Category Archives: Simon Harvester

Dishing up Pulp Curry in a new way: why I am starting a Substack newsletter

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

After much thought I have decided that to experiment with moving the focus of my blogging from this site to a new Pulp Curry Substack newsletter.

Why am I doing this?

The first post on this website appeared on July 2010 (about the incredibly underrated 1979 Australian heist film, Money Movers – you can read the post here). I’ve been writing on the site with varying frequency ever since (579 posts in all), and for the most part have enjoyed it immensely.

But for the last 12 or so months I just haven’t been feeling it – or getting the hits to make it seem worthwhile – and have started to wonder whether it’s worth continuing with the effort. Posting on a website has been starting to feel like the equivalent of trying to read a broadsheet newspaper in a crowded tram carriage, unwieldy and inconvenient.

And, thinking about it, I suspect the blog format is starting to get a bit stale for me and is actually now a brake on my posting more regularly.

I know that I’m no Robinson Crusoe in this regard. The majority of the blogs I used to follow have gradually fallen by the wayside, as people have moved on, grown weary of the effort, found other interests, adopted other means to get their message out, or, in some cases (gulp), died.… Read more

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Pulp Friday: More late 1960s and 1970s pulp and popular fiction about the Vietnam War

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments
Vietnam Nurse, Avon, 1966

In 2019 I wrote about why it was there were so few examples of Australian and US pulp and popular paperback fiction published in the 1960s and 1970s to engage with the Vietnam War and its consequences. That is, as anything more than a background or reason for why a character was as confused/damaged/homicidal as they were. Even fewer books still were actually set in Vietnam.

The piece in question appeared in the book I coedited, Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, but it was excerpted in full on the American site CrimeReads. The piece is here and details the relevant books I did manage to unearth and my speculation for why, despite its relatively huge cultural impact in both Australia and the US, so little fiction was written about the Vietnam conflict during these years.

I have been on the lookout ever since for entries I might have missed in my original piece and thought Pulp Curry Readers might appreciate an update on my, admittedly, rather paltry findings. Most of the books below are American, although a number – The Wine in God’s Anger and the Half-Burnt Tree – were penned by Australian writers.… Read more

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Posted in Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Pan Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Simon Harvester, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980, Vintage pulp paperback covers, War film

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Pulp Friday: The pulp of Simon Harvester

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

“One of his companions had sworn to betray him. But how and when.”

The last Pulp Friday for 2011 features the work of Simon Harvester, a British pulp writer best known for the character of Dorian Silk. Silk was a globe trotting Brtish spy with an unlimited ability to speak languages and understand local customs and a fairly obvious attempt by the author to cash in on the James Bond craze of the sixties and early seventies.

Harvester also wrote pulp fiction featuring other characters, most set in Asia, of which the two books in this post are both examples.

Published in 1969, The Chinese Hammer concerns another spy, Heron Murmer. A British forey into the space race results in a missing rocket, pilot and tape with valuable data. Murmer is sent to the Himalayas to retrive it only to discover that there is a traitor amongst the colourful group assembled for the mission. Is it the half caset reporter? Maybe the native guide, Jimmy?

Dragon Road, features Harvester’s other creation, Malcolm Kent, a former British soldier, now engineer, who makes a habit of getting tangled up in international intrigue in the Far East.

How many modern day spy books do you see with an engineer as the main character?… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Simon Harvester, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Behind the bamboo screen: Asian pulp covers of the sixties and seventies

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

Regular readers of Pulp Curry will by now be familiar with my obsession with pulp paperbacks from the fifties, sixties and seventies (previous posts on which you can be see here, here and here).

The following selection, sourced from my collection, is one I’ve wanted to do for a while now – Asian themed pulp paperback covers from the sixties and seventies. These are mainly from the United States with a smattering of Pan Books from the United Kingdom thrown in.

Not surprisingly, given the hysteria generated by the Cold War, the threat posed by the so-called “red menace” is a key theme of most of these titles, such as The Bamboo Screen, the story of an innocent Westerner thrown into “a savage world of spies and Oriental beauty,” a place where “life was cheap and love was a tool”.

Hong Kong was a favoured location for many of the do or die battles with Communism, as can be seen in Assignment Hong Kong and Twelve Hours to Destiny. Operation Hong Kong is one of a number of titles put out by Solider of Fortune magazine in the seventies: “Rainey has to stop Chinese agents from turning Hong Kong into a bloodbath”.

Other popular locations were Vietnam (Simon Harvester’s Battle Road), and jungles of Malaya in Mark Darby’s The Tigress, a place where “death stalked…with a Sten gun in its hands.”… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Horwitz Publications, Pan Books, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp paperback cover art, Simon Harvester, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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