Tag Archives: James Hadley Chase

Book reviews: Deadly dames, midcentury Brit pulp and 1970s science fiction

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Yes, it’s been a while since my last post, and during this time a few pulp and popular fiction related studies have come across my radar that I’m very keen to let Pulp Curry readers know about.

The first is of these is The Trials of Hank Janson by Steve Holland. If you are not familiar with Steve’s work then you need to rectify that and a good way to do this is to visit his site Bear Alley, where you will find a wealth of writing about British comics and pulp fiction. The second step is to pick up a copy of The Trials of Hank Janson, a slightly expanded reissue of a book originally published by Holland in 2004, when it shortlisted for the prestigious Gold Dagger Award by the UK Crime Writers’ Association.

Janson was one of the most successful British pulp writers of the 1940s and early 1950s. His books during this time were violent faux American crime tales in a similar vein to the work of James Hadley Chase and Australia’s Carter Brown: gritty gangster tales, full of American slang and detail, set in large American cities such as Chicago or New York. In the UK context, these books were part of a much larger wave of faux American crime fiction that swept the country in the postwar period (a trend which I wrote about for US site CrimeReads here).… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book cover design, Book Reviews, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds Radical Science Fiction 1950 to 1985, James Hadley Chase, Men's Adventure Magazines, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Science fiction and fantasy, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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My top 10 British gangster films

Posted on March 6, 2021 by Andrew Nette| 10 Comments

One of my favourite British gangster films, Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, is 50 years old. It premiered in the UK in the northern British city of Newcastle, where it was filmed, on March 7, and in the US on March 18. I have penned a piece for a prominent crime fiction/related site on the influence of Get Carter on crime cinema, but am not exactly sure when this will come out. For now, I thought the film’s half century anniversary was as good a time as any to hit you with my top 10 British gangster films.

They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

I wrote about They Made Me a Fugitive in some length on this site here. It was one of a trio of early post-war British gangster films that caused a stir with censors, the others being No Orchids for Miss Blandish and Brighton Rock, both of which appeared in 1948. Fugitive stars Trevor Howard as Clem Morgan, a demobbed Royal Air Force pilot who reluctantly joins a criminal gang headed by a flash gangster with a very nasty streak, Narcy, but baulks when his discovers his new employer is into drug trafficking. What I love about this film, and the aspect that attracted the most critical condemnation when it first appeared, is its depiction of the poverty and desperation of post-war British life.… Read more

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Posted in Billie Whitelaw, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime film, Heist films, James Hadley Chase, Joseph Losey, Michael Caine, Peter Yates, Richard Burton, Stanley Baker, True crime

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“Every headlight’s a police car, every shadow is a cop”: Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

I have been writing a bit this year on the phenomenal popularity of faux American crime fiction in post-war culture in places like Australia and Great Britain. By this I mean crime fiction written and produced in these countries that not only mimicked the atmosphere and tropes of hardboiled American mystery novels and film, but was set in mythical versions of big American cities, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. This fiction, for example many of the books written by Australian crime fiction author Alan Yates aka Carter Brown, was sometimes even mistaken for the genuine thing.

One of the countless cultural offshoots of the United States’ emergence as the dominant global power after World War II, the success of faux American crime fiction is often associated with the wide penetration of film noir and American writers such as Mickey Spillane. But as I wrote in this piece on the popularity of the controversial 1939 James Hadley Chase novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, its roots go much deeper; the influence of pre-war writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and W. R Burnett. Also the private detective and mystery fiction contained in the mass-produced American pulp fiction magazines that flooded into markets such as Australia and Great Britain in the 1930s.… Read more

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Posted in Australian pulp fiction, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Burt Lancaster, Crime fiction, Crime film, Film Noir, James Hadley Chase, Mickey Spillane, Noir fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp paperback cover art

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Pulp Friday: No Orchids for Miss Blandish

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

‘In 1939, amidst violence and wartime shortages, one hardboiled noir took the nation by storm, provoked moral outrage, and inspired legions of imitators.’

My latest piece for the CrimeReads site is a look at the popularity and controversy around James Hadley Chase’s 1939 blockbuster, No Orchids for Miss Blandish. You can read my story in full at the CrimeReads site here.

The article is a sequel of sorts to a story I did back in April on the popularity of mid-century faux American crime fiction in Australia and the career of one of the country’s least known most successful crime writers, Alan Yates, who wrote under the pseudonym, Carter Brown. A link to the full piece is here.

… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Film Noir, James Hadley Chase, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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They Made Me a Fugitive

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

I recently wrote a yet to be published article on the critical furore that greeted the 1939 James Hadley Chase book, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, and the 1948 film version. Among my research was an article by British film academic James Chapman which discussed the film version of No Orchids as part of a cycle of British crime films that drew severe condemnation from censors, moralists and film critics for their depiction of sex and violence and their bleak take on post-war British life. Another was the 1948 adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. But it was the first of this cycle, appearing in 1947, that I had not seen and only vaguely heard about, They Made Me a Fugitive or I Became a Criminal, the title it was released under in the United States.

Fugitive stars Trevor Howard as Clem Morgan, a demobbed Royal Air Force pilot who joins a criminal gang headed by a flash gangster with a very nasty streak, Narcy (Griffith Jones). Narcy runs a funeral parlour business as a front for a black-market operation, the good smuggled in the coffins. Morgan and Narcy take an instant alpha male dislike to each other. Morgan is particularly critical of Narcy’s decision to traffic in what he calls ‘sherbet’, which I think is cocaine (although this is not spelt out in the film).… Read more

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Posted in British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime film, Film Noir, Heist films, James Hadley Chase

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