Tag Archives: Crime Factory

The death of a bookshop: a tribute to Melbourne’s Kill City Books

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 26 Comments

KC 4

I love poking around in second-hand bookshops. The more disorganised and dishevelled, the better. I can’t remember the last time I found one with a curtained off section where they stashed the adult stuff, the pulp fiction and true crime, but those ones were best of all.

It’s always sad to hear about the closure of a second handbook shop and they’ve been closing with alarming frequency in Melbourne over the last few years.

The latest casualty is Flinders Books, which had operated out of the basement at 119 Swanston Street, for 18 years. Before that it had reportedly been a trading card shop, and going back even further, a rest and recreation area for military personnel after World War II.

Basement Books, located at 342 Flinders Street is, as far as I know, the last second-hand bookshop in the Melbourne CBD.

The reasons behind the closure are nothing new: changing book buying habits, including the rise of e-books, coupled with a massive rent increase, all of which, according to the owner, made the business impossible to sustain at its current location.

As if the end of a good second-hand bookstore is not sad enough, the passing of Flinders Books has a wider historical significance. For the last eight years of its existence it also hosted the remnants of Kill City Books, once Melbourne’s premier bookshop specialising in crime fiction and true crime.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Chester Himes, Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Crime fiction, Forgotten Melbourne, James Ellroy

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LEE, an anthology of fiction inspired by Lee Marvin

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

LEE cover-I am a HUGE Lee Marvin fan.

Survivor of the carnage of World War Two, drinker, larger than life character, enduring icon of masculine cinema, the star of some of  my favourite films, including The Big Heat, The Killers, Point Blank, Prime Cut and The Dirty Dozen. The man who, in the words of his most recent biographer, “cemented the most purposeful and consistent portrayal of man’s violent and primal inner demons in the history of modern American cinema”.

Well over a year ago myself and fellow Marvin fanatic and Crime Factory editor in chief Cameron Ashley, were sitting in a bar drunkenly bullshitting about future projects, when we stumbled across the idea of doing an anthology of stories inspired by the life of one of our favourite movie stars.

The final product of that conversation, LEE, will be unleashed onto the world in a few weeks time. In the meantime, I thought readers might get a blast out of feasting their eyes on the cover above.

While putting together the book was not without its challenges, finding fellow crime writers who shared our passion for Marvin and who where prepared to put pen to paper to celebrate him and his movies, was not one of them. … Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Lee Marvin, Roger Smith

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Anthologies, my novel and more shameless self-promotion

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

In over a couple of weeks I will be jetting off to spend a couple of weeks in the US, New York mostly, followed by a few days in Philadelphia to attend Noir Con.

I-can-not-wait.

Several more ‘Noir Con noir bust’ posts are scheduled between now and when I leave, but I just wanted to take a short break from these to do a bit of shameless self-promotion. A lot of writing I’ve been working on for the last year is being released around the same time. By the end of the year it’ll be back to the drawing board, but for now I’ve got some serious pimping to do.

First up, is Crime Factory’s latest publication, Hard Labour, an anthology of 17 noir and hardboiled Australian short crime stories, edited by Cameron Ashley, Liam Jose and myself. We launched this baby last week at Grumpy’s Green in Collingwood.  A fine time was had by all and we managed to sell enough copies on the night to more or less pay the printing bill.

The print version of Hard Labour is now available from our website for $13.99 plus postage. The digital book is available on Amazon here for just $2.99.

It’s a bargain for crime fiction this good.… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Crime Factory, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, Garry Disher, Leigh Redhead, Noir Con, Snubnose Press

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Noir Con or bust guest post #2: Patti Abbott

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

For the second of my ‘Noir Con or bust’ guest posts I’m very happy to welcome Detroit based writer, Patti Abbott. 

Not only does Patti host a terrific blog of her own, she is a major contributor to the on-line and print crime short fiction that thrives in the US. Seriously, it’s hard to over emphasise just how prolific Patti is. What’s more, her short crime fiction is always of high quality. If you’re not convinced check out her first anthology of short stories, Monkey Justice, here. 

Welcome to Pulp Curry, Patti.

Thanks to Andrew for hosting me. His suggestion to me was to talk about the online crime fiction market, and I will do so if a bit circuitously.

It took me a long time to 1) find my way to writing 2) find my way to writing fiction (I started out with poetry) 3) find my way to writing crime fiction.

I began writing poetry (as an older student) in a college class in the mid 1990s. The class was ideal for me since I harboured such ambitions. I was  lucky to have a supportive instructor and I managed to publish a couple dozen poems in small literary journals. But editors would often send a note saying that my story was overly narrative and had I ever tried my hand at short story writing?… Read more

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Posted in Crime Factory, Crime fiction

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“My name’s Andrew and my first book’s coming out digitally” and other musings about e books

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

It’s official. The merits of digital versus print books now shares top billing with ‘why don’t mainstream Australian publishers do more genre fiction’ (they just don’t and probably won’t in the near future, so just get over it and write), as literary conversations I now try to avoid.

This was confirmed for me at an event I attended as part of the wonderful Emerging Writers’ Festival, which ended in Melbourne last week. I’d muscled in on a conversation between a book industry person (they wouldn’t tell me exactly what they did) and another emerging writer whose first novel is due out soon through one of Melbourne’s independent publishing houses.

When I told the industry person my first book was coming out through a digital only publisher in the States, they looked at me and said. “Is it going to be another of those 99 cent jobs? They just devalue you and your writing.”

When the person started to criticise digital books, I suggested they were dealing with an outmoded business model. The person then accused me of being anti-publisher.

As I’ve said on this site before, I love dead tree books. I love their smell, their feel, the companies that produce them, the shops that sell them, the whole box and dice.… Read more

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Posted in Snubnose Press

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