It’s also one of the more unusual pieces of pulp fiction produced in the sixties and seventies in response to the real and imagined goings on in Sydney’s notorious vice strip, Kings Cross.

I just love the cover of this book. The minimal furnishings, the title font, the female model, who I presume is supposed to look ‘Satanic’ but comes across more as a sort of sullen drag queen. It speaks of things that just shouldn’t be talked about in polite company, which, in turn, only makes me more curious.

Kings Cross Black Magic was released by Horwitz publications in 1965. According to the University of Ortago’s wonderful pulp fiction website, Attila Zohar was a pseudonym for James Holledge. Holledge was a former clerk who became part of the stable of in-house writers brought together by Horwitz in the early sixties. He wrote approximately 45 books between 1961 and 1970, most of them salacious journalistic tracks parading as sociological expose.

His titles included Australia’s Wicked Women (1963), Crimes Which Shocked Australia (1963) and Women Who Sell Sex (1964) and What Makes a Call Girl (1964). Full makes if you can start to see a pattern here. National borders were no barrier to Holledge. Kimono Strip (1965) was as expose of sex industry in Japan, “a country of ten thousand pleasures”. Paris After Dark (1965) promised an “expose of the fabulous city of women, strip tease, folies and a new type of call girl”.

It’s fairly safe to assume Horwitz’s expense account didn’t stretch to actually paying for Holledge to travel to either Japan or France and, in the era before the Internet, one can only imagine him having to piece together those exposes from library books, the odd film and his fevered imagination.

Teenage Jungle, published in 1964 (cover below) is another classic Holledge effort. In what could have been pulled straight from last night’s episode of A Current Affair, it was billed as a “confidential report” that “explodes the teenage myth”. The front cover screamed: “Boys and girls alike nowadays are a rough, cruel, crude collection, thinking largely in terms of sex and sadism…”

In between his various exposes, Holledge found time to pen his share of Nazi and Japanese prison camp atrocity books.

Kings Cross Black Magic was presumably written to cash in on the tabloid feeding frenzy around Roseleen Norton, dubbed the “Witch of Kings Cross”. The back cover blurb is terrific:

“Behind the glittering panorama of strip joints and all male shows the Cross has another facade… mysterious sinister, that ensnares the unwary into Satanic séances and the depraved orgies of black magic. Frenzied sex rites take place which stun and horrify.”

If you’re interested in seeing more Holledge titles, there’s a great selection of them on this Pinterest site here.

Earlier this year I did a series of posts on my love of heist films, what my favourite ones are, and how they differ from caper films.

The number one rule of a solid heist film is the heist always, always goes wrong, whereas caper films put more emphasis on comedy and the criminals often get away with it.

What to make, then, of the 1978 Canadian film, The Silent Partner?

I’d heard about this film around the traps, never prioritised viewing it because of the star, Elliot Gould, an actor I’ve never much cared for, and what I perceived to be its caper feel.

Wow, was I wrong.

Gould plays Miles Cullen, a teller in a small bank in a large Toronto shopping mall. He’s a boring nobody who secretly lusts after another teller, Julie (played by Susannah York), and whose only passion is collecting tropical fish.

That all changes the day he learns the bank is about to be robbed after finding a discarded note on one the bank’s counters. He quickly deduces that the culprit is a guy in a Santa suit whose working the crowd outside the bank and whose ‘give to charity sign’ is done in the same hand writing as the discarded note.

But instead of telling his boss or going to the cops Miles devises a plan to keep most of the cash from his transactions, thus ensuring that when Santa robs the bank he’ll get far less money.

It’s a bad move. Santa is a career criminal called Harry Reikle (a brilliant and very different performance by Christopher Plummer). Reilke likes to wear mascara and dress in drag. He got a thing for beating up and raping unsuspecting women who attend the local sauna he hangs out at. And it doesn’t take him long to figure out that he take from the robbery is far less than it should be and there’s only person who could have the money.

Reikle embarks on a campaign to intimidate Miles to give him the additional money, a campaign that quickly escalates from threatening calls in the middle of the night too much more serious methods of persuasion. Miles resists, in the process throwing aside his inhibitions and engineering a series of devious counter moves.

It’s virtually impossible to go further without engaging in some major plot spoilers.h. Just go and see it. Seriously, it’s a terrific film that defies being easily categorised into either a heist or caper film. The Silent Partner also has a great seventies period feel, John Candy plays one of Mile’s co-workers, and features the only murder I can remember seeing being committed on screen using a fish tank.

My Google Alerts have been running hot with mention of it. Unfortunately, they are not referring to my gritty crime thriller set in mid-nineties Cambodia. They are referring to secret payments made by Afghanistan’s prime minister Hamid Karzai by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, with the aim of maintaining access to the Afghan leader and his top allies and officials.

The only type of Ghost Money I want to hear about is the type pictured above.

Here’s the pitch:

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan.

But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up with Heng Sarin, a local journalist, Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.

Ghost Money is a crime nove about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices they make, what they do to survive.

Ghost Money is still getting great reviews. It’s available as a digital book in print here.

For readers in Sydney who have yet to pick up a copy, print editions of Ghost Money are also available at Pages and Pages Bookstore, 878 Military Road, Mosman.

A lot of the books we consider radical or counter cultural pulp fiction where written by people who, in reality, had nothing to with the actual scene but just wanted to cash in on it.

Today’s Pulp Friday book, Trashing, was written by someone intimately involved in the sixties counter culture. Released by Belmont Tower Books in 1972, the author, Ann Fettamen, was a pseudonym for Anita Hoffman, wife of Abbie Hoffman. In true Yippie style, Hoffman puffed the book (“Ann Fettamen is the Nancy Drew of the revolution… Trashing makes Harold Robbins read like Homer”). So did fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin.

