John Flaus plays Pete Shields, an aging Sydney criminal who experiences an emotional epiphany after a diamond robbery he’s involved in goes violently wrong and his doctor informs him he’s got terminal cancer.

Shields returns to Melbourne, his hometown, where he has family, a little brother Brian (Aussie icon Bryan Brown), having trouble going straight, and Brian’s wife, Jeannie. There’s a lot of unfinished emotional business between them, including Shields’s affair with Jeannie years ago that may mean he is father of her and Brian’s daughter.

Pete also has unfinished criminal business with a gang run by Mister Curtis (Peter Stratford). To make sure his brother doesn’t fall back into their clutches, Pete takes Curtis’s gang apart man by man then kidnaps the crime boss’s daughter for a $50,000 ransom.

Blood Money has a definite Get Carter vibe, including the ending where Shields, having exchanged the daughter for the cash, is gunned in a remote quarry.

It’s not the greatest local crime film ever made, but Director John Ruane (who went on to do Death in Brunswick) gives it a grainy realism that draws the viewer in. It’s not afraid to align itself with classic hardboiled US narratives and, in doing so, feels surprisingly unselfconscious and fresh.

The real crime of this film is the trouble I had to go to see it. I can’t help but speculate that it if was a coming of age film shot in regional Australia, critics would be baying for it be restored and re-released. But an urban crime film with a hard-boiled sensibility? Forget it.

Unfortunately, it’s not the only hard to get local crime flick from the seventies and eighties. There several others worth listing, partly to give you a sense of some of the buried cinematic treasure out there, partly in hopes some reader might be able to point me in the direction of where copies might be found.

The Empty Beach (1985)

Based on the novel of the same name by writer Peter Corris, The Empty Beach features Bryan Brown as Cliff Hardy, a tough PI working the mean streets of Sydney.

The movie opens with a wealthy criminally connected businessman called John Singer about to go for a pleasure cruise on the Harbour with his mistress. But they are greeted at the docks by some shady looking characters. No more is heard from him. It is surmised that he fell overboard that day and drowned.

Two years later Singer’s wife Marion (Belinda Gibbon) hires Hardy after she receives an anonymous note claiming her husband is still alive. Hardy’s investigation leads him to the newspaper reporter, Bruce Henneberry (Nick Tate), who reported on Singer’s disappearance.

Henneberry thinks something is not right, something that’s related to his latest investigative journalism piece. He also has all the dirt on the city’s corrupt political, business and criminal elite on tapes he’s stashed away. When Henneberry’s murdered, Hardy finds himself in a race with the police and Sydney’s underworld to track down tapes

Unlike Blood Money, The Empty Beach is well made and scripted and Brown is fantastic as Hardy. It’s one of the few local crime movies I can think of that can genuinely stake a claim to being a real noir.

Although relatively easily available on VHS tape, unless you’ve kept your old video player you still have to fork over for a DVD copy, which is what I did, and the quality is not great. Why a film this good hasn’t been restored and re-released is a complete mystery to me.

Goodbye Paradise (1983)

I watched ages ago and suspect the passing of the years and much of Surfers Paradise where it was shot, has imbued the film with qualities that probably don’t match up to the reality of the product.

Michael Stacey (Ray Barrett), a drunken former Assistant Police Commissioner fallen on hard times, is employed by an old friend to undertake the relatively simple task of finding his daughter who has gone missing amid the glitter of Surfers Paradise. Stacey’s mission takes him through the city’s corrupt underbelly, with diversions through a religious cult and several murders, and ends up with him unearthing the beginnings of a military coup.

Directed by Carl Schultz (better known for Careful He Might Hear You released the same year), it won 4 AFI awards, including Best Actor for Ray Barrett and Best Screenplay by Bob Ellis and Denny Lawrence.

The occasional VHS copy surfaces on Ebay for an exorbitant price. There’s also a copy at ACMI in Melbourne, but you have to go to a booth to watch it. That’s okay if you’re watching porn but no way to see a film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgqErgMmVUo

Scobie Malone (1975)

As far was I’m concerned, this is the grand daddy of lost Australian crime films. Based on the novel Helga’s Web by local author Jon Cleary, it features his fictional detective Scobie Malone, played by Jack Thompson.

Malone is a Sydney homicide detective investigating the murder of a high-class prostitute. In the course of his inquires, Malone uncovers she had links to a high level politician, a film director and an infamous crime boss known as Mister Sin (Noel Ferrier – remember him?).

It was one of several films made based on Cleary’s work and the second featuring the character of Malone. The first, The High Commissioner, made in 1968, starred Rod Taylor as Malone and Christopher Plummer as the Australian High Commissioner in England caught up in unsavoury dealings.

Cleary reported hated the later film, especially the way his character was transformed into a womanizing rogue cop. Scobie Malone completely bombed at the box office, despite Thompson having recently been in Petersen (1974) and the wonderful Sunday Too Far Away (1975).

It’s almost as if this has been completely erased from Australia’s collective cultural memory bank. Very little has been written about it and I’ve never been able to get even near to unearthing a copy.

“Savagery and passion amongst the wild women convicts of early Australia.”

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is Journey Among Women by Diana Fuller, published by Sun Books in 1977.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about out of print classic Australian books. Journey Among Women has long been unavailable and details about its author are also thin on the ground.

That the book lives on at all in our cultural memory is only due to the cult following of the movie version, released in 1977, scripted by Fuller and directed by Tom Cowan. Unlike the book, the film is available, although it’s not easy to get.

Set among the brutal colonial beginnings of Australia, the story centres on the daughter of a judge who runs away with a group of hard core female convicts. They establish a women’s only society in the remote bush, successfully defending themselves from the wild men who dwell there and the colonial police and soldiers trying to capture them.

Journey Among Women is apparently based on a true story, the escape of a group of female convicts from a NSW Paramatta stockade in our early colonial days. Shot on a small budget, the movie was by all accounts incredibly controversial due to its graphic violence, overt lesbianism and explicit nudity.

But while the cast and director thought they were making an feminist film, it was more popular with drive-in audiences who flocked to see its racy content. The film is nowadays classified as part of the Ozsploitation wave of movie in the seventies.

It’s symptomatic of our nations’s narrow cultural bandwidth that films like My Brilliant Career (1979) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), both idealised, mythical versions of our past, continue to be emphasised over more daring works like Journey Among Women, which despite its pulp sensibility is arguably a far truer depiction of our bloody convict history.

The other interesting thing about Journey Among Women is its publisher. Sun Books was founded in Melbourne in 1965 by three men who had previously worked for Penguin but grew tired of the distain for Australian books shown by head office in London. Sun Books produced a large body of local literature, everything from poetry, political analysis to literary and semi-pulp fiction.

In the process they gave the first leg up to a number of fledging Australian writers who went onto become major literary figures. Sun Books was eventually absorbed into McMillan Publishing and ceased publishing stand alone titles altogether in the late eighties. In the course of researching this piece I found this link to a PDF of an exhibition on the history and work of Sun Books, held by Monash University in 2005.

