I recently posted a review of this book here. The book’s author, Sam Hawken, was kind enough to agree to answer some questions by e-mail from Texas about his work.

What was the inspiration for writing The Dead Women of Juárez?

The story of the dead women is inspiration all by itself. I first found out about the problem while visiting Amnesty International’s site looking for something else entirely and immediately I thought it would make for a good story. It’s hard to beat real life when you’re coming up with ways people make other people miserable.

One of the things I liked about your book was the way you were able to set a hard boiled crime story against the backdrop of such horrific real life events, without trivialising or sensationalising them. Crime fiction is an excellent way of holding up a mirror to society’s problems but it can be hard to do. Was that something you were conscious of when you were writing and was it difficult to pull off?

The only thing I really thought about was making sure that everything that happened revolved around a key event in the book, an event that related directly to the plight of the dead women. I didn’t want to write something that tried to wrap the whole problem up in a bow, which is something Jennifer Lopez tried to do in her 2006 film, Bordertown. I felt that if I could make the larger issue relatable on a personal level, it would be more real to the reader. I’m not sure how difficult it was, but I can say that I didn’t enjoy the experience.

I think the key characters in the book are very well drawn, particularly Kelly Courter, the washed up boxer, and Sevilla the grizzled Mexican cop. Did you base either of them on real life characters?

They are not, though Kelly gets his name from middleweight boxer Kelly Pavlik, who was on my mind in 2007 when I wrote the book. He’d just beaten Jermain Taylor to become WBO/WBC middleweight champion.

Sevilla is not based on a real person, per se. I was, however, thinking of Giancarlo Giannini when I described him physically, and in my dreams if/when The Dead Women of Juárez makes it to the TV or movie screens, he’s playing the part.

Your bio says you are a Texas native. Your depiction of life in Mexico seems pretty graphic and realistic. I assume you have spent time in Mexico? If so, was that in Juárez? Tell me about that.

I was born in Texas in 1970, so I had many years to visit Mexico before the narco trouble started in 2003. I once spent three weeks traveling through the heart of the country, visiting lots of small towns and villages, so I feel I know Mexico fairly well. I still do not speak the language well enough to make myself understood, however, and that’s something I very much want to correct.

As for Ciudad Juárez, I have been there, though not since before 2003 and definitely not since 2006, when the city exploded. It happens that Juárez just recently (within the last couple of weeks), lost its title as the murder capital of the world, with a 38% drop in killings in 2011. It’s still averaging more than five deaths a day, so I don’t plan on going back anytime soon, but maybe things are finally starting to get better.

What was involved in researching the back ground to what has occurred in Juárez?

It all started with the meager information Amnesty International had on their site. From there I went on to visit the sites of various groups inside and outside Mexico that advocate for women’s issues, including the feminicidios. After that it was a matter of reading Mexican media, which can be extremely gruesome. I also must acknowledge the book, The Daughters of Juárez, by Teresa Rodriguez and Diana Montane with Lisa Pulitzer. It’s a tremendous book and required reading for anyone interested in the deaths. I referred to it often while writing.

The Dead Women of Juárez is a pretty accomplished effort for a first book. While it may be your first published book, I’m curious to know is it first one you tried to write? What do you think helped you get it right?

I started writing novel-length fiction in the early ‘90s that could not be more different from what I write today. Back then I wrote lots of cyberpunk, a science fiction subgenre that was going out of style before I even put my fingers on the keyboard. I was, as you can imagine, not very successful. I then took a break from writing anything for about ten years (1996-2006), and returned to it with a couple of novels that have not, to this date, sold. So it kind of depends on how you count as to how many manuscripts I produced before The Dead Women. I call it number three, disregarding my first efforts from the ‘90s.

As far as how I got it right, I’m still in the dark about that. I genuinely hated writing The Dead Women and I thought it was terrible when I finished it. When I heard back from my agent that she thought it was “brilliant,” and authors like Dave Zeltserman raved, I was bewildered. Every time a good review comes in, I’m always a little bit amazed, because clearly these readers are seeing something in the writing that I did not, which makes me doubt my own judgment regarding the quality of my work.

Every time I read a story about the rape and murder of women in Juárez, I am left wondering why it is that no has been brought to justice. No justice system, including Australia’s, is perfect and justice systems are particularly imperfect in parts of the developing world. Even so, I find the notion that so many people can be killed, so brutally without anyone being caught, mind-boggling. What, in your opinion has led to this situation? Why have the police proven so inept in catching some of those responsible? Why do these killings continue with such impunity?

Well, depending on whom you talk to, the perpetrators of many hundreds of these killings have been caught. A bunch of bus drivers were rightly convicted of murdering women they singled out on their routes, and a (probably innocent) Egyptian man had over a hundred killings attributed to him, though murders with the same MO occurred after he had been jailed. The authorities explained this away by saying he was somehow paying street gangs to carry out additional killings to make him look guiltless. There are a few others I’m aware of, but those accusations and guilty verdicts are deeply tainted by stories of police brutality leading to false confessions.

After finishing the book and sending it on its merry way, I checked out the aforementioned movie, Borderlands. In that film it’s postulated that the authorities don’t do much to solve these murders because it’s bad for business. Ciudad Juárez is a major locale for maquiladoras, factories where all sorts of goods, high tech or otherwise, are made for the American market, and by and large the women who vanish are working girls who toil in these places for dollars a day. While that makes for a nice, conspiratorial theory, I suspect the answer is a little simpler and actually somewhat more unpleasant: women just aren’t valued as much as men, and the oftentimes sexual nature of these crimes makes the women look guilty of something even though they are the victims. It’s akin to rape victims being castigated during trials for their sexual behavior, as if they were “asking for it.”