The book is a semi-autobilographical tale of a young woman who gets involved in the counter culture after meeting a charismatic revolutionary, and engages in all manner of Yippie activities.

The back cover blurb is as follows:

“The perils of Ann.

Orgies, drugs, stealing and revolutionary mad-making are part of the underground’s daily life. When Ann, a nice girl from a good home, falls in love with a subterranean guru she meets the hippies head-on. After an LSD wedding in Central Park, Ann settles for the humdrum existence of pot-smoking, group sex and biker rumbles, credit card stealing and takeover of the New York Stock Exchange. An all-too-true saga of the youth movement today.”

I first saw Trashing reviewed in Iain McIntyre’s wonderful book Sticking It to the Man! This book is almost impossible to get hold of. Thanks to Iain for the loan of it here.

A heads up that issue 13 of Crime Factory is out (with cover design by the one and only Eric Beetner, who also did the cover for my novel, Ghost Money)

In this issue I talk to Dwayne Epstein, author of the new Lee Marvin bio, Lee Marvin Point Blank, about Marvin’s life and movies and what it was like to research a book on one of the true icons of masculine cool.

But that’s just one piece among many, including:

Michael A Gonzales interviews Gary Phillips and Tommy Hancock, creators of the new anthology, Black Pulp.

Ruth Dugdall talks working with and writing about criminals with Angela Savage.

Tom Darin Liskey gives true crime reportage from Indian Country.

Elusive Ozploitation icon Roger Ward is interviewed about his career by James Hopwood.

Plus Kennedy assassination pulp fiction (and no, I didn’t know such a thing existed either before this issue, either), great fiction and reviews.

It’s a bargain at 99 cents for the Kindle version or $5.99 plus postage for the print version.

Or, if you’re on a budget (or just stingy), you can download the PDF here for free.

And Melbourne folk, while I’m pulling on your coat about Crime Factory related matters, this coming Tuesday, May 14, Crime Factory Publications is proud to be teaming up with Cinecult 303 for a screening of Lee Marvin’s cult classic, Prime Cut (which I reviewed on this site here).

Come along, 7pm, at 303 High St, Northcote.

Starring Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman and Sissy Spacek, this 1972 film is eighty-eight minutes of pulp weirdness – part exploitation flick, part brutal, hard-boiled, crime story. Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a tough as nails enforcer who is hired to go to Kansas City and retrieve half a million dollars owed to the Chicago mob by a slaughterhouse Kingpin called Mary Ann.

For sale at the event will be Crime Factory Publications’ Lee Marvin inspired anthology, LEE. It should be a great night.

One of the most successful pulp fiction related posts to date on this site was a selection of Asian themed pulp fiction paperback covers I put up in 2011, Behind the bamboo screen: Asian pulp covers of the sixties and seventies.

For a while now I’ve been planning a follow up and here it is.

As was the case in the original post, the covers below portray the anti-communist hysteria created by the rise of the so-called ‘red menace’ as well the fate of innocent (and not so innocent) Westerners thrown into chaos and intrigue of the ‘Far east’, a place of intrigue, “notorious pleasure palaces” and “forbidden desire”.

Hong Kong was a popular setting of Asian themed pulp fiction, as evidenced by titles such as A Coffin From Hong Kong (“A seemingly innocent telephone call led him to the murder of a Chinese call-girl who had talked to much and into the teeming, sordid nightlife of colourful Hong Kong”).

Other locales portrayed below include, Korea (The Turncoat), China (Shanghai Incident – “I had two callers my first night in Shanghai – death and a honey blonde”), the “South Seas” (November Reef), India (Men and Angels), Burma (The House of Bamboo – “In a Burmese girl’s warm, seductive beauty he found escape from the flames of forbidden desire”), and Thailand (Port Orient).

The bad guys include the usual assortment of Red Chinese communist agents, assorted scheming femme fatales and evil Asian crime lords.

If this post has wet your appetite for more Asian themed pulp, you’ll find much more here on my Pinterest site.

“A sadistic maniac was developing a deadly virus by using children as guinea pigs.”

Vigilantes were one of the key themes of the muscular over the top world of seventies pulp fiction. And one of the biggest, meanest and weirdest of them was John Yard aka The Hunter.

Published in 1975, The Deadly Prey is one of four books I know of in The Hunter series, the other titles being Scavenger Kill, Track of the Beast and A Taste for Blood. All of them were released by New York pulp publisher, Leisure Books. You’ll find the covers to the other three books here on my Pinterest site.

Yard is a former African game hunter who has changed professions and, along with his side kick, Moses Ngala, now works as a gun for hire.

The subject of his attentions in The Deadly Prey is a mad scientist who is testing a lethal super virus on the inhabitants of an Appalachian hippy commune. Unfortunately for the scientists and his backers in the military industrial complex, one of the kids he kills happens to be the son of one of Yard’s former hunting partners and, of course, a former Green Beret.

Whatever, the back cover blurb does much more justice to the story than I ever could.

“Sadistic Maniac

In Appalachia, a twisted scientist was developing a super deadly virus that could be used for bacteriological warfare. Before long, he began using human beings as guinea pigs – and one them, a young man from a nearby commune, died a hideously painful death as a result.

His death would have gone unnoticed if his father had not asked Moses Ngala to find out what became of his son. Moses found the boy in a shallow grave, and also found that there was no legal recourse against the scientist. That was when he called in John Yard – The Hunter – and together they set out to claim a bloodcurdling vengeance against a sadistic maniac.”

“Well Ma’am if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.” 

The late Roger Ebert called it the “Stanton-Walsh Rule”. Any movie “featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M.Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can’t be altogether bad”.

