Category Archives: Crime fiction

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).

… Read more

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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.

… Read more

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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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Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

Posted on March 4, 2019 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

While many Pulp Curry readers will be familiar with names such as Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, I’d wager far fewer know very much about them. Fewer still would be across the details of how they came to be published and their enormous influence. Filling in the gaps in this relatively little known but important aspect of mid-20th century pulp history is Kinohi Nishikawa’s Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground.

Street Players is the story of the now defunct Los Angeles based publishing company, Holloway House. Founded by two white men, Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock, throughout the 1960s it published run of the mill smut paperbacks, mainly sexology and spicy confessional stories, as well as the pin-up magazines Adam and Knight, all written by white writers and aimed at white readers.

The company’s trajectory radically changed with the release of Pimp in 1967. It appeared under the by-line, Iceberg Slim, the street name of a former Black hustler, prisoner and pimp called Robert Beck. Pimp was a huge hit. White readers enjoyed the voyeuristic peek it offered into the subterranean world of pimping. Despite the fact the Beck’s story was heavily fictionalised, Black readers saw in it a genuine slice of their urban ghetto experience.… Read more

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Posted in Black pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction & Youth Culture, 1950-1980, Neo Noir, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980

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