Here’s the back cover blurb from the Sun Books paperback.

“In late 18th century Australia a desperate escape takes place from an isolated British penal colony.

A hard core of brutalised, intractable female convicts enlists the aid of Elizabeth Harrington, the refined daughter of the Judge-Advocate. They flee into the wilderness taking her with them.

Together the women learn to survive – hunting, foraging and fending for themselves, going deeper into the bush, deeper into a world without men…

But Elizabeth’s fiance, Captain McEwan, determines to bring Elizabeth back to the rigid confines of society and the convict women to the degradations of their cell. he does not realise the epic confrontation before him – a confrontation of fire and freedom…”

Wish You Were Hear sort of blind sided me. That doesn’t happen very often.

I’d been hearing about it for a while without actually putting all the pieces around it together: an Australian made suspense, partly shot in southern Cambodia, backed by Blue Tongue Films, the outfit behind Animal Kingdom and The Square, two solid local crime films I’d favourably reviewed on this site previously.

I can’t say too much about Wish You Were Here without giving away the plot. It fits nicely into the genre of suspense film dealing with what happens when nice middle class white people go somewhere exotic and exciting, a place where they’re freed from the expectations of their everyday lives, and behave badly, with serious consequences for their mental and physical health.

In this instance, the place is the tourist beach resort of Sihanoukville on Cambodia’s southern coast. The nice middle class people are two couples, pregnant Alice (Felicity Price) and her husband Dave (Blue Tongue regular Joel Edgerton), and Alice’s Younger sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and her charming and mysterious boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr).

Their exciting, carefree holiday adventure is brilliantly established in the first moments of the film, culminating in a drug fuelled dance party. Next thing we see is Dave staggering half naked and blood stained through the harsh dawn light. Jeremy has disappeared and everything has changed.

The story moves back and forth between their time in Cambodia and post-holiday Sydney where Dave, Alice and Steph try and deal with the ramifications of what happened the night of the party. The truth eats away at family and emotional bonds until the two worlds, quite literally, collide with each other.

Wish You Were Here is by no means flawless but I liked this film a lot. I liked it because it takes risks, because it tries to do something different to a lot of other Australian films, because it’s beautifully filmed and, for the most part, well acted. I particularly liked the fact that part of it was shot in Cambodia, the location of my upcoming crime novel and a place that just doesn’t get enough attention in crime fiction and film, far as I’m concerned.

I was also impressed by first time director Kieran Darcy-Smith’s depiction of Cambodia. Sure, there’s a degree of fetishism, like there is in most Western films set in the developing world. But Darcy-Smith also captures how the gap between the haves and have-nots in Cambodia can be so wide, yet for various reasons obscured in the eyes of most Westerners and the disastrous consequences that can flow from this.

There’s a well-worn pattern in Australian cinema, right back to Bruce Beresford’s wonderful heist movie, Money Movers in 1979, that sees first time directors dabble in genre film before going onto to do more mainstream and usually less interesting work. I’ll be curious to see which direction Darcy-Smith takes.

A quick heads up that issue ten of Crime Factory is now live on the site and definitely worth checking out.

The Crime Factory team have amassed a pretty amazing line-up of talent for this issue. Dave Honeybone interviews Aussie crime writer David Owen (author of the Pufferfish series), William Boyle dissects Charle’s Willeford’s 1962 noir classic Cockfighter, James Hopwood lifts the lid on the sci-fi spy smut novels of Clyde Allison, and there’s a fantastic piece in our ‘True Crime Deposition’ section by Josh Stallings, and much more. Doing the hard yards on short fiction in this issue are Patricia Abbott, Thomas Pluck, Mark Joseph Kiewlak, Benoit Lelievre, Seamus Scanlon, Rob Loughlin and Deborah Sheldon.

I’m extremely proud to have an in-depth interview in this issue with probably the best living female noir writer currently working, if not the best full stop, Megan Abbott. I managed to steal a bit of time during Megan’s lightning visit to Melbourne for the launch of Crime Factory Publications in early March, to talk about her books, cheerleaders and the lure of noir. It’s a great interview. I know because Megan’s mum, Patti, said so.

Megan’s upcoming book is called Dare Me. It’s a coming of age noir story set in the world of competitive cheerleading and all the advance word to date is it’s fantastic. I’ll be reviewing Dare Me for this site in the next month or so.

A couple of other quick things while I’ve got your attention.

The Crime Factory gang was thrilled this week to hear our mag had won the 2012 Spinetingler Magazine award for best zine. It’s a honour given the competition we were up against. Of course, the real praise should go to all our contributors and columnists, whose work makes Crime Factory what it is. Congratulations to the winners and entrants in all categories. If you get a chance, go and check out the Spinetingler Magazine awards, and have a look at the diversity and depth of talent represented there.

Things are also hotting up in terms of my own writing efforts. My debut crime novel, set in Cambodia in the mid-nineties will be out sometime in the next couple of months through US crime publisher Snubnose Press. It’s had a name change since I last wrote about it, more about that later.

Max Quinlan, the main character in my book, also features in a short story appearing soon in the excellent on-line magazine Noir Nation, and I’ve got a story in the next issue of Blood and Tacos. Each issue of Blood and Tacos features a series of stories affectionately parodying the over the top US pulp fiction books of the late seventies and eighties. My character is Bastard Mercenary, and the story’s called Operation Scorpion Sting. Can’t wait for this one.

I’ve also had a story accepted in Phnom Penh Noir, a very exciting hard copy anthology by the editor of Bangkok Noir, Christopher G Moore. More on that when I have it.

Last but not least, I’m really looking forward to the Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival, taking place May 23 – June 3. I’ll be trying to attend as much of the festival as I can. I’m also speaking on a panel on the afternoon of Sunday 27 May, on the issue of building an audience. Check out the full festival program here.

“When he has to, Shannon can be as vicious as the worst Mafia thug who ever used a blow torch on a stoolie.”

We usually associate pulp fiction with the classic hard-boiled covers of the fifties and sixties. But pulp endured well into the seventies and beyond, before finally dying out and in the late eighties.

Today’s Pulp Friday is a selection of pulp covers from that latter period of pulp, the seventies and eighties.

I’m not sure why, but the pulp from this period seemed more extreme than it’s earlier iterations, if that’s possible, more turbo changed and over the top. The violence was more pronounced. The characters were PIs, mercenaries, spies and adventurers, like their predecessors, but they were even more starkly drawn, often to the point of being bizarre.

If you doubt me, check out the following.

Shannon #3: The Mindbenders features a private eye who lives “in a penthouse on Manhattan’s swank Upper East Side, but most of his work is done in the gutter”. He is the number one agent for a boutique government spy agency called Morituri, run by a priest referred to as Number One. Shannon is handsome, independently wealth and writes PI novels in his spare time. This book involves the suicide of a woman Shannon was close to which he ties to other deaths involving the UN.

