Category Archives: True crime

“We need gangsters to get things done”

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Act of KillingFrom the first scene, a bizarre musical number involving dancers emerging from the mouth of a giant fish, to the last, an old man being physically sick at the memory of his actions (whether genuinely or not is unclear), The Act of Killing is a riveting, at times, unbelievable piece of documentary film making.

In 1965, the height of the Cold War, a section of the Indonesian military staged an unsuccessful coup. It was very quickly blamed on the influence of the then powerful Indonesian communist party. A massive campaign of killing targeted anyone suspected of being a communist, including trade unionists, farmers, intellectuals and ethnic Chinese, or anyone unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of a score that needed settling.

Up to a million people were murdered. The main assailants were paramilitary death squads. The killing was out of control and chillingly low-tech in its nature. As the film states at the beginning, the men who carried it out “have been in power and have persecuted their opponents ever since.”

US director, Joshua Oppenheimer, asked two of these men from Medan in North Sumatra, to recreate their actions on film. They do it with an enthusiasm that is sometimes hard to watch.

You can read the rest of this review here at the website for Overland Magazine.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from Indonesia, Melbourne International Film Festival, True crime

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Pulp Friday: Kings Cross Black Magic

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

Kings Cross Black MagicToday’s Pulp Friday is a great example of exploitative pulp dressed up as quasi-serious sociological inquiry, Kings Cross Black Magic by the wonderfully named, Attila Zohar.

It’s also one of the more unusual pieces of pulp fiction produced in the sixties and seventies in response to the real and imagined goings on in Sydney’s notorious vice strip, Kings Cross.

I just love the cover of this book. The minimal furnishings, the title font, the female model, who I presume is supposed to look ‘Satanic’ but comes across more as a sort of sullen drag queen. It speaks of things that just shouldn’t be talked about in polite company, which, in turn, only makes me more curious.

Kings Cross Black Magic was released by Horwitz publications in 1965. According to the University of Ortago’s wonderful pulp fiction website, Attila Zohar was a pseudonym for James Holledge. Holledge was a former clerk who became part of the stable of in-house writers brought together by Horwitz in the early sixties. He wrote approximately 45 books between 1961 and 1970, most of them salacious journalistic tracks parading as sociological expose.

His titles included Australia’s Wicked Women (1963), Crimes Which Shocked Australia (1963) and Women Who Sell Sex (1964) and What Makes a Call Girl (1964).… Read more

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Posted in Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Rosaleen Norton, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: Mafia pulp fiction

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

The Mafia, Cosa Nostra, the Mob, the Family, the Outfit, the Syndicate, call them whatever you like, it’s hard to overstate the influence organised crime had over pulp fiction.

My post on the Andrew Dominik movie Killing Them Softly earlier this week, got me thinking about how the Mafia have been portrayed in popular fiction and film.

One of the aspects of Killing Me Softly I found so interesting was its depiction of organised crime in the traditional sense as being just a shadow of its former glory. For the most part, the gangsters were a bunch of clapped out old men and cautious time servers, clinging desperately to the last trappings of their power base.

It wasn’t always so. Stretching right back to the late forties, organised crime was one of the central pre-occupations of pulp writers. The phenomenal success of Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather, published in 1969 and the subsequent movie version by Francis Ford Coppola in 1972, saw pulp’s fascination with the Mafia stretch well into the seventies.

In addition to novels examining every aspect of the Mafia’s rituals and existence, so all pervasive and powerful was the Mafia’s reach, pulp writers invented a series of characters that existed just to fight it.

Robert Briganti or ‘the Assassin’ as he is known, “lives only to destroy the Mafia.”… Read more

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Posted in Belmont Tower Books, Crime fiction, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Mafia, 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: 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: Ricki Francis, Nero

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

“The frank, revealing story of a male prostitute.”

By far the best home-grown Australian pulp produced in the sixties and seventies came from a little known publishing house called Scripts Publications.

I’ve long wondered about the nature of this low rent operation and their bizarre roster of pulp paperbacks.

The mystery has now been solved thanks to John Harrison’s marvellous history of vintage adult paperbacks, Hip Pocket Sleaze. According to Harrison, Scripts was the in-print Horwitz used for is racier pulp titles. Key themes included crime, bikies, black magic, Japanese prison camp exploitation, and a voyeuristic fascination with the exploits of drug users and sex workers in Kings Cross, Sydney’s notorious red light district.

According to Hip Pocket Sleaze, “a total of sixteen paperback titled [were] published per month at the height of their popularity in the mid to late 1960s, with each title having an initial print run of 20,000 copies.”

For these titles Horwitz mostly used most cheap photographs for covers, something which gives the books a wonderful fly on the wall expose feeling.

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is a classic example, Rick Francis’s, Nero, published in 1971.

I don’t know who Rick Francis is, if indeed that’s his real name. But, if the other titles listed at the beginning of Nero are anything to go by, he did a damn fine line in paperback sleaze – The Butch Girls, The Sex Life of a Model, Innocents Behind Bars and The Bikies.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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