I’ve always liked Walsh as a character actor. But it was only when I recently re-watched the Cohen Bother’s Blood Simple after many year, that I realised just how on the money Ebert was.

Walsh plays a seedy PI called Loren Visser. Visser hired by a rich Texan bar owner, Julian (Dan Hedaya), to kill his wife, Abby (a very young Francis McDormand), who is cheating with one of Julian’s employees, Ray (John Getz).

If you haven’t seen Blood Simple, it won’t spoil your viewing pleasure too much if I tell you Visser kills Julian, tries to frame Abbey for the murder, and all manner of hell is unleashed.

On one level, Blood Simple comes across as a fairly standard small town film noir. Characters chase their own shadows and do very bad things in an effort to extract themselves from an increasingly fraught and dangerous situation.

What really raises it about the pack of similar films is the Cohen brother’s signature brand of dark weirdness, which managers to be both restrained and shocking. There’s a fair bit of violence (the title Blood Simple is taken from a phrase in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest to describe the addled and fearful mindset of individuals emerging from a violent situation). Someone gets buried alive and Visser ends up chasing Abby around Ray’s apartment at night, a scene that strangely reminded me of the final moments of Blade Runner.

Walsh totally owns this film. Clad in his cowboy hat and cheap beige leisure suit, he imbues Visser with a sick, sweaty reptilian sleaze. It’s a master class in how to do a down at heel, doublecrossing PI. He also gets all the best dialogue, including the last line of the film, uttered as he lies mortally wounded on a bathroom floor.

It’s the second time recently I’ve been struck by how good a character Walsh is.

The other was his turn as Dustin Hoffman’s ball breaking parole officer in the terrific 1978 film, Straight Time. Based on the No Best So Fierce, by real life con Edward Bunker (who has a small role in the film), I love  everything about this film, the script, the down at heel late seventies feel and the cast.

Straight Time has a real tension to it, in large part derived from Hoffman’s attempt to stay out of prison and on the right side of Walsh’s character. Interestingly, Harry Dean Stanton, the other half of Ebert’s rule, has an excellent role in Straight Time as Hoffman’s offsider in an ill-fated jewelry store heist.

Other great Walsh performances include Bryan, Deckard’s cold-blooded boss in Blade Runner, and his role as Sergeant Sanger along side James Woods in the little known 1982 movie, Fast Walking, about a prison guard who finds himself the subject of unwanted demands by both the Klan and a group of Black radicals, when a radical black nationalist is transferred into the jail.

Maybe now I need to check out Harry Dean Stanton’s films a bit more?

In a sign of just how much Australia’s culture is on the skids, this site, Pulp Curry, is to be added in the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA Archive.

PANDORA is the National Library e-archive dedicated to enabling the long term preservation of online publications to ensure Australians have access to their documentary heritage now and in the future.

It’s a wonderful honour for my site to be included on the PANDORA Archive. I also get a thrill out of the fact that future generations will be able to check out my musings on Australian and international crime fiction and film, obscure pulp novels and associated topics.

For some reason, it reminds me of that scene from one of my favourite seventies dystopian science fiction films, Rollerball, when Jonathan E visits the super computer Zero to try and find out more about the corporations running the planet.

This is what he finds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0

Photo credit: Angela Savage

Regular readers will be familiar by now with my admiration for the late Donald Westlake. Westlake was the hard boiled writer’s hard-boiled crime writer, having penned numerous books over his career, including the wonderful Parker novels under the pseudonym of Richard Stark.

Today’s Pulp Friday is one of Westlake’s early efforts, The Smashers, aka The Cutie, aka The Mercenaries. This edition is the first Dell publication in 1960.

The Smashers was Westlake’s official fiction debut under his real name. His previous fiction efforts, like those of his peer Lawrence Block, were soft porn paperbacks written under other names (here’s a nice post on one of these titles Back Stage Love - ”The Shocking expose of what goes on behind the scenes at a summer stock theatre”).

The Smashers is the story of Clay, the right hand man of New York mob boss Ed Ganolese. Clay gets a late night call from a junkie with a dead woman on his hands and the police on his tail. The junkie claims he’s innocent and because he’s connected to Ganolese, Clay has to adopt the role of a PI and find out who the real killer is.

It’s an early and interesting take on the criminal as protagonist that Westlake was subsequently to perfect with his Parker books.

I think you’ll agree the cover art is great. The back cover blurb is short and to the point:

“The blistering story of a syndicate overlord, the men who enforce his private law, and the women who answered his personal calls…”

I must confess this is one of the few Westlake books I haven’t read. That’s something I plan on rectifying sooner rather than later.

Since Ghost Money came out as an e-book at the end of October last year a number of you have been asking when it will be available as a print publication.

Well that time has come.

The print edition of Ghost Money will set you back $15 plus postage and is available here from Amazon.

For those of you who haven’t picked it up yet and prefer the e-book experience you can still pick up Ghost Money for your Kindle or e-reader for $3.99 .

Either way it’s a bargain for a slice of Asian favoured crime fiction that the prestigious UK site, Crime Fiction Lover called “the Third Man of Asian noir”.

As always if you have read Ghost Money it’d be great if you could leave feedback on Amazon or Goodreads and, most importantly, drop me a line and let me know what you think.

“Mike Brand’s most sinister adversary – Cyn Boudin, high priestess with a lust for power.” 

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is a wonderful piece of forgotten Australian pulp, Sinquake by Gene Janes.

Sinquake was produced by little known local pulp publisher and distributor, Calvert Publishing  After Horwitz Publications and Cleveland, Calvert may well have been one of Australia’s largest publisher of paper backs in the fifties and sixties. Calvert published the Carl Dekker ‘On the Spot’ mystery series, as well as a large number of Westerns, war and romance novels.