William Riordan’s One The Take (“They wouldn’t let him be a good cop so he became the worst”) is the story of Inspector Stephen “Stash” Winsocki, the crookedest cop in New York, as told by his equally bent driver.

The Hunter, A Taste for Blood involves seven people whose plane crashes in a remote Africa swamp. They start dying one by one and slowly realise the killer one of them. The main character is John Yard, a former Green Beret who served in Vietnam who is now a soldier of fortune.

The Underground Cities Contract is the 18^th book to feature the US government’s “ace hit-man and blue ribbon executioner” Joe Gall. The inside front cover plot summary sounds like some sort of wild pulp haiku

1 Turkish People’s Liberation Army

3 kidnapped Americans

1 double-dealing Turkish terrorist

1 uninhibited belly dancer

1 Joe Gall

… And no holds barred

Death Squad #2: Killers for Hire concerns a group of San Diego cops “laying their careers and their lives on the line to get rid of the criminal scum who prey on decent citizens. If they’re caught they’ll go to jail for life, but they think it’s worth it.”

Danger Zone features the exploits of Venable, “an adventurer who would do anything to make a buck. Now he was down on the wild coast of Mexico – the Acapulco scene – with all the other hustlers, gunrunners, starlets, revolutionaries, and just plain crooks. This was where the action was – cocaine smuggling and the hot money cooling off from illegal operations in the States. Venable was there to make a bundle, that is if he managed to stay alive.”

If you enjoy this kind of thing, head on over to Blood and Tacos, a fantastic part-parody, part-homage to the pulp of the late seventies and eighties, edited by US crime writer, Johnny Shaw.

Each issue features several wonderfully warped stories based on the pulp tales of this period. You can download them from the site or spring a couple of dollars for the Kindle version. Among the gems in issue one is the character of Albino Wino in Long Hair Death Farm and Chingon, the world’s deadliest Mexican.

I have a story in Issue two, but you’ll have to wait to find out what that is.

It’s worth noting that when this post originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website, readers came up with several good additions, including Andrew Vachss’s Burke, Charlie Huston’s Henry Thornton, Lawrence Block’s hitman character Keller and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. I had originally thought of including the James Ellroy character Dudley Smith (“Knock, knock, who’s there, Dudley Smith, so reds beware”), but he’s a bent cop so not eligible. However, Ellroy’s Pete Bondurant would definitely make the cut.

Please leave a comment if you can think of any others.

Parker by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake)

The 24 books written between 1962 and 2010 featuring the professional thief known as Parker remain some of the best crime fiction ever written. Sixteen Parker novels appeared between 1962 and 1974. Westlake took a rest from the character until 1997, then wrote another eight Parker books.

Parker is a career criminal who steals things for a living. Get in his way on a job or try to double cross him afterwards and he’ll hurt you. Yet he’s not a psychopath in the vein of so many contemporary literary and film criminals. His only morals are what it takes to survive, no more, no less. He’s almost an anti-character, emotionless, with few social connections and hardly any past that Westlake ever let the reader know about.

The pre-1974 Parkers are the most hard-boiled, the character having mellowed somewhat in his post-1997 incarnation, but they are all solid, meticulously constructed tales, using multiple points of view, Parker’s and others. Westlake’s writing style is lean and disciplined and he’s a master of less is more. If you haven’t read him, start at the first book, The Hunter and go from there. I envy you.

Wyatt by Garry Disher

Wyatt is the creation of Australian crime writing veteran, Garry Disher. Like his American counterpart, Wyatt is an old school hold up man. The character is unusual for Australia scene where police procedurals and literary crime fiction rule the roost. Seven Wyatt books have been published to date.

You can start at the beginning of the Wyatt series or you jump straight to the most recent, Wyatt, in 2010. In Wyatt the score is a jewel heist, presented by an old colleague who fancies a shot at the big league. There are multiple double crosses courtesy of the cast of characters, including a bent cop, a wannabe gangster, a stone cold French assassin and an unhinged stripper.

Eddie ‘Fingers’ Coyle by George V Higgins

Chances are you’ve seen the 1973 movie, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but have you read the book that inspired it? It’s a no frills depiction of desperate men doing whatever they have to do to stay one step ahead of each other and the law. And the most desperate is Coyle, a 51 year-old ex-con, gunrunner and Christ knows what else in his criminal career. He’s got a wife, three kids and the prospect of a three to five-year jail stretch for being caught driving a truckload of stolen whisky, he’ll do anything to avoid.

Crime fiction does not come tougher than this and Higgins’s grasp of Boston’s criminal milieu and language is second to none.

Gloria Denton by Megan Abbott

Denton featured in Megan Abbott’s third book, Queenpin. She was based on a real life character Virginia Hill, a mob luminary around the time of Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. Denton takes a young woman under her wing to help keep the books at a sleazy mob run nightclub. But the relationship between mentor and protégé is an uneasy one. A chilling depiction of what a woman had to do to survive in the gangster milieu with a wealth of period detail.

Jack Carter by Ted Lewis

Another character better known for his cinematic portrayal (Michael Caine in Get Carter) but whose print persona is worth checking out. Lewis wrote three books featuring the English gangster and standover man, Jack Carter. The first was Jack’s Return Home, on which the movie was based, followed by Jack Carter’s Law, then Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon.

Lewis has been called the English Mickey Spillane and the character of Carter is a violent, foul-mouthed strong-arm man for the London mob. The dialogue is cracking, as is the period detail of the late sixties/early seventies criminal underworld in England. The books are only available second hand but are well worth tracking down.

Carter “Doc” McCoy by Jim Thompson

McCoy only featured in one Thompson book, The Getaway, but what a book. Ex-con McCoy engineers a small town bank heist in order to pay off the corrupt head of the parole board who he bought a pardon from. He and wife, Carol, are soon on the run from a homicidal ex-partner and various other rural sociopaths. Thompson was an expert at depicting an amoral world-view dripping with cynicism and this novel is no exception. Thompson does what a lot of others try to in half the words and better. A must read.

Crissa Stone by Wallace Stroby

Crissa Stone is the central character of Wallace Stroby’s 2011 book, Cold Shot to the Heart. Stone is a professional career criminal. She takes her time, never works close to home or with the same crew more than once. But when she has to find the money to help secure the release of her mentor and lover, suddenly she finds herself breaking her own rules with disastrous consequences. Stroby is a great writer and the plot is tight and fast paced.

“She lit a fuse inside men.”

Last time I featured Gil Brewer on Pulp Friday, it resulted in a spirited Twitter discussion as to who was the quintessential hard-boiled pulp author, Brewer or Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark.

Personally, my votes goes to Westlake/Stark on account of his Parker books.

But I do love Brewer’s sleazy psychological take on pulp fiction. He’s also a case of life imitating art. He died in 1983, after years of alcoholism, mental health problems and financial stress. And Like most of the most accomplished pulp novelists, he only gained critical attention well after his death.

Both the titles featured today were published by Monarch Books, based in Derby, Connecticut, Play It Hard in 1964 and Wild To Possess (“She lit a fuse inside men”) in 1963.

