The book about Australian TV’s most notorious address

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Number 96I have a lot of time for anyone who makes the effort to preserve and curate popular (and unpopular) culture of pretty much any kind. The latest example of this kind of work to cross my radar is a book which shares the same title as the hit seventies Australian soap opera that is its subject, Number 96.

In the book’s introduction, Nigel Giles says he was eight years old when he started watching Number 96, two years after it made it sensational debut on ATVO (now known as Channel 10). I was the same age but, regrettably, my parents were not so permissive and deemed me too young to be allowed to watch the show. Nonetheless, it still registered on my pre-teen brain because of Abigail Rogan or ‘Abigail’ as she was universally referred to, who briefly played the show’s sultry blond bombshell, Bev Houghton. Thanks to the success of Number 96, Abigail would become one of Australia’s first sex symbols, starring in a raft of TV shows and movies.

Number 96 depicted the lives of the residents of a fictitious block of inner Sydney flats. It was the brainchild of two producers, expat American Bill Harmon and Don Cash, who was English born but had worked in the US.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Australian television history

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Noir at the Bar Melbourne

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

NATB1A very brief heads up for Melbourne based readers of Pulp Curry, that if you are at a loose end on Tuesday, March 28, I have the event for you.

Myself and crime writer, Iain Ryan (whose debut novel, Four Days, I reviewed on this site here) are organising Melbourne’s first Noir at the Bar event.

What is Noir at the Bar you ask?

It is pretty much what it sounds like – a group of writers do readings in a bar (or in our case a cool second hand bookstore with a bar, Grubb Street Bookshopm 1/379 Brunswick St, Fitzroy).

Crime fiction critic and blogger Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders originated Noir at the Bar at Noircon in Philadelphia in 2008, and from there the idea has spread all over the US. Indeed, these days hardly a week goes by in which there’s not a Noir at the Bar somewhere in the US.

Anyway, Iain and I thought it was high time we had one in the US. After all, we get enough of the crap of the US, we may as well take the good things as well.

So, a night of readings from some of Melbourne’s best noir fiction stylists and drinks in a cool establishment, what is not to like about that.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir

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Guest post: AC/DC noir

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

cover-pluck-bad-boy-boogie-600x900pxI am very happy to welcome crime writer Thomas Pluck to Pulp Curry this week. He’s got a new crime novel out called Bad Boy Boogie. He’s based in New Jersey but is also a massive – and I mean massive – fan of the iconic Australia rock band, AC/DC. You reckon the book and the band aren’t connected? You reckon wrong.

I’ll let Thomas explain.

PluckI remember first hearing the snarl of Bon Scott’s voice on the radio in my grandmother’s basement. I promptly wrote “Dirty Deeds – Done Dirt Cheap” on a scrap of lumber and put out my shingle on her desk, waiting for clients who needed whatever help a nine-year-old raised on Encyclopedia Brown could offer.

I didn’t get to give anyone concrete shoes or use TNT. I think my sister hired me to find her imaginary dog. But AC/DC stuck with me. They sounded like no other rock band I’d heard before. And I wasn’t totally sheltered. My uncle ran bars in Manhattan and the jukebox service was mob controlled, so you played what records they gave you and when they swapped them out, he came home with shoeboxes of KISS, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, Wings, and Steve Wonder.

But no AC/DC.

I wouldn’t hear much of them again until high school, when I had my own money from delivering papers and occasionally working off the books on construction sites.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime fiction, Noir fiction

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Pulp Friday: The Thing From Another World

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

The Thing 1951Today’s Pulp Friday is an absolute thing of beauty.

The Australian edition of John W Campbell’s The Thing From Another World, published by Malian Press in Sydney, in 1952. The wonderful cover is by the prolific local artist, Stan Pitt, who illustrated comics and pulp paperback covers for a number of Australian pulp publishers over a lengthy career that stretched form 1942 to the 1970s.

This edition is particularly interesting because it is the first to anywhere in the world to reference the 1951 film, The Thing From Another World, directed by Howard Hawks. I originally saw it when it was posted by a chap called Morgan Wallace on the Vintage Paperback and Pulp site on Facebook.

Investigating Campbell on the Internet, I discovered a host of terrific images associated with this particular work.

The story was originally known by the title Who Goes There?, and first appeared in the August 1938 edition of Astounding Magazine under Campbell’s pen name, Don A Stuart.

It was published in hard cover as part of a collection of Campbell’s short fiction by Shasta Books in 1948. And then appeared in various editions, with various titles, leading up to the last one below, Bantam paperback tie-in to the 1982 film version by John Carpenter, The Thing.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Science fiction and fantasy

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Feminist vigilantes, vampires & the forgotten exploitation film career of Bob Kelljan

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

On the weekend I unintentionally plunged head first into the lost cultural zeitgeist that was the short but fascinating big screen career of US exploitation filmmaker, Bob Kelljan.

This started Friday evening, when I finally got around to checking out Australian outfit Ex-Films‘ DVD re-release of American International Pictures’ (AIP) controversial 1974 exploitation rape revenge film, Act of Vengeance, courtesy of my friend and film scholar, Dean Brandum. The DVD extras include an excellent essay by Dean on the film’s distribution and the controversy over the original title, Rape Squad, which the company subsequently changed at the last minute to Act of Vengeance.

Lost/unknown/unappreciated exploitation films from the 1960s and 1970s have been hot property for a while now. That said I have little tolerance for watching an exploitation film for the sake of it. But Act of Vengeance, which Kelljan was brought into direct after the previous two directors were fired, delivers on several fronts. 

The plot focuses on a group of women who have been victims of a hockey masked man dubbed the ‘Jingle Bells Rapist’ by the police, because of the song he makes his victims sing as he attacks them. Frustrated by the failure to catch the rapist and angry over their shocking treatment by police, the women band together to form a support group for victims of rape.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Blaxsploitation, Horror

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