There’s no publication date for Sinquake but it was probably released some time in the early to mid-sixties, before the introduction of decimal currency in 1966. The cover was supplied to me courtesy of local pulp collector, Graeme Flanagan.

Sinquake features Mike Brand, an Australian trouble-shooter for the British secret service. I’ll let the back cover blurb explain the rest.

“The Soviet was using the enormous appeal of BLACK MAGIC, with its terrifying rites and orgies, together with the sensual and seductive beauty of “SIN” – Mademoiselle Cynbarra Boudin, the high priestess of the Cult’s British circle, to ensnare top political and diplomatic figures into compromising situations.

With recent scandals as a blue-print, the political stability of the Free World is threatened by moral chaos.

The entire force of both the British and Commonwealth Secret Service is thrown into battle in a desperate attempt to thwart Russian plans for destruction.

“SINQUAKE” is something new in suspense.”

Enjoy.

There’s already been a bit of chatter on Twitter about other actors people would like to see as the subject of their own fictional anthology, and several authors have contacted me with ideas.

There are only two criteria involved I can think of in choosing a subject.

First, the subject concerned has got to be deceased, preferably passed a while ago. It’s just too complex, legally and other ways to do an anthology based on someone living.

Second, there’s got to be something about them. Not just an interesting body of cinematic work and an interesting life, but an ongoing cultural resonance or zeitgeist that sets them apart from other actors and allows crime writers discuss broader issues.

Here are my picks for actors I think would be good subjects. And I should stress, these are just my musings and in no way reflect what Crime Factory will do in the future.

That said, you never know….

Warren Oates

There’s already been a bit of social media chatter about the possibility of a Warren Oates inspired anthology. Indeed, Blood and Tacos editor Johnny Shaw has already nominated a title, Wild Oates.

Born in a small community in Kentucky, Oates got his start in Westerns and TV serials in the late fifties, before going onto to amass an impressive list of cult films. These included Two Lane Black Top, Dillinger, Badlands, Cockfighter (based on the Charles Willeford novel of the same name), 92 in the Shade, the occult masterpiece Race with the Devil and Stripes, just to name a few.

He was a frequent collaborator with the wild man of sixties/seventies US cinema, Sam Peckinpah, which in itself would be interesting fodder for fiction. He did three of his best known films with the director, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and the film everyone would be fighting to tackle, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Oates belongs to that group of US actors, like Marvin, that hit their stride in the sixties, and who you can’t imagine doing nearly as well now. That face for a start, like a section of broken freeway. It was also the period in which the Hollywood studio system was in crisis and scrambling to deal with the counter culture and the impact of the Vietnam War. Many of my favourite US films were made during this time.

And Wild Oates is a great title.

Stanley Baker

If there was ever a British equivalent of the tough, macho persona of Lee Marvin, Stanley Baker was it. Born in a dirt poor Welsh coal mining village (he was a life long friend of that other famous son of Welsh miners turned actor, Richard Burton), Baker grew up a self described “wild child”, only interested in football, boxing and drinking.

He got his start with Ealing Studios in the early forties and his break through role was the wonderful 1957 British noir, Hell Drivers. In 1960, Baker starred in the critically acclaimed noir, The Criminal, directed by Joseph Losey. In 1961, he was offered and knocked back the role of James Bond in Dr No. He went onto start his own production company that birthed, amongst other films, Zulu and the Italian Job. He also branched out into funding rock festivals. Baker’s career suffered with the decline of the British film industry in the late sixties, after which he had to take whatever work he was could get. A lifelong socialist and a heavy smoker, he died of complications from lung cancer in 1976.

Other favourite Baker films of mine include Hell Is a City, The Guns of Navarone, the underrated spy film Innocent Bystanders and the excellent heist movie, based on the great train robbery, Robbery.

Gloria Grahame

For my money Gloria Grahame personified the femme fatale of the classic film noir period.

She was an under rated actress. She totally owned In a Lonely Place, the film she did with Humphrey Bogart, and received an Oscar for Crossfire, which she starred in along side Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan.

But the role I most remember her for is Debby March, the doomed gang floozy in Fitz Lang’s Big Heat who gets scalding coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin, on whom she subsequently extracts her revenge.

Grahame got her start in the mid-forties, never really shook the tag of the tough as nails, hard-bitten, promiscuous noir femme fatale. She was married four times (including to director Nicholas Ray and a former step son) and died in 1981 at the terribly young age of just 57 from complications arising from breast cancer. Other films I loved her in included Odds Against Tomorrow, Naked Alibi and Oklahoma.

There’s something about Grahame’s persona that would be great to explore in a fictional anthology. It would also be fascinating to explore the studio system and film noir from her perspective.

Sterling Hayden

Although he was best known for his role as the mad US military commander, Brigadier General Jack Ripper in Kubrick’s Dr Stangelove, Hayden made a lot of films, including a lot of war movies and westerns I’ve never seen and a number of good noirs I have.

The latter include the granddaddy of heist films, John Huston’s 1950 classic, Asphalt Jungle, The Naked Alibi (1954), in which he played opposite Grahame, and with Kubrick again in the 1956 movie, The Killing.

Other films I’ve seen and liked him in include the first The Godfather film (1972), where he played the crooked Irish cop, McCluskey, and Johnny Guitar (1954), one of the strangest Westerns ever made, as Johnny ‘Logan’ Guitar.

Although Paramount Studio once billed him “the most beautiful man in movies”, I’ve never thought of him as especially attractive. He does, however, exude an intense, hard-nosed masculinity that perfectly fitted the noir sensibility of the late forties, early fifties. He was no pretty boy. He had a face that looked like it had seen things.