It looks like Brewer was in good company in the Monarch stable of pulp writers. As the advertisement on the inside back cover of Wild To Possess states, you could buy these two Brewer titles and three other Monarch pulps for just $1.50. That’s value, especially given that among the titles to choose from were The Key Game “A fast moving exhilarating story of emotional fadism among uninhibited married couples”, and The Lolita Lovers,  a “dramatic novel of the ‘beat’ generation living and loving by thir own rules in a teeming asphalt jungle”.

The back cover blurb for Play It Hard is a great example of the sort of twisted  tales Brewer churned out.

“Girl in skin-tight suit.

She wore Jan’s skin-tight clothes, Jan’s provocative scent, and had all of Jan’s built-in equipment for driving men crazy. But she made love like no woman Steve Nolan had ever known – including Jan, his wife of less than a week.

But how could he prove she wasn’t Jan when the girl swore she was his wife – and none of his friends had met his real pick-up bride?

Steve suspected someone was out to get him, using this provocative sex bomb as bait. And when the girl he’d really married was found brutally murdered, he had to move fast – before the police got to him first.” 

You’ve probably heard of Jungle Jim, the nickname for the Asia-based hunter Jim Bradley, who featured in a series of fictional adventures starting in 1934. Jungle Jim battled pirates, slave traders and other assorted jungle foes on radio and in print.

He was later re-tooled for a series of 16 B movies set in Africa and starring Johnny Weissmuller.

Odds are, however, you probably haven’t heard of Jungle Jim, the Cape Town based bimonthly magazine that publishes crime, horror and genre tales penned by writers from all over the African continent.

Stumbling across things sites like Jungle Jim is one of the reasons I love the Internet.

When I first saw this in mid-2011, I immediately contacted the editors and asked them to send me some samples of their mag so I could review them for this site. They quickly sent me issues 5 through to 8 (issue 10 is about to come out).

I’ve finally got around to reading them and what a ride. The stories in Jungle Jim capture the incredible mystery, beauty and harshness of life in Africa minus the ‘Kony 2012′ cliches and Western condescension.

‘The End When It Comes’ by Werner Pretorius (issue 5), concerns a waitress in the tiny town of Kaiser Bay who picks up a drifter who is much more than he seems. Apocalyptically so.

Constance Myburgh’s tale, ‘Hunter Emmanuel’ (issue 6) is about a logger who finds a severed women’s leg hanging from a tree in the forest he is cutting down. The discovery propels him on a mission to find the owner of the leg and why it was cut off.

‘Assassin’ (issue 7) is by a Nigerian writer called Tosin Otitoju and is a fantastic take on the changing nature of corruption and violence in post-dictatorship Nigeria.

‘Baboon War’ (issue 7) is a sort of bizarre horror/young adult fiction tale about group of schoolgirls who get attacked by baboons on their way to school each day.

A terrifying story carried over issues 7 and 8, ‘Punishment and Crime’ looks at the horrific exploits of a Cape Town gang member called Punishment. This one’s not for the faint hearted.

Issue 8 also has an unsettling little tale entitled ‘The Island’ by a Cape Town based writer called Dion Loubser, which concerns the supernatural goings on on a prison island.

That’s enough to give you a flavour.

It’s great to see a group of artists and writers who are doing something totally different from a lot of the other short crime fiction mags that are starting up, as well as publishing great fiction from a part of world we don’t hear enough about.

The actual format the mag comes in is great, too. There are instructions on how to open it on their website.

The site also contains a wonderful collection of images from what looks like South African pulp fiction from the sixties and seventies. The Afrikaner pulp mag featuring Rocco de Wet and his Kalishnakov wielding girl friend gets my vote as the best pic.

“Lusting females with sadism and sex on their mind.”

Bikers were one of the major themes of pulp fiction in the late sixties and seventies.

Society’s fascination with bikers obviously dates back much further than this, but by the late sixties it had well and truly seeped into popular culture, thanks to the well publicised violence at Aldamont, movies like Easy Rider (1969) and the success of Hunter S Thompson’s 1965 gonzo journalism classic, Hells Angels.

Australia was no exception to this trend, with concerns about law and order arising from the growth of the counter culture and the popularity of movies like Stone (1974) and Mad Max (1979) resulting in our own fascination with bikie culture.

The result was wave of pulp novels focusing on the exploits of outlaw biker gangs and the cops trying to break them. The books mirrored mainstream society’s fascination/loathing of bikie culture, real and imagined, mixed with lashings of gratuitous sex and hard-core violence.

Wheels of Death (1975) and Bikie Birds (1973) are two Australian examples of biker pulp fiction. Both were written by Stuart Hall, who penned approximately 45 pulp novels between 1970 and 1980, including a number of biker pulps for Scripts, the adults-only inprint of Sydney-based pulp publisher Horwitz Publications.

In addition to writing about the denim clad male members of these bikie gangs, Hall devoted considerable attention to the women (or ‘birds’ as women were often referred to in popular working class Australian slang) who rode with them, characters every bit as sexually loose and violent as their male counterparts.

Other biker titles by Hall included Wheelie (1973), Bikie Rumble (1975), Birds of Destruction (1976) and Vengeance is a Woman (1980).

Blood Circus was written by Thomas K. Fitzpatrick and published by Fawcett Gold Medal Books in 1968. Trying cash in on the success of Thompson’s Hells Angels, it concerns a rookie LAPD officer given the job of infiltrating a sadistic Californian biker gang known as “the Beasts”.

UK pulp publisher New English Library published a popular series of pulps in the early seventies.

Published in 1973, Alex R Stuart’s The Devils Rider fused outlaw bikers with supernatural themes against the backdrop a Great Britain on the brink of complete social collapse. The key characters are Sam, the Satanic leader of a biker gang called the Sons of Baal, and Johnny, a young drop out who joins the them.

The blurb on the back of The Devil’s Rider reads: “The moon gleams ivory through the wisps of cloud. Shovels and pickaxes are strapped to the bikes, like Sam insisted. For what? Digging their own graves? Sam wouldn’t say. The whole trip’s weird.”

Angels on My Mind (1974), also published by New English Library, was the final in a series of four books by Mick Norman about the exploits of the “Hell’s Angels”, a biker gang that “delight in perverting the ‘normal’ way of life and turn their backs on the rest of society… But for those who get in their way, and won’t let them have what they want, they have only one answer – violence.”

John Harrison’s Hip Pocket Sleaze, a book I’ve mentioned several times on this site and one of the best guides I’ve found pulp fiction in the sixties and seventies, contains a lot more information about biker pulp, including an interview with J.D. Norman son of the late NEL editor and bike paperback author, Mick Norman.

If you like this post make sure you check it out.

A couple of nights ago I finally got around to viewing a film that’s been on my must-watch pile of DVDs for ages, Kinji Fukasaku’s Blackmail Is My Life.

Regular Pulp Curry readers will know I have a bit of a thing for Fukasaku’s work, having previously reviewed two of his films on this site, Yakuza Graveyard (1976) and Street Mobster (1972).

