Category Archives: Crime fiction

10 great Australian westerns

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

To mark the UK release of The True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), Justin Kurzel’s bold reimagining of the sage one of Australia’s most famous myths, bushranger Ned Kelly, the British Film Institute asked me to write about my ten favourite Australian westerns. Not only is Ned Kelly Australia’s most famous bushranger – the name given to convicts who had escaped and survived Australia’s harsh environment to become outlaws – his legend forms a mini industry in film and television. In addition to Kurzel’s, Kelly has been the subject of eight films. The Kelly filmography forms part of a larger of body of Australian westerns, made by overseas and local concerns. You can read my piece in full at the BFI site here.

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Posted in Australian crime film, Australian noir, Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Bryan Brown, Crime fiction, Westerns

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Pulp Friday: Australian pulp’s Spanish Connection

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 10 Comments

One of the tasks I set myself over the Christmas/New Year period was to start putting my pulp paperback collection into plastic bags. It is amazing that these fragile constructions of cheap paper, glue and card, never meant to last more than one read, have survived for almost half a century, and for a while now I’ve been thinking I should treat them with far more care.

Among my collection are a number of Larry Kent novels, which are incredibly hard to find in the wild nowadays. Most of these were purchased as a single lot on a random visit to a second-hand bookshop in the New South Wales coastal town of Ballina (better known as the home of the Big Prawn statue) during a beach holiday many years ago.

In the process of bagging these books I took the chance to do a little digging into Larry Kent’s little-known Spanish connection, which this post will examine, as well as being a long overdue coda to Cleveland Publications, until it closed early last year the last remaining player in the once large and boisterous post-war pulp publishing industry in Australia.

Cleveland was founded by Jack Atkins in Sydney in 1953. New Zealand born, Atkins was an entrepreneur and horse lover. For a time, he was also the secretary of the NSW branch of the conservative Democratic Labor Party, which split from the Labor Party over its links to communist influenced trade unions in 1955.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Six lesser-known pulp writers of the revolution and counterculture era

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

I am over at the Criminal Element site with a list of six pulp, crime, and popular fiction writers from the counterculture era who may have slipped your radar, but are ripe for rediscovery. These are some of the writers and their books are featured in the new book I have coedited, Sticking It To The Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980.

Melbourne folk, Sticking it to the Man is available at Brunswick Bound on Sydney Road, Lulu’s in Melbourne and, by next week, they’ll also be in the New International, Paperback Books, Metropolis and other stores. Or, if you’re in Australia and are keen for a physical copy, I can send you a copy for $40 plus postage. Let me know. 

Also, PM Press is having an end of year sale and all the material, including Sticking it to the Man, is 50% off with the coupon code: GIFT (this includes people in Australia if you order from the US site here).

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Posted in 70s American crime films, Book cover design, British pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction & Youth Culture, 1950-1980, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980

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A Time For Violence: Stories with an Edge

Posted on June 8, 2019 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

With everything that I have on at the moment, it has been a while between pieces of published fiction for me, which is why I am happy to have a story in this new crime fiction anthology by Close to the Bone Publishing, A Time For Violence: Stories with an Edge, edited by Andy Rausch and Chris Roy.

My story is titled, ‘Ladies Day at the Olympia Car Wash’. It is in there with some pretty decent company, including pieces by Joe R. Lansdale, Max Allan Collins and Richard Chizmar, among many others.

So, if you are after some short crime fiction to kick back with over the long weekend, you should pick this collection up.

It is available in ebook and hard copy from Amazon here.

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Posted in Crime fiction, Neo Noir, Noir fiction

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Pulp Friday: Pollen’s Action

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Regular Pulp Curry readers will be aware I am a big fan of Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle’s Men’s Adventure Library (MAL) series. These books showcase the wonderful, lurid, at times, completely bizarre material that featured in the genre of men’s adventure pulp magazines that flourished on American newsstands from the 1950s to the 1970s. I have written about the important work they have done archiving and showcasing the efforts of the one of the most prolific illustrators working for the men’s adventure magazines, Samson Pollen. I reviewed their first book about Pollen, Pollen’s Women, some months ago on this site. They have now produced a second edition on the artist, Pollen’s Action.

Pollen was one of the many people who managed to make a living as illustrators in the post war period, a time when there was plenty of work for individuals who could quickly produce attention grabbing, ready made art to order for pulp magazines, book covers, comics, advertisements and movie posters. As Deis discusses in his introduction to Pollen’s Action, Pollen started out painting paperback covers. But when this market started began to dry up in the late 1960s, as photographic book covers came into vogue, he began working for Magazine Management, one of the largest American publishers of men’s adventure magazines.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Men's Adventure Magazines, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

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