback additions.

Enjoy.