Pulp Friday: passion pits and twilight zones, Kings Cross pulp fiction

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

The Deserters“A startling and authentic story of wartime Sydney when the American ‘invasion’ turned Kings Cross into a passion pit of vice and black marketing.”

Earlier this week I reviewed Louis Nowra’s terrific social history Kings Cross A Biography for the Overland Journal website.

Kings Cross has always had a particular place in our popular imagination as Australia’s capital of sin, sleaze and crime.

The terrific 1995 television mini-series Blue Murder and the not-so-wonderful Underbelly: Razor and Underbelly: The Golden Mile all did their bit to maintain this unsavoury reputation.

In the sixties and early seventies, Kings Cross was also a favourite setting for locally published pulp novels.

As I have discussed many times on this site, pulp fiction is a warped reflection of mainstream society, its illicit desires, fears and fascinations. Thus it was with pulp’s depiction of the Cross as a virtual Sodom and Gomorrah of sex, gambling, crime and human depravity of every description.

Wild youth gangs, criminal syndicates, black magic, pulp took all of these and turned them into portable, pocket sized key pieces of key hole voyeurism. From a publishing perspective they sold a bomb to punters eager for vicarious thrills and a peek of the dark goings on in the Cross.

Nowra’s book didn’t touch on this this particular aspect of Kings Cross’s hold on our popular imagination.… Read more

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Posted in Gold Star Publications, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Cross examinations: a review of Louis Nowra’s Kings Cross A Biography

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

KCIn the late eighties I visited Sydney with my girlfriend at the time. We stayed in a fleabag hotel in the middle of Kings Cross, walked around the neon-lit streets at night and bought a bag of marijuana off an emaciated dealer in an alley next to a strip joint. It turned out to be mostly dried parsley.

Not much of a connection with Australia’s capital of sleaze and sin, I know. But what my real life interactions lacked, imagination made up for, fuelled by Kings Cross’s place in Australian popular culture.

One of my favourite fictional private investigators, Cliff Hardy, the creation of Sydney author Peter Corris, has done his fair share of time knocking around the Cross. The terrific 1995 television mini-series Blue Murder and the not-so-wonderful Underbelly: Razor and Underbelly: The Golden Mile also did their bit to maintain its unsavoury reputation.

You can read the rest of this piece on the Overland website here.

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Peter Corris, True crime

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Interview: Eva Dolan, author of Long Way Home

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

Dolan

My first review of 2014 was Long Way Home, a cracker of a debut novel by British author, Eva Dolan. 

Long Way Home opens with the discovery of a corpse of an adult male migrant worker in the burnt out remains of a backyard shed. That makes it a job for the Hate Crimes Unit of the local Peterborough plod, and introduces the two main characters, themselves immigrants, DI Zigic, a third generation Serb living in the town, and his offsider, Ferrier, a young policewoman of Portuguese decent.

Long Way Home is a deceptively hardboiled story and an accomplished book from a writer I suspect we are going to be hearing a lot more from in the years to come.

Eva was nice enough to drop by Pulp Curry and answer some questions about researching and writing Long Way Home, the literary benefits of a quiet day job and the lessons she’s learning from playing poker applicable to writing crime fiction.

Tell us the story behind your debut novel, Long Way Home. What inspired it?

The initial inspiration for Long Way Home was a conversation I overheard in a pub – two men discussing the methods of a local gangmaster who conducted his business like a latter-day slave owner, keeping order with threats and beatings, withholding wages and skimming every way he could.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Interviews

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Pulp Friday: Night Squad by David Goodis

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

Night Squad“They gave him back his badge – and sent him down into the brutal throbbing heart of the slums.”

The first Pulp Friday for 2014 needs no introduction, Night Squad by the legendary US noir writer, David Goodis.

The cover above is from the first printed edition of the book, by Gold Medal Books in 1961.

I love the seamy noir atmosphere created by this cover. I also love the back cover blurb:

“The loneliest man on earth.

The Night Squad wanted Corey on its team, and the racket boys wanted him, too.

The trouble was that Corey wanted them both. But the cops had offered Corey only a badge, while Walter Grogan had bribed him with big money. Both sides were brutal, both knew as much about the slums as the rats infesting it. And Corey Bradford walked a tightrope between them, not knowing whether the man who smiled at him one day would be aiming a bullet at his head the next.”

Enjoy.

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Posted in Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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The Beat(en) Generation: What Inside LIewyn Davis says about how we live now

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Inside-Llewyn-DavisYou don’t have to be doing hard yards in some area of the creative arts to empathise with the lead character in the Coen brothers’ latest offering, Inside LIewyn Davis – but it doesn’t hurt. Like the brilliant 1991 film, Barton Fink, Davis is a Kafkaesque take on the financial, emotional and existential struggle to create, however you want to define it.

It is also the latest in a wave of recent films to showcase the enduring cultural power exercised by the generation of post-Second World War writers who came to prominence in the late fifties, known collectively as the Beats.

That Davis is major homage to the Beats is signposted in the film’s opening scene, with Llewyn doing his solo guitar act at the Gaslight Café, a famous real life coffee house located in Greenwich Village, New York, the epicentre of Beat culture in the late fifties and early sixties. The Gaslight was known as ‘a basket establishment’. Entertainers would pass around a basket at the end of their set hoping to be paid. Performers who appeared there at some stage included what was to be a who-is-who of the American folk scene.

You can read the rest of this article over at the Overland magazine website.

 

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Posted in Beat culture, Non-crime reviews

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