Hayden played a lot of cops, all of them cynical, world-weary men who don’t give a damn. Why did he pull off these parts so well? It wasn’t an act. Hayden actually didn’t give a goddamn about the movie business or the films he was in.

Hayden got his start in movies in 1941. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour he abandoned Hollywood, changed his name and enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. He ran German naval blockades to smuggle guns to Yugoslavian partisans and parachuted into Croatia for guerrilla activities.The shit he must have seen and done.

After the war, he briefly joined the Communist Party and campaigned in support of the ‘Hollywood 19’ against the House of Un-American Activities Committee. He only returned to film work only order to pay for his great passion, sailing boats. He even got jaded on politics, saying he regretted joining the Party and only did it so he could hang around drunk at parties and chase women.

All in all, a life that screams inspiration for possible fiction anthology.

What do you think of my choices. Who would yours be?

LEE is available in hard copy from the Crime Factory site and for your Kindle from Amazon here.

You can purchase LEE for your Kindle here for $2.99. The dead tree book is also available from the Crime Factory site for $15.00.

Regular readers will have heard me go on about the LEE anthology a few times on this site. I helped edit LEE, along with my fellow Crime Factory editor Cameron Ashley and founder of the original Crime Factory Magazine, Dave Honeybone, and I’m particularly proud of it.

It features seventeen crime writers, including established pros and newbies such as myself, riffing on various aspects of the fictional life of one of our favourite cultural icons, Lee Marvin.

There’s what Lee got up to off the set of the little known 1955 film, Shack Out on 101, Lee dealing with Apartheid during the filming of Shout at the Devil, Lee at the 1966 Oscars where he won a gong for Cat Bellou, fishing form marlin off the coast of Queensland, lending a helping hand to the props man on the classic Point Blank, coming off second best from an encounter with Andy Warhol at Studio 54.

As one of the editors you’d expect to say how good the book is, but seriously, virtually every story is a winner. Don’t take my word for it, here’s what others are saying about LEE:

“This collection delivers. The writing is pungent, sly and muscular, dark and comic and all of it has tremendous energy. A love of film and love of noir is evident in every story. This does Lee proud.”

Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap and Dead Europe

“This collection of short fiction puts legendary actor Lee Marvin smack dab in the centre of the action where he belongs.”

Dwayne Epstein, author of Lee Marvin Point Blank

“LEE is a surprisingly smart, fun and downright entertaining read. It has an undeniably pulpy feel and a masculine edge that’s reminiscent of early crime fiction but it’s also laugh out loud funny at times, as well as thoughtful, perceptive and engaging.”

Kimberly Lindburgs, Movie Morelocks 

“In my eyes, anthologies are hit or miss affairs. Very few are solid all the way through. When you have one with a premise such as this one, the bar is set high. I loved it. It was original. In some of the stories you can actually hear Marvin’s voice.”

Crimespree Magazine

“It seems like every individual involved with creating this collection has a real affection for Marvin and that transfers to the stories told even when he’s a painted as a total bastard. I had a blast from start to finish.”

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So what are you waiting for? If you’re a Lee Marvin fan, and chances are if you are reading this site you are, why not pick up a copy for yourself and see what people are talking about.

And while I’m pulling on your coat, the first of our novella series, Fierce Bitches by US author Jedidiah Ayres – already being touted in various people’s top ten lists for 2013 – is also available as an e-book for the same price of $2.99.

Late last week Ieng Sary aka criminal case file 002, former foreign minister for the charnel house known as the Khmer Rouge regime, died in Phnom Penh at the age of eighty seven.

One of five senior members of the Khmer Rouge being investigated by an international tribunal, Sary died denying he had any role in overseeing the death by starvation, torture and murder of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and early 1979.

Unfortunately, he escaped justice, dying before the tribunal could hand down its findings into his case.

Described in the charge sheet as ‘retired’, he lived peacefully in the former guerilla strong hold of Pailin until 2007, when an ageing Soviet-era chopper swooped down and police arrested and bundled him off to Phnom Penh.

For me, the news of the 87-year-old Sary’s death was very much a case of fact and fiction merging.  Sary’s defection from the Khmer Rouge in 1996 forms the historical backdrop of my crime novel set in Cambodia, Ghost Money.

Normally, I’d feel dreadful using someone’s death as an excuse to plug my book, but I’ll make an exception in Sary’s case.

I was just about to a stint as a journalist with one of the wire services in Phnom Penh, when news of Sary’s defection from the Khmer Rouge broke.

Unknown to most foreign observers, the Khmer Rouge has been splintering internally for many years. Partly this was the result of the government’s relentless military operations. More decisive were internal tensions over the movement’s direction and how best to divide the spoils from the guerrillas’ logging and gem mining operations along the border with Thailand.

At the time Sary claimed he’d grown sick of fighting and wanted to end the war. A more significant influence were reports Khmer Rouge hardliners under Pol Pot had discovered Sary was skimming the proceeds from gem mining and logging operations, and were about to move against him.

Whatever the case, both sides of Cambodia’s dysfunctional coalition government courted Sary and his not inconsiderable military clout for their own ends. Sary, meanwhile, used his position to stay one step ahead of a prison cell. It was a bizarre, increasingly acrimonious game of cat and mouse that eventually resulted in open warfare between the two coalition partners.

But that’s another story.

Over a decade later, when I was again working in Cambodia as a journalist, I watched Sary sit in the dock of the international criminal tribunal, flanked by security guards.

