Category Archives: Vintage pulp paperback covers

Pulp Friday: Open House

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

“To protect her young daughter she would have to expose the truth of her own affair with their virile young boarder.”

Sounds complicated.

This Friday’s pulp offering is Open House by Joan Ellis. It was published by Star Books, Crow’s Nest Sydney, and printed by Griffin Press in South Australia. There’s no publication date.

To the best of my knowledge, Star Books was a local outfit that did Australian mass market print runs of overseas pulp authors. It was active in the late sixties and early seventies. One day I’m actually going to have to spend a bit of time and track down the details of some of these local pulp publishing houses, as I’d love to know more about them.

Through the wonder of the Internet I discovered Ellis certainly was a prolific author, mainly erotic pulps and campus exploitation tales very popular in the US in the early sixties. So prolific, in fact, I suspect it was name used by several authors to ghost under.

I’m not sure whether Joan did her own titling. If so, she certainly had an talent for creative sleaze. Some of the titles I was able to track down, included Campus Pet (“With her one-track mind and breath taking body, she was bound to be a hit on campus”), Campus Jungle (She wondered if he’d still want her once he found out about the things she’d done at a not-so-private campus party”), High School Hellions, Faculty Wife and Cool Co-Eds (“They came in search of knowledge, the kind not found in text books…”), and Third Street (The place where questions were asked, the street where few men were ever seen”).… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: Headed for a Hearse

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

“His address was Death Row and his lease was up in six days… “

They don’t write cover blurbs like that any more.

Today’s Pulp Friday contribution is the 1960 UK Pan edition of the 1935 novel, Headed for a Hearse, by Jonathan Latimer.

Latimer was a crime reporter for newspapers in his native Chicago before going on to write a series of hard-boiled novels. He also worked in Hollywood where he wrote a number of screenplays, including The Glass Key (1942), The Big Clock (1948) and Nocturne (1946).

My parents had a good collection of Pan paperbacks on their bookshelf and I can remember, even as a very small child, being fascinated by the fantastic cover art.

The story sounds good, too.

“SIX DAYS to go before Westland would go to the electric chair for the murder of his wife…

SIX DAYS for him to sweat in the death cell – with a gangster and a fiend for company.

SIX DAYS for private investigator William Crane to flirt with death and to find the real killer…”

 

 … Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Pan Books, Pulp Friday, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: Hell is My Destination

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Welcome to the first of what I hope is going to be a weekly series known as Pulp Friday.

I love the pulp fiction of the fifties, sixties and seventies. I love the artwork and the cadence of their lurid, often totally over the top front and back cover text.

I’m particularly fascinated by Australian pulp paperback novels, how they were written and put together, the stories and themes they looked at.

I’ve amassed a pretty good collection of these books over the years, from opportunity shops, garage sales, and the like. Most were written by unknown authors, many using pseudonyms, and put out by publishing houses that no longer exist.

For me they represent a period in Australian publishing history that has been largely forgotten by the book industry’s emphasis on creating capital ‘L’ literature. This situation is only now being challenged by e-publishing, which is allowing small, niche publishers to get out there and produce genre fiction, including pulp fiction.

Anyway, as a way of celebrating my and others interest in these books, from now on each Friday I’m going to post one pulp paperback cover.

I’ll try to make most of them either Australian pulps or local reproductions of foreign books. That said, I’ve also got a hell of a lot of US and British pulps I’d just love to share with you.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, 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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Books my father read

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 16 Comments

July 24 was the fourth anniversary of the death of my father, William Nette.

He died peacefully in hospital on the Queensland Gold Coast, where he had retired with my mother many years earlier. He was 86.

Like many father-son relationships, we didn’t always get on. That’s putting it mildly. But he brought a lot of positive influences to my life.

He turned me onto the joy of jazz, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey and Dave Brubeck. He had a large collection of 78s wrapped in brown paper that he’d secreted out of Papua New Guinea, where he was an armed forces disc jockey during the war, along with cartons of cigarettes he later sold in Australia.

Only recently have I realised he’s also responsible for much of the delight I find in reading and my particular fondness of crime fiction.

I remember the pivotal moment quite clearly. I was thirteen. He came home from work one day and, to my complete horror, announced he was withholding my allowance until I started reading books (comics, which I loved, didn’t count).

He set the first two books, Robinson Crusoe, followed by Treasure Island. They were heavy looking volumes with no pictures that had belonged to my father when he was a boy.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Crime fiction, Horwitz Publications, Larry Kent, Pan Books, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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