Dishing up Pulp Curry in a new way: why I am starting a Substack newsletter

After much thought I have decided that to experiment with moving the focus of my blogging from this site to a new Pulp Curry Substack newsletter.

Why am I doing this?

The first post on this website appeared on July 2010 (about the incredibly underrated 1979 Australian heist film, Money Moversyou can read the post here). I’ve been writing on the site with varying frequency ever since (579 posts in all), and for the most part have enjoyed it immensely.

But for the last 12 or so months I just haven’t been feeling it – or getting the hits to make it seem worthwhile – and have started to wonder whether it’s worth continuing with the effort. Posting on a website has been starting to feel like the equivalent of trying to read a broadsheet newspaper in a crowded tram carriage, unwieldy and inconvenient.

And, thinking about it, I suspect the blog format is starting to get a bit stale for me and is actually now a brake on my posting more regularly.

I know that I’m no Robinson Crusoe in this regard. The majority of the blogs I used to follow have gradually fallen by the wayside, as people have moved on, grown weary of the effort, found other interests, adopted other means to get their message out, or, in some cases (gulp), died.… Read more

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

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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Mackenna’s Gold (1969): Gold, Ghosts and Frontier Violence

1969 was arguably the year Hollywood fully embraced the revisionist western. In addition to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, there was True GritTell Them Willy Boy is HereDeath of a Gunfighter, and Midnight Cowboy. As well as playing with notions of ‘the cowboy’ and ‘the West’, they contained more stylised violence, more sex and stories that overtly fed off the cynicism and disillusionment of America’s war in Vietnam and domestic racial strife. Released in May that year, Mackenna’s Gold straddles the divide between the classic big studio western and its revisionist successors. It is also a story filled with supernatural elements, in which humans are haunted not only by spirits guarding a lost canyon full of gold but by their own greed and paranoia.

Mackenna (Gregory Peck), a former gold prospector and gambler, now marshal of a remote desert territory in the US southwest, is tracking an old Apache man, Prairie Dog (Eduardo Ciannelli), who has been attacking prospectors. Mackenna is shot at and in turn shoots Prairie Dog. The old man dies but not before Mackenna finds a map on him that supposedly shows the way to a secret canyon lined with gold, which he burns after memorising. Suave but vicious Mexican outlaw, John Colorado (Egyptian actor, Omar Sharif, as one of the film’s many ethic appropriations) captures Mackenna.… Read more

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Orphan Road book launch

Melbourne folk, just a very quick heads up that I will be launching my latest crime novel on Tuesday July 11 at Brunswick Bound bookstore, 316 Sydney Road, Brunswick. Details are below. It would be great to see you there.

And if you cannot make the date but would like a copy of the book, please ask your local bookseller to order it in via Ingram Spark or drop me a line and I can fix you up with a copy.

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Orphan Road now available

My latest crime novel, Orphan Road, is now available.

Orphan Road is available from the publisher Down and Out Books. It is also available from Amazon and other online platforms, and bookshops are able to order it via Ingram Spark.

And Melbourne friends, a heads up that I’ll be launching the book at my local bookstore, Brunswick Bound, 361 Sydney Road, Brunswick, on Tuesday, July 11.

Please put that date in your dairy and more details come soon.

Orphan Road – a sequel to my last novel, Gunshine State – sees my (not so) professional thief Gary Chance become involved in the murky aftermath of one of Australia’s largest heists, Melbourne’s Great Bookie Robbery. In April 1976, a well organised gang stole as much as $16 million from bookmakers in the Victoria Club, located on the second floor of a building in Queen Street and the City. The real amount of what was stolen was never confirmed and the culprits, although they are known now, were never identified at the time or apprehended.

But, of course, the heist always goes wrong and while the police never arrested anyone for the Great Bookie Robbery, the various members of the gang fell out amongst themselves, leaving a trail of bodies.

As the starting point for Orphan Road I posited the question, what if a large amount of cash wasn’t the only thing stolen that day in April 1976.… Read more

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