Sary complained of dizziness and at one point in the proceedings, asked that the hearing into his case be adjourned on the grounds that he had spent his lunch break being examined by a doctor and was hungry. I recall thinking the irony of that statement would not have been lost of the older Cambodians watching the nationally televised proceedings, who would have been able to remember eating rats, spiders, lizards and anything else they could find to ward off starvation under the Khmer Rouge.

Many historians maintain Sary’s membership of the Communist Party’s Central Committee leaves little doubt of his involvement in Khmer Rouge decision-making processes. He was also responsible for sending Cambodian diplomats and students returning from abroad after the war to Tuol Sleng, Pol Pot’s infamous torture chamber.

Sary’s wife, Ieng Thirith, was also charged with war crimes for her role in the murder of hundreds of her staff while she was the regime’s Minister of Social Action. Thirith, whose fearsome demeanour could be described as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest with Maoist characteristics, also maintained her innocence.

Her lawyer at the time I was covering the tribunal, argued she was mentally unstable and many believed she would try and cop an insanity plea to get out the proceedings. They were close. She was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and discharged on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Kaing Guek Eav aka Duch, the former head of Tuol Sleng, was found guilty in 2010. That leaves Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s right hand man, and Khieu Samphan, another powerful official in the Khmer Rouge, left to stand trial. Both of them are old and in all likelihood may not survive to be hear the tribunal’s verdict.

I found it a genuinely moving experience to watch Sary sit in court with only protective glass separating him from hundreds of ordinary Cambodians, farmers, students, monks, many of them victims of his regime.

Despite all the problems with the tribunal, it’s rare for ordinary Cambodians  to see the powerful held accountable for crimes they have committed. If it does nothing else, hopefully the tribunal has given them a taste for it.

Ghost Money is a hard-boiled crime story set in the nineties, when Cambodia was a broken country, still trying to recover from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. If there is one thing everyone who has reviewed it agrees on, it’s a vivid evocation of that period of time in the country’s history. If you’re interested in Cambodia and this period of history, you can purchase it for your Kindle here. It is also available in generic e-pub format and I am currently working with the publisher, Snubnose Press, for a hard copy to be released. Hopefully, this will be available in the next few weeks.

Photograph courtesy of the ECCC.

“Loaded with money – starved for sex – and her favorite dish was Sin a l Carte. The story of a summer hotel that gave women what they wanted – for a price.”

When it comes to quality sleaze pulp the serious collector can’t go past the books produced Midwood in the late fifties and sixties.

I don’t know a lot about this New York based publishing outfit, except that they produced some classic sleaze pulp. Lesbians sex, trailer park trash, suburban infidelity, nyphomaniacs, illicit sexual on campus, in the office, in a remote swamp community. You name it, there was a Midwood book dealing with it, always accompanied by appropriately suggestive titles and lurid cover art.

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is a classic example, Sin a la Carte (formerly known as Another Night, Another Love), by Loren Beauchamp, published by Midwood in 1962.

There’s nothing I can say about this book that isn’t perfectly captured in the by the back cover below.

You can find second hand Midwood pulps on the web but, be warned, they are not cheap.

If you want to see more head over the excellent site Pulp International, which has a great selection of Midwood books (as well as just about every other type of pulp book and magazine imaginable).

Have a great weekend.

While it is not be as well known, Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fight is as good as anything that’s come out of the southern US, a searing story of masculinity, drinking and violence in regional Australia that still packs a punch today.

Fear of being trapped in the outback, as we call the vast expanse of harsh terrain that makes up the majority of Australia, is still semi hard-wired into the psyche of most city dwelling Australians. So, imagine how terrifying the prospect was in the sixties, when our interior was so much more remote and alien.

John Grant is a mild mannered teacher working in a tiny speck of a town called Tiboonda. Its isolation and distance from the coast has obliterated nearly all aspects of civilisation, except the ability of the local pub to keep the beer cold. As Grant puts it: “In the winter you wished for the summer, in the summer you wished for the winter, and all the time you wished to blazes you were a thousand miles from Tiboonda.”

Grant has six weeks leave ahead of him and 140 pounds in his pocket. All that stands between him and six weeks in Sydney and a chance to seduce the standoffish Robyn, is an overnight train stop in Bundanyabba or ‘the Yabba’ as the locals call it.

That is until he wanders into one of the Yabba’s local pubs and loses nearly all his money in a two up game. He wakes next morning, broke and at the mercy of the locals who, as he discovers, can literally kill a stranger with their brand of kindness.

Nursing a beer bought with some of his last remain funds, Grant is trying to plot how he can escape the Yabba, when he is befriended by one of the local mine managers, a man called Haynes. Haynes has taken him home for a roast and what turns into an all night drinking session with other men from the mine.

Grant wakes up next morning in a shack owned by Doc Tydon, a drifter who has washed up in the Yabba, the only place in Australia where he can practice medicine without the fact he’s an alcoholic being held against him. Just when Grant thinks things can’t get any worse, his mates from the previous evening arrive to take him out for a spot of roo shooting. The ensuring drug and alcohol fuelled carnage, written over 40 pages, is the highlight of Wake in Fright, an incredible visceral series of images and emotions in Cook’s blunt but evocative prose.

“Three of the kangaroos were dead. One had its legs broken and looked at them with undisturbed eyes.

Joe smashed its head in with a branch he broke off a dead tree.

Grant was surprised that he did not feel particularly upset at the mass carnage. They were, after all, only kangaroos.

Joe and Dick each took a carcass, ripped open the belly, spilled out the intestines and sawed off the hindquarters, complete with the long muscular tails.

Grant had never seen anything quite so sudden. In one moment the kangaroos had been quite respectable corpses; in the next they were horrible bits of animals trailing their insides.”

Wake in Fright is a brutal and genuinely menacing story. It was also made into an excellent 1971 film, which helped re-kick start the Australian film industry in the seventies and was unavailable for decades until a copy was found in Pittsburgh shipping container labeled “For Destruction”.