Released in 1968, Blackmail is set in Tokyo at the beginning of the country’s economic boom. The story revolves  around four young slackers who will do anything to avoid the trappings of mainstream middle class life. They are a tight knit group comprising former Yakuza, Seki, ex-boxer Zero, Tom Boy sex bomb Otoki, and their leader, Muraki.

Muraki may look like a bit of a fool with his hounds tooth jacket and permanent grin but he’s an expert in his chosen craft – blackmail. He’s also completely unafraid of anything. As he puts it: “The bigger and tougher they are the more reason to taker them down.”

Their targets are mostly “stupid arsed salary types”, low level starlets and businessmen who the gang secretly film committing adultery in seedy love hotels. But Muraki is keen to take things up a notch. His opportunity comes when he leans of the existence of the ‘Otaguro Memorandum’, a document that could bring down a corrupt high-level Japanese politician if it ever saw the light of day.

Needless to say, the powerful individual does not take kindly to being shaken down by a bunch of street punks.

As a voice over from Maruki says at one point in the film, “The prettier something looks on the outside, the more revolting it is on the inside”. It’s a perfect description of Japanese society in the sixties. While the country’s stellar economic growth and glittering consumer culture made the desperate poverty experience in the post-war Japan seem like a distant memory, much of this development was based on lies and political corruption.

Fukasaku came of age after World War Two and emerged from the hardscrabble Occupation years imbued with a deep cynicism and a mistrust of authority. The target of his ire in Blackmail was a real life corruption case in which senior member of the country’s Diet (parliament) was caught extorting fellow politicians and using the hush money to fund his campaigns. Although the media exposure of these activities created a political outcry, the politician concerned kept his post and went onto much bigger things.

Blackmail Is My Life contains all Fukasaku’s signature visual techniques, his extensive use of voice overs, usually across freeze framed images, the lack of linear story telling and his tendency to manically bounce between different points in the story, which gives the film a disjointed, alienated feel.

There’s a fantastic sixties sounding score and Fukasaku has a lot of fun with the technology used by the black mailer. His lurid use the images arising from the gang’s activities turn the viewers into voyeurs, a deliberate strategy which becomes particularly biting in the film’s final scene.

Pulp Curry readers interested a more detailed consideration of Japanese crime cinema should head over to the US-based website, Criminal Complex, where my Crime Factory colleague Cameron Ashley writes a great column, ‘The Nail that Sticks out’. This examines not just crime cinema but Japanese pulp and noir culture more generally. It’s a must for fans of Japanese crime film and fiction.

This was brought home to me again over the weekend after watching Hunger, Steve McQueen’s 2008 depiction of the final months in the life of IRA militant Bobby Sands. Sands and 9 other IRA inmates staved themselves to death in 1981 in protest against the Thatcher government’s insistence of treating them as common criminals rather than political prisoners.

I recently reviewed Adrian McKinty’s book The Cold Cold Ground, which dealt with a Catholic cop in a Protestant neighbourhood trying to solve a murder against the backdrop of the civil unrest unleashed by the hunger strikes.

Hunger is about what happened inside the walls of the Maze Prison. It’s a visceral, blistering film, all the more so because it’s made with incredible slight of hand.

It opens with the arresting image of a pair of bloody knuckles being soaked in water. These belong to one of the prison guards and were acquired administering incredibly savage beatings to IRA prisoners in response to their “blanket and dirty protests” in which the prisoners refused to wash and smeared shit over the walls of their prison cells. The guard is subsequently murdered in the aged care home where his mother lives, one of 16 guards killed by paramilitaries in retaliation for the treatment of the prisoners.

Michael Fassbender’s depiction of Sands is nothing short of astonishing given that the meat of the character hangs on just one scene in the 91-minute film, a conversation between Sands and a sympathetic priest, in which the Republican prisoner goes from jovial to hard headed political militant in the blink of an eye via a vignette about cross country running when he was a youth.

Hunger is one of the few contemporary examples I can think of a successful prison film. They were huge in the thirties, when heaps of movies about men serving time where churned out, and were a staple of forties and fifties noir. They appeared more infrequently after that, the exception being the huge wave of women in prison films that were so popular in the seventies and eighties, like Big Doll House (1971) and Jackson County Jail (1976)

Hunger got me thinking about what makes a good prison film. A crucial ingredient is that there’s no pretense the prisoners are there by accident. Whether they committed political or criminal acts, in the best prison films the inmates know why they are inside and they have two choices: make the best of the situation or escape.

Memorable prison films include:

Brute Force: Directed Jules Dassin, who made Thieves Highway (1949) and Night and the City (1950) before being driven out of Hollywood by the anti-communist witch hunts of the fifties. This 1947 film examines the battle of wills between the inmates of cell R17 led by Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) and a sadistic head guard. Fed up with their treatment, the inmates plan a break out. It’s a tough, brutal film that still packs a punch. The scene where the prisoners use blow torches to force a stool pigeon to his death in a stamping machine is particularly memorable. Another solid (but hard to get) prison noir is Caged (1950), in which a naive nineteen year old widow becomes coarsened and cynical after being sent to a woman’s prison and exposed to hardened criminals and sadistic guards (led by Agnes Moorehead’s as a sexually predatory head warden).

A Prophet: Made in 2002, this French film directed by Jacques Audiard, depicts an impressionable young Arabic man (Tahar Rahim) sentenced for a petty crime to a jail on the verge of war between the Arab inmates and the Corsicans who have traditionally run it. The prisoner soon discovers the opportunities for criminal advancement in prison dwarf anything available to him on the outside.

Stir: This 1980 Australian film was inspired by the true-life prison riot at Bathurst Jail in 1974. Starring a young Bryan Brown, it features one of the most honest and non-sensationalised depictions of homosexuality in prison I have seen on film. Other good Aussie prison films include Ghosts of the Civil Dead (1988) and the little known Everynight… Everynight, released in 1994 and based on a play about the early life of infamous contract killer Christopher Dale Flannery.

Fast Walking: Based on The Rap, a novel by US author Ernest Brawley, Fast Walking was released in 1982 and starred James Woods as Frank ‘Fast Walking’ Minivar, a permanently stoned prison guard with a side line as a pimp. The prison he works in is on edge after the murder of a black inmate, a situation worsened by the imminent arrival of William Galliot, a radical black nationalist. The Klan wants Galliot dead and there are rumours the prison authorities have put a contract out on him. Rosco, his Neo Nazi biker cousin, also an inmate, pressures Minivar to kill Galliot for $25,000. He is also approached by a group of black nationalists to bust Galliot out for $50,000. When I reviewed Fast Walking on this site last year it was almost impossible to get in DVD. It has since been released as part of the Warner Archive collection.

Other contenders for inclusion would be Stuart Ronseberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967), McVicar (1980) starring the Who lead singer Roger Daltrey and, of course, Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1980). Although it’s ages since I’ve seen it, I’m also very fond of the 1985 Brazilian American film, Kiss of the Spider Woman.

