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

Share

→ 3 Comments

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

Tagged , , , ,

The Silent Partner

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 9 Comments

the-silent-partner

Earlier this year I did a series of posts on my love of heist films, what my favourite ones are, and how they differ from caper films.

The number one rule of a solid heist film is the heist always, always goes wrong, whereas caper films put more emphasis on comedy and the criminals often get away with it.

What to make, then, of the 1978 Canadian film, The Silent Partner?

I’d heard about this film around the traps, never prioritised viewing it because of the star, Elliot Gould, an actor I’ve never much cared for, and what I perceived to be its caper feel.

Wow, was I wrong.

Gould plays Miles Cullen, a teller in a small bank in a large Toronto shopping mall. He’s a boring nobody who secretly lusts after another teller, Julie (played by Susannah York), and whose only passion is collecting tropical fish.

That all changes the day he learns the bank is about to be robbed after finding a discarded note on one the bank’s counters. He quickly deduces that the culprit is a guy in a Santa suit whose working the crowd outside the bank and whose ‘give to charity sign’ is done in the same hand writing as the discarded note.

But instead of telling his boss or going to the cops Miles devises a plan to keep most of the cash from his transactions, thus ensuring that when Santa robs the bank he’ll get far less money.… Read more

Share

→ 9 Comments

Posted in Crime film, Heist films

Tagged , , ,

The only Ghost Money I want to read about

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Ghost MoneyThere’s been a hell of a lot of talk about Ghost Money over the last few weeks.

My Google Alerts have been running hot with mention of it. Unfortunately, they are not referring to my gritty crime thriller set in mid-nineties Cambodia. They are referring to secret payments made by Afghanistan’s prime minister Hamid Karzai by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, with the aim of maintaining access to the Afghan leader and his top allies and officials.

The only type of Ghost Money I want to hear about is the type pictured above.

Here’s the pitch:

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan.

But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up with Heng Sarin, a local journalist, Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.

Ghost Money is a crime nove about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices they make, what they do to survive.… Read more

Share

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Australian crime fiction

Pulp Friday: Trashing

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Trashing“Gentle Ann in the clutches of a stone-freak revolutionary mad mob.”

A lot of the books we consider radical or counter cultural pulp fiction where written by people who, in reality, had nothing to with the actual scene but just wanted to cash in on it.

Today’s Pulp Friday book, Trashing, was written by someone intimately involved in the sixties counter culture. Released by Belmont Tower Books in 1972, the author, Ann Fettamen, was a pseudonym for Anita Hoffman, wife of Abbie Hoffman. In true Yippie style, Hoffman puffed the book (“Ann Fettamen is the Nancy Drew of the revolution… Trashing makes Harold Robbins read like Homer”). So did fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin.

The book is a semi-autobilographical tale of a young woman who gets involved in the counter culture after meeting a charismatic revolutionary, and engages in all manner of Yippie activities.

The back cover blurb is as follows:

“The perils of Ann.

Orgies, drugs, stealing and revolutionary mad-making are part of the underground’s daily life. When Ann, a nice girl from a good home, falls in love with a subterranean guru she meets the hippies head-on. After an LSD wedding in Central Park, Ann settles for the humdrum existence of pot-smoking, group sex and biker rumbles, credit card stealing and takeover of the New York Stock Exchange.… Read more

Share

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

Tagged , ,

Pulp Friday: more adventures behind the bamboo screen

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

The Turncoat

One of the most successful pulp fiction related posts to date on this site was a selection of Asian themed pulp fiction paperback covers I put up in 2011, Behind the bamboo screen: Asian pulp covers of the sixties and seventies.

For a while now I’ve been planning a follow up and here it is.

As was the case in the original post, the covers below portray the anti-communist hysteria created by the rise of the so-called ‘red menace’ as well the fate of innocent (and not so innocent) Westerners thrown into chaos and intrigue of the ‘Far east’, a place of intrigue, “notorious pleasure palaces” and “forbidden desire”.

Hong Kong was a popular setting of Asian themed pulp fiction, as evidenced by titles such as A Coffin From Hong Kong (“A seemingly innocent telephone call led him to the murder of a Chinese call-girl who had talked to much and into the teeming, sordid nightlife of colourful Hong Kong”).

Other locales portrayed below include, Korea (The Turncoat), China (Shanghai Incident – “I had two callers my first night in Shanghai – death and a honey blonde”), the “South Seas” (November Reef), India (Men and Angels), Burma (The House of Bamboo – “In a Burmese girl’s warm, seductive beauty he found escape from the flames of forbidden desire”), and Thailand (Port Orient).… Read more

Share

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

Tagged , , , , , ,