Cook infused the book with his experiences working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the remote Broken Hill region of New South Wales. He handles Grant’s slow descent into the nightmare landscape that is the Yabba with slow burn ferocity, heightening the tension through a series of bizarre interactions with the local residents, Tydon, Haynes and his sexually promiscuous daughter Janette, a simultaneously naïve and menacing local cop, Crawford.

Over half a century since it was published, it’s hard to think of another Australian novel like it.

Wake in Fright was recently re-released by Melbourne publisher Text and is available in print and digital formats.

A heads up that you can now order LEE, Crime Factory’s anthology inspired by iconic American actor Lee Marvin, from our the site.

There’s been a bit of buzz around the traps about LEE and at the risk of sounding immodest, it’s all justified. Seventeen stories ranging from gonzo to literary noir, penned by some of the hottest crime writers around. Here’s what others are saying:

“This collection of short fiction puts legendary actor Lee Marvin smack dab in the center of the action where he belongs.”
Dwayne Epstein, author of Lee Marvin: Point Blank

“This collection delivers. The writing is pungent, sly and muscular, dark and comic, and all of it has a tremendous energy. A love of film and love of noir is evident in every story. This does Lee proud.”
Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap and Dead Europe

I’m excited to say I’ve also got a story in the anthology. I won’t give too much away about it, except to say it titled ‘Gone Fishing’, hence the theme of the photo above.

If you want a sneak peak of LEE, ManArchy is running a excerpt from Irish crime writer Adrian McKinty’s contribution to the anthology, ‘Hospital Ship’, which you can find here.

And if too much Lee Marvin is not nearly enough, you might light to check out my review for ManAnarcy of the recently released Marvin bio by Dwayne Epstein, Lee Marvin Point Blank. You can find it here.

Melbourne folk, a reminder that we’ll be launching LEE as well as the first of Crime Factory’s novellas, Fierce Bitches by US writer Jedidiah Ayres, this coming Sunday, March 3. The event will kick off from 4pm at the John Curtin Hotel, 29 Lygon Street, Carlton.

Crime Factory has organised some seriously good entertainment for the event. In addition to the opportunity to buy Fierce Bitches, LEE and the other books in our back catalogue, there’ll be music by Greens Dairy Angel Ensemble and The Sons of Lee Marvin. Film scholar and historian of Melbourne’s grindhouse cinema scene in the seventies and eighties, Dean Brandum, is also going to be doing a presentation on Lee Marvin in Melbourne, featuring original local newspaper and poster art for the Melbourne releases of his films and footage of the night he attended the Logies!

I look forward to seeing you there.

Photo courtesy of The Saturday Briefing.

I’m not sure if it’s related to the fact that there’s more books available, if they’re easier to access electronically or via on-line bookstores like Booktopia, or whether social media means we just need something to talk about, to look busy, so hell, why not talk about how we’ve just added another book to our TBR list.

Whatever, the upshot is it’s rare for many of us, well, for me anyway, to find ourselves in a situation where we don’t actually have anything on hand to read and we need to find something quickly. A situation that necessitates departing from our planned reading list and taking a chance on whatever book we can find.

This happened to me last week.

I was in Queensland’s Surfers Paradise for several days on personal business. I’d finished the book I was reading, Dennis Lehane’s excellent Live By Night, a lot quicker than I thought I would. I didn’t have my Kindle or any other reading material with me and there was nothing in the house I was staying in.

So I had to go out and find a book. Quickly.

Now Surfers is not exactly book lover’s paradise but it does have one or two okay second hand bookshops. In one of those I found a copy of Charles’ Willeford’s The Way We Die Now.

I love Willeford and I’ve read all the Hoke Moseley detective novels. So in that respect, I wasn’t stepping too far out of my comfort zone. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read them and I’d forgotten just how good they are.

Moseley is working cold cases for the Miami police when his commander gives him a special assignment, go to the south of Florida and find out who is murdering migrant Hispanic farm workers.

He’s living with his two daughters from his previous marriage and Ellita, his former Cuban female partner on the police force and her young baby. Moseley’s got to juggle cold case leads, with his special assignment and bringing up his two daughters. To top it off, a man he convicted for murder has got out of jail and moved in across the street from his house.

Willeford handling of all of this is masterful. He moves seamlessly between down and dirty action and Moseley’s ruminations on the changing nature of Miami. His writing has a classic fifties pulp feel fused with an off beat hard boiled style.

Moseley is a terrific character, a shabby, cheap skate, misanthropic, old school, right wing cop working in the increasingly multi-ethnic city of Miami in the eighties. He’s the perfect anecdote to so many of the politically correct police appearing in crime fiction these days. Indeed, after reading The Way We Die Now, I think the Moseley books should be used in writing courses on the subject of how not to do a boring police procedural.

On top of all this, it felt fitting reading the book in Surfers Paradise. The city took off in the late seventies as a prime destination for beach tourism and was modelled on aspects of Florida. Every second hotel and motel still seems to feature the words ‘tropic’, ‘villa’ ‘palms’ or ‘casa’ in its title.

New Hope For the Dead was the fourth Moseley book. Willeford died the same year it was published, 1988. A great pity because, if this book was anything to go by, Willeford had plans for Moseley and the series felt like it had a lot more gas left in the tank.

As a result of reading this, I’m going to be dusting off and re-reading my other Willeford books. I’ve also been inspired to find a good bio of the writer. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

And I’m going to be ignoring my TBR pile much more often.

Based on your comments and the thoughts I’ve had on the subject since the original post, here are follow up list of other films that could be included in a best of heist films list (and my shameless editorialising regarding what I think about the merits of not of them).