I keep thinking people will eventually discover Asia as a fascinating place to set crime fiction, but it looks like I’ll have to keep on waiting on that score.

Not that there aren’t some great crime reads set in the region. A few weeks ago I wrote the following post on some of my favourites for the site, Crime Fiction Lover. One book I could’ve included but didn’t was David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero. One CFL reader suggested the books of Seicho Matsumoto. I’d live to hear other suggestions as I’m sure there are heaps more.

Jade Lady Burning – Martin Limon

Low profile crime writer Martin Limon has so far written six books featuring Sueno and Bascom, officers in the Criminal Intelligence Division of the US military based in South Korea, and a seventh is on the way.

Jade Lady Burning was the first of the series, written in 1992, and for my money it’s still one of the best. Sueno and Bascom are assigned to investigate the brutal murder of a local prostitute which turns into something much more sinister. South Korea in the seventies is bleak, authoritarian and paranoid, the perfect backdrop for a couple of hard-boiled investigators to ply their trade. A lot of the action is set amongst the bars and brothels that have sprung up to cater to the US military presence. Limon’s not the first Western writer to cover this ground. But as army veteran who spent time in Korea, his treatment of the subject is vastly superior to most of what’s out there, focusing as it does on the culture clash that occurs when so many young American men are thrown into the middle of an ancient and very hierarchical society.

Zero Hour in Phnom Penh – Christopher Moore

The doyen of the large expatriate crime-writing scene in Bangkok is Christopher G Moore, a Canadian who since the early nineties has been writing books featuring the Bangkok-based American PI, Vincent Calvino. Moore has written 12 Calvino books, good, solid hard-boiled reads. Most are set in Thailand, although Moore has also taken his character to Vietnam and Cambodia.

The Cambodia book, Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, is my favourite. Taking place in 1992, it’s one of the few crime novels set in Cambodia. Calvino has been employed by a shady businessman to find a grifter gone to ground in Phnom Penh. Accompanying the PI is his regular off-sider Prachai Congwatana, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Thai police. The Cambodia capital is crawling with United Nations peacekeepers and every imaginable type of criminal, while in the countryside troops loyal to the country’s various political factions maintain a fragile peace.

The Half Child – Angela Savage

Angela Savage is a Melbourne writer and the Half Child is her second book to feature the character of Jayne Keeney, a Bangkok-based PI. The Half Child takes Jayne to the sleazy southern Thai town of Pattaya, to investigate the alleged suicide of an Australian volunteer working in a Christian run orphanage.

The Half Child is not as hard edged as my first two recommendations, but it’s a satisfying read and Savage’s observations of Thai society are entertaining, sharply drawn and spot on.

The Eye of Jade – Diane Wei Liang

Crime fiction was banned in China as “bourgeois” after the communist revolution in 1949. Deng Xiaoping briefly relaxed these restrictions before they were reimposed in 2007, when the ruling party adopted the encouragement of social harmony as a key platform.

While there are Chinese writers doing crime fiction set in China, they don’t live there. The best known of these is Qiu Xiaolong and his poetry spouting Shanghai cop, Chen Cao. Another is Diane Wei Liang who has written two books featuring the character of Mei Wang, a former member of the Department of Public Security who now makes a living as a PI in Beijing. The first of these, The Eye of Jade, involves her search for a piece of Han Dynasty jade of great value, pillaged by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and soon spins off into the events surround China labour camps. The author knows what she’s talking about, having spent her childhood in a labour camp in a remote region of China.

Satori – Don Winslow

Satori’s main character, the assassin Nicholai Hel, appeared previously in the best selling 1979 novel Shibumi (“the Zen Buddhist concept of a sudden awakening, a realisation of life as it really is”) by ‘Trevanian’, the pseudonym of American academic Rodney William Whitaker.

Winslow’s book is an homage and pre-qual to the Trevanian’s work. It is set in 1951, just after Hel’s release from three years in solitary confinement for killing his Japanese mentor. The American CIA wants Hel to kill the corrupt Soviet commissioner to China, a delightfully debauched and evil character called Vorosheenin. The action moves from communist China to the jungles of Vietnam. It’s a wonderfully written historical action tale with a great pulp fiction feel.

I’m curious what exactly the remake could do differently, given that Headhunters already feels so much like a mainstream American thriller.

By that I mean it is slick, fast paced and requires viewers to suspend their disbelief to an increasing degree as the plot unfolds.

I make no bones about my lack of knowledge of Scandinavian crime fiction and film, but it seems to me the only really Nordic qualities Headhunters has are some pretty creepy characters, the huge level of graphic violence and a lot of Ikea-like interior design.

Not that the film doesnlt have its merits.

Could you submerge yourself in a pit human shit or take another human life to escape someone trying to find and kill you? Those are just two of the situations faced by the main character in Headhunters, Roger Brown (Askel Hennie).

Brown is Norway’s most successful corporate headhunter. He’s got a thing about being short (five and a half feet) and a problem maintaining the lavish lifestyle expected by his taller, impossibly blonde trophy wife, Diana.

To make ends meet Brown moonlights as an art thief. He identifies clients who have valuable possessions and steals them. When he meets a man who owns a very valuable painting he sees his chance to make a lot of money and take the pressure off for a while.

The man in question, Greve (Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is almost as slick as he is. As it turns out he is also a hell of a lot more dangerous, an ex-special forces soldier with an excellent knowledge of high tech surveillance gadgets.

The first third of the film, which introduces us to Brown’s world and deftly depicts the high wire balancing act he has to do to maintain his lifestyle and appearances, is great.

From there, Brown’s orderly life gradually deteriorates and he is soon on the run for his life from Greve. It’s during these scenes that the film becomes both a bit far-fetched and a little predictable. And the ending is far too slick and contained.

Headhunters is part heist film, part corporate thriller and part dark satire of corporate culture. Doubtless it will not be the last film made of a Nesbo book.

Those wanting a different kind of remake of a Scandinavian crime book should check out The Laughing Policeman, which I saw on DVD a few weeks ago.

This film, made in 1973, is based on a book by the Swedish husband and wife crime-writing duo Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, one of ten they wrote featuring the hard-boiled left wing Stockholm police detective Martin Block.

It was directed by Stuart Rosenburg, who did the honours on a number of my favourite early seventies American films, including WUSA (1972), Pocket Money (1973), and Cool Hand Luke (1969). Like those films, The Laughing Policeman combines a hard-boiled sensitivity with a discursive story telling style typical many of the films of that era.

In this instance, two San Francisco cops (played by Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern) get caught up in some very sleazy events when they have to piece together the events leading to the late night massacre of a commuter bus full of passengers, among the victims another cop.

There’s a great car chase towards the end and a wonderful turn by character actor Anthony Zebe. Don’t expect a straightforward ending that neatly wraps up all the plot lines. You won’t get it. That’s one of the reasons I liked this film so much. The Laughing Policeman is not the easiest film to find but it is available and well worth checking out.

“Revenge or hate? She didn’t know which – but something irresistible was drawing her to Bangkok to confront her brother’s killer.”