Straight Time (1978)

A huge thanks to West Australian crime writer David Whish Wilson for alerting me to Straight Time, which I’d seen previously but forgotten. Dustin Hoffman plays a career criminal just out of prison, trying to stay on the right side of his ball breaking parole officer, masterfully played by one of my screen heroes, M. Emmet Walsh, and avoid the temptation of re-offending.

Straight Time is based on the book No Best So Fierce, by real life con Edward Bunker (who has a small role in the film). Everything about this film works, the script, the down at heel late seventies feel, the cast, which includes Theresa Russell, Gary Busey, Kathy Bates and Harry Dean Stanton. It’s also got a jewellery store heist towards the end that is so tense it’s almost unbearable.

The Getaway (1972)

Several readers mentioned the 1972 version of The Getaway as worthy of inclusion in a list of best heist films and they were spot on. Written by Walter Hill, directed by Sam Peckinpah, based on the book by Jim Thompson, and starring Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens, I ask you, what is not to like about this film?

The Killing (1956)

A number of readers nominated Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 film, The Killing. While it certainly has a great cast, including Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook Jr, Coleen Grey, Timothy Carey and Vince Edwards, there’s something about it I’ve never liked. It feels too studied, too much like Kubrick ‘doing’ a classic noir. That’s a criticism I’d also level at another film suggested by several readers, David Mamet’s 2001 effort, Heist.

The Anderson Tapes (1971)

Several of you mentioned this film. It stars Sean Connery as Duke Anderson, a criminal fresh out of jail who decided to rob an entire building, unaware his every move is being recorded and filmed. I won’t pass judgement either way on this one, as it has been too long since I’ve seen it. Definitely warrants a re-watch.

They Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968)

Crime film and book blogger Cary Wilson suggested They Came to Rob Las Vegas, which I’d not previously heard of. A group of criminals plot to hijack an armoured car carrying seven million dollars as it travels from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Shot in the US but financed by European money it stars Gary Lockwood, Elke Sommer, Lee J Cobb and Jack Palance. You can check out Cary’s review of They Came to Rob Las Vegas here. My copy is on order.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

No argument from me about the merits The Thomas Crown Affair. It’s got McQeen, Faye Dunaway, a jazz score and some wonderful split screen photography. A rare example of a heist film where the criminal does get away with it, that does not suck.

Rififi (1955)

The chorus of support for Jules’ Dassin’s Rififi was loud and strong and right. I’d put down the 1972 movie Un Flic as my favourite French heist film, but thinking about, Rififi is much a better pick, in, if only on the grounds of the 32-minute long silent heist scene.

Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

My friend and film expert Dean Brandum threw this one into the mix and it’s a good one. A gang of US soldiers sneak behind enemy lines to steal a stash of Nazi gold. I have fond memories of first watching this film with my parents and have enjoyed viewing it many times since. A hard boiled heist film meets an almost counter cultural take on the horror of war with a lot of laugh out loud moments. It stars Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Donald Sutherland and, of course, Gavin MacLeod as Moriarty.

Milano Calibre 9 (1972)

This one nearly got included in my original list. Milano Calibre 9 was the first in a trilogy of films by Italian director Fernando Di Leo. It focuses on a low-level mafia foot soldier, Ugo Piazzo. Released after three years in jail, Ugo is braced by Rocco (Mario Adorf), a clownish but lethal mob associate working for a Milanese crime boss known as The Americano. Still smarting from losing $300,000 several years earlier (a breath taking series of scenes in the film’s first few minutes), The Americano thinks Ugo took the money and stashed it away while he was in jail. So does everyone else, including the cops, his friends and his ambitious stripper girlfriend (Euro-crime regular, Barbara Bouchet).Ugo denies the allegation. All he wants to do is blow town for Beirut with his girlfriend and never see Milan again. Instead he’s forced to re-join the mafia, setting in train an elaborate game of ‘did-he-do-it-didn’t-he-do-it’.

Another Euro-heist film mentioned as being worth looking at is Caper of the Golden Bulls released in 1967. The story centres on a former robber living in Spain who comes out of retirement to rob the country’s national bank, although to my knowledge it’s not available anywhere on DVD.

 Plunder Road (1957)

Trust New York film noir expert Jake Hinkson to suggest a film that, as far as I know is not available anywhere. Five men steal five tonnes of gold and then try and transport it across the country in three trucks. Of course, things end badly. I’d love to see this film. Jake, if I ever make it to New York you have to screen me your copy.

Set It Off (1996)

Another one I almost included in my original top 10. Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifa star in this tale of four working class black women who are sick of being fucked over by their bosses and society in general decide to turn their hand at robbing banks. To their surprise, they are quite good at it, leading to the growing attention on them by the police and increasing tensions within the previously solid group. It’s been a while I’ve seen this film but I remember liking it as a different take on the heist film.

Blue Collar (1978)

Another one I thought about including in the original list. Director Paul Schrader takes no prisoners in this incredibly hard-boiled story of three Detroit steel workers (Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto and Richard Pryor) who decide to deal with the economic pressures facing them by robbing the safe in their union local. Unbeknownst to them, the union is bed with the local syndicate who don’t take kindly to their funds being appropriated. One of my favourite films and definitely my favourite of Schrader’s work

The Outfit 1973

Based on the book of the same name by Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake, it features Robert Duvall as Macklin, a cold-blooded career criminal out to avenge the murder of his bank robber brother by the syndicate, after the brother knocks over a bank under their control. The cast also includes Joe Don Baker, Karen Black and Robert Ryan and it was directed by John Flynn who also did the must underrated (in my book anyway) 1987 film Best Seller with James Woods.