Today’s Pulp Friday contribution, Monkey on a Chain, is going to be short and sweet because I’ve got a mountain of writing deadlines at the moment.

This edition of Monkey on a Chain was published by MacFadden Bartell Books, one of the large US pulp publishers in the fifties and sixties. It was written by Charity Blackstock, a pseudonym for Paula Alladyce, who wrote over 20 crime and historical romance pulp novels between 1950 and 1981. She also used the names Ursala Today and Charlotte Keppel.

By the sound of the back cover blurb, Monkey on a Chain might have been one of Alladyce’s racier offerings.

“A journey into hate. 

Sue Douglas left her husband and children to seek out the man who had killed her beloved twin brother twenty years before in a prison camp on the notorious River Kwai. All she knew was his name and that he lived in Bangkok.

Sue stalked her quarry everywhere in the steamy, exotic city – including its brothels – until the night she met him by chance and realised suddenly that her life would never be the same. 

A torturous love-hate relationship developed between them which reached a shattering climax at her brother’s grave on the River Kawi…”

It was a good night. A decent sized crowd rocked up to Grumpy’s Green in Fitzroy to hear readings by Adrian McKinty, Leigh Redhead, David Whish Wilson and Megan Abbott. The jazz band After Dark My Sweet, were on fire. We even sold a few copies of the local edition of Crime Factory: The First Shift.

The highlight for me was meeting US noir author Megan Abbott. Not only is she a fantastic writer, she was incredibly generous with her time and thoughts about all things crime fiction and noir.

She read was from her upcoming book Dare Me. Dare Me is her most contemporary novel to date, set amongst the world of competitive cheerleading. I’d never thought about cheerleaders as akin to US servicemen or, better still, the modern American equivalent of gladiators. But talking to Megan about what inspired Dare Me, and the research she did for it, neither analogy sounds too far from the mark.

I can’t tell you how much I am dying to read it.

I won’t say anything more now. I managed to grab an hour before the launch to interview Megan for the next issue of Crime Factory. More details, plus an extract from Dare Me are also available on Megan’s website.

Megan wasn’t the only incredibly talented female author at the launch. Melbourne writer Leigh Redhead read from her first book, Peepshow, and gave us a wonderful little story about a punter who died in a strip club she’d worked in once. I suspect it’s not the first airing that tale has had, but it was the first time I’d heard it.

I’ve blogged on this site extensively about McKinty, Whish Wilson and Abbott. I finally got around to reading Peepshow in the lead-up to the Crime Factory Publications launch. Now I wonder why I waited so long to get into Redhead’s work.

The main character in Peepshow is a stripper called Simone Kirsh who is forced to go under cover at a men’s club to find the killer of its seedy owner, Francesco ‘Frank’ Parisi.

The book is a great slice of home grown tart noir, a fast paced read that perfectly balances grit with humour. There’s lots of sex, country music and great characters. But two things about it are particularly worth commenting on from a critical perspective.

The stripper usually features as a background character in your average hard-boiled crime novel. It was good to read a crime yarn told from the perspective of one, by a writer who has worked in the adult industry and knows what she is talking about.

What I liked most about the book (which was first published in 2004) was the depiction of the bay side Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, which has since been changed massively by development and gentrification. A lot of people have gone on about the way that Shane Maloney writes about Melbourne. I found Redhead’s take far sharper and more interesting.

In addition to Peepshow, Simone Kirsh has appeared in Pie, Rubdown and Thrill City. The best starting point to find them is Leigh’s site.

By the way, if you couldn’t make the Crime Factory Publications Launch and are keen to get a copy of the local edition of the anthology, it’ll be available to Australian customers through our website in the coming days.

Dark Prints Press anthology, The One That Got Away is out and it contains a story by yours truly.

You can order the book here and the digital edition will be available soon.

Based in Perth, Western Australia, Dark Prints Press is one of a growing number of small local niche publishers focusing on genre fiction. For Dark Prints, the focus is on crime and horror and sometimes the two together.

Submissions have just opened for their upcoming anthology, A Killer Among Demons, which will feature twisted tales based on a combination of paranormal/supernatural crime themes. Details are here if you’re interested.

The One That Got Away has a similarly dark premise. It contains 12 tales  about getting away with crime. My story, Two Blind Cats, features the ex-Australian army soldier, now criminal for hire, Gary Chance, who has previously appeared in other short stories I’ve penned.

There’s also a piece by my Crime Factory colleague Cameron Ashley, Ned Kelly short story award winner Zane Lovitt and many others, including some guy called Lawrence Block.

Check it out when you get a chance and support the great work being done by Dark Prints Press.

“The Sydney Opera House opening was glitter and show – and then it became a  bloodbath.”

One of lessor known sub-genres of sixties/seventies pulp fiction was what for want of a better term could have been called ‘Blaxsploitation pulp’ (even though a lot of it was written by white authors).

It was big in the US and UK usually featured black PIs solving their cases in style at the same time as sticking it to the man or black revolutionaries seizing power and getting some pay back on whitey. You get my drift. New English Library, a UK pulp publisher, also released a series of semi-soft core porn novels featuring slaves and slavers in the pre-US civil war deep south.

I’ve never been able to find any example of this kind of pulp fiction in Australia, with the exception of today’s Pulp Friday offering, Operation Concrete Butterfly by Dick Peters.

To says this is a little known book is an understatement. I have not been able to find out any background on the author or Arkon Paperbacks, the outfit that published it in 1973. The publication notes suggest it might have been a subsidiary of Angus and Robertson Publications but I can’t be sure.

As for the plot, the back cover blurb gives a pretty good indication of what the prospective reader is in for.

“Beside Elmore stand the sugar bags full of jewels, which rest on piles of furs. The floyer is littered with Dior gowns and hand-made dinner suits, there is broken glass everywhere and congealed blood, bloody footprints left by the naked hostages’ track on the first night right the way down the wide front stairs, black-brown stains on the white in the strengthening morning sun. And then getting stronger, the sound Elmore’s always dreading, waiting for, the ratchetting drone of the helicopters.

Diamonds and decorations, tiaras and furs and white, white smiles; the rich, the powerful, the royal, the noble, the great – the opening of the Sydney Opera House was to be their personal celebration. Only the Black October movement had other ideas…”

I know I’ve been going on a lot on this site about Crime Factory Publications in the lead up to our March 5 launch.

Yes, that’s the one with readings from Edger Award winning author Megan Abbott, acclaimed Irish thriller writer Adrian McKinty, Perth-based crime writer David Whish-Wilson and author of the Simone Kirsch PI series, Leigh Redhead.

Well, I just wanted to give you a sneak peak at the cover for our Australian print only version of the book that came out last year through New Pulp Press in the US, Crime Factory: The First Shift. It includes stories by Ken Bruen (London Boulevard), Roger Smith (Dust Devils), Frank Bill (Crimes in Southern Indiana), Hilary Davidson (The Damage Done) and 23 others. First Shift is a great opportunity for local readers to check out the new wave of noir and hard-boiled writers in the United States who you won’t see much of in Australian bookshops.

We’ll be selling it on the night. It’ll also be available as print on demand from our website www.thecrimefactory.com

Anyway, while Iv’e got your attention, just a quick reminder that the venue on March 5 is Grumpy’s Green, 125 Smith Street, Fitzroy. Kick off is 7pm, with readings starting around 8pm. Entry is free but you’ll have to pay for the books and booze.

I’ve been an Adrian McKinty fan ever since reading Falling Glass last year and was keen as hell to get his latest, The Cold Cold Ground.

McKinty’s books are the kind of crime fiction I love, sharp, well written, combining political analysis with a hard noir edge.

I’ll be doing a longer review of The Cold Cold Ground in the next issue of Crime Factory. I just wanted to do a short post on it here, partly because it’s such a good book and deserves all the kudos is can garner and partly because it’s another chance for me to spruik the launch of Crime Factory Publications on March 5. McKinty will be one of the authors attending and reading from his work, along with Megan Abbott, David Whish Wilson and Leigh Redhead.

The Cold Cold Ground is set in the spring of 1981. Sean Duffy is a cosmopolitan, well education Catholic cop posted to the fiercely Protestant working class town of Carrickfergus. In other words, a complete fish out of water.

As if it’s not bad enough that Duffy has to start every day checking under his car for IRA bombs, the economy is collapsing and civil war seems imminent following the death of Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands.

A body is found in a burnt out car. That’s nothing unusual except it’s got someone else’s right arm, suggesting there’s more than one victim. When another body is found, it appears a serial killer is on the loose. With police resources stretched to the limit, Duffy is given the case.

Things become even more complicated when a young woman, the wife of an IRA hunger striker, is found hung in a forest. Was it suicide or murder? Duffy’s gut tells him there’s a connection between the two cases.

The Cold Cold Ground is a white-knuckle ride through Ireland’s Catholic-Protestant conflict. In addition to murderous Protestant paramilitaries and the highest levels of the Irish republican movement, the story traverses abortion, homophobia, racism, every open sore in North Ireland’s history.

Growing up in the late seventies and early eighties I vividly remember the black and white images of conflict that seemed to appear on our television screen on an almost nightly basis. McKinty’s ability to recreate the sense of bleakness and dread that must have charaterised those times, often in just a few sentences, is second to none.

“Darkest Ulster in the Year of our Lord 1981: rain on the gable, helicopters flying over the lough, a riot reduced to the occasional rumble….”

Or this passage about when Duffy has to attend a funeral in Belfast:

“Rows of neat, well tended graves, gravel paths, trees. Signs of trouble already over the Lagan in the west and north of the city. Smoke curling over a dozen hijacked cars. Army helicopters hovering over potential foci and already that atmosphere that you only ever find in cities on the brink.”

The Cold Cold Ground is the first of three book series featuring Duffy. Given McKinty’s recent criticism of most crime fiction series as sterile and predictable, it’ll be interesting to see where he takes Duffy from here.

If McKinty’s previous form is any indication there’s little doubt he’s got the skill to keep us guessing.

Adrian McKinty will be reading a the launch of Crime Factory Publications, March 5 is Grumpy’s Green, 125 Smith Street, Fitzroy. Kick off is 7pm, with readings starting around 8pm. Entry is free but you’ll have to pay for the books and booze.

A couple of months ago on this blog I mentioned 2012 was going to be a big year for me. In addition to several short stories coming out around the place in the next couple of months, my novel will be out as an e-book around mid-year with Snubnose Press. On top of all this, I’ve now got my own slice of the publishing business (he says, tongue firmly in cheek).

The Crime Factory crew have been discussing taking our work to the next level for a while now. Several factors drove the decision to finally bite the bullet.

First and foremost, nine issues of Crime Factory magazine (of which I’ve been on board for the last four) have given us contacts and access to quality crime fiction from great writers. We don’t always make the most of this and push the great writing we get as much as possible. Starting our own outfit is one way to reverse this situation. We also wanted to raise the profile of the magazine here in Australia where, in comparison to the US, we’re pretty much unknown.

Second, technology such as e-books and print on demand makes it possible for very small players like us to get material out there, even if it’s only to a niche audience.

Third, while there’s some great Australian crime fiction being published, the local scene is always not exactly bursting with diversity and genre fiction still very much plays second fiddle to capital ‘L’ literature, including in crime writing.

You’ve heard me bemoan the state of affairs on this blog many times. There’s no need to do it again.

Fourth, the three of us had this crazy feeling it might be the right time to do this, that we could pull it off. We reckon, just maybe, there’s a local audience for the crime fiction we like, stuff that’s a bit darker and different to much of the crime fiction currently published.

If that sounds naive or arrogant I don’t mean it to. All I am saying is that rather than sit around and analyse or complain we figured it’s a more productive use of our time to get out there and do something different.

In other words, it was time to put up or shut up.

Over the last few months we’ve put together a new website and a brand spanking new logo which adorns this post. We have also put together an awesome night of entertainment on March 5.

On hand to help us launch Crime Factory Publications will be Edger Award winning author Megan Abbott (you can see my previous raves about her work on this blog here and here) and acclaimed Irish thriller writer Adrian McKinty. I reviewed McKinty’s book, Falling Glass, last year on this blog. I’ve just finished his latest, The Cold Cold Ground and its every bit as good. Representing the Australian scene will be Perth-based crime writer David Whish-Wilson and author of the Simone Kirsch PI series, Leigh Redhead.

All the authors will be reading from their work and the good folks of Brunswick Bound bookstore will be on hand should anything take your fancy.

We’ll also be selling an Australian print only version of the book that came out last year through New Pulp Press in the US, Crime Factory: The First Shift. It includes stories by Ken Bruen (London Boulevard), Roger Smith (Dust Devils), Frank Bill (Crimes in Southern Indiana), Hilary Davidson (The Damage Done) and 23 others. First Shift is a great opportunity for local readers to check out the new wave of noir and hard-boiled writers in the United States who you won’t see much of in Australian bookshops.

We plan to follow this up a little later in the year with an all-Australian crime fiction anthology, Crime Factory: Hard Labour, which I’m helping edit. Although the exact line-up has yet to be finalised, so far it’s looking pretty impressive, with stories from name players such as Redhead, Helen Fitzgerald, Whish Wilson and Angela Savage, and a number of emerging writers.

We have also snagged the first ever Wyatt story by Garry Disher, ‘Wyatt’s Art’.  ’Wyatt’s Art’ was originally published as ‘Cody’s Art’ in 1990 and ‘Wyatt’s Art’ in 1998, the last time it saw publication. Hard Labour will be available as an e-book and print on demand publication.

The venue on March 5 is Grumpy’s Green, 125 Smith Street, Fitzroy. Kick off is 7pm, with readings starting around 8pm.

Entry is free but you’ll have to pay for the books and booze.

Get a sitter. It’s going to be a great night and a fitting start to what’s going to be a wild ride.