You have mentioned that you are working on another book, due out later this year. Tell me about that.

Tequila Sunset is all done and bound proofs are due in February, so the wheels are already well in motion for a September 2012 release date. In this one we return to Ciudad Juárez, but we also spend time on the American side of the border in El Paso, Texas. El Paso is, somewhat bizarrely, the safest city in the United States though it is a literal stone’s throw away from one of the most violent cities in the world. Bullets from Ciudad Juárez sometimes fall in El Paso.

The book follows three characters: Flip Morales, a paroled convict involved with the infamous Barrio Azteca street gang of El Paso/Juárez; Cristina Salas, an El Paso detective who works the city’s gang unit; and Matías Segura, a Mexican federal agent whose purview is Azteca activity in Juárez. It is estimated that Barrio Azteca is responsible for as much as 85% of the murders in Ciudad Juárez, and these three are caught up in the middle of that activity. There’s more, of course, but I don’t want to spoil potential readers. Expect a broader picture of the situation and an expansion of the human element already present in The Dead Women.

It’s a tough sell setting crime fiction against a backdrop of real life horrors without coming across as sensationalist or trivial. But this is precisely what Sam Hawken attempts to do in his first book, Dead Women of Juarez, and pulls it off fantastically.

The real life horror in question takes place in the Mexican city of Juarez, just across the border from the United States. Juarez is famous for two things: as a magnet for multinational companies seeking cheap, mainly female, labour, and the fact since 1993 as many as 5,000 women have been murdered there and no one has been brought to justice.

Hawken inserts into this picture the fictional character of Kelly Courter, a washed up, junkie boxer who makes a living as a punching bag for younger, hungrier Mexican fighters. As a sideline, he traffics and sells drugs for Esteban, his friend and the brother of Kelly’s on again, off again girlfriend and women’s rights activist, Paloma.

Kelly is in self-exile in Juarez, escaping the legal and moral consequences of a fatal mistake, the details of which we learn much later on in the book. It’s a day-by-day struggle to survive in a tough town, constantly being shadowed by grizzled Mexican narcotics cop, Sevilla, apparently intent on busting Kelly for his illegal activities.

Hawken introduces the horror of what is happening in Juarez with a slow burn, not a bang, through the posters of missing women on telegraph poles and the fear of women on the street. I can’t say much more without giving the story away. Paloma disappears and Kelly comes off a major drug binge to discover he is the prime suspect and his fate is in the hands of Sevilla, a man with secrets and ghosts of his own, in many ways as much as stranger in Mexico as Kelly.

Hawken’s writing is sparse and basic. His bio says he is a Texas native. If so he must have spent time in Mexico because his depiction of the violence, poverty and fleeting beauty of the country feels like it can only have come from first hand exposure.

The book has its problems. In particular, the ending felt too quick and forced. But these don’t distract from its many strengths. Dead Women of Juarez is a gritty, gripping noir. Like the best crime fiction, it is also holds a mirror to some pretty horrific realities and a fight for justice that shows no sign of being won anytime soon.

If this is what Hawken does with his first novel, I’m looking forward to his next.

Dead Women of Juarez is available through Serpent’s Tail.

This year’s been no exception. I managed to knock off several books I’ve wanted to read for a while.

The first was Dead Women of Juarez by Sam Hawken. This was a great hardboiled read, especially for a first novel. I particular admire the author for having the guts to set the story amid the real life horror story in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, where since 1992 as many as 5,000 women have been murdered and no one has been brought to justice. I’ve done a longer review of Dead Women for Crime Fiction Lover and will post it to this site next week.

Another author I’ve been wanted to check out is Vicki Hendricks, who writes erotic noir fiction set in Miami. Her 2007 book, Cruel Poetry, took me back to the mid-nineties when Miami-based crime fiction was huge. The city’s crime rate was through the roof, Elmore Leonard was based there and writers like Carl Hiaason and Edna Buchanan were best sellers.

This book is very different to the other Miami crime novels I can remember reading, in a good way. The main characters are a hedonistic, python owning call girl named Renata and her shy, voyeuristic wannabe writer neighbour, Julie. Renata attracts trouble like a magnet. One of her regular Johns, a poetry professor called Richard, is dangerously infatuated with her. Then there’s the shit that’s stirred up when Julie accidently kills another of Renata’s customers. The women have to employ a couple of low life criminals to dispose of the body but of course they fuck it up. Cruel Poetry is a wonderful little tale of murder and blackmail, featuring a love-triangle with a difference.

Also on my list for a while has been The Adjustment by Scott Phillips, which I read as an e-book. I’d heard a lot about this one, and it lived up to the hype. It’s a wonderfully bent little tale in the best of pulp tradition of Charles Willeford. The main character is Wayne Ogden, a devious, violent ex-US soldier who returns to life in sleepy Wichita after WWII. He spent the war as a supply Sargent cum black marketer and pimp. Upon his return he gets a job as a fixer for the corrupt, skirt chasing owner of a local aircraft factory, which is where things really get complicated.

But the absolute knock out of my most recent reads is The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock. My enjoyment of this book is matched only by the difficulty I’ve had trying to describe what it’s about and how good it is to people.

The Devil All the Time is a violence soaked multi-generational gothic novel set in the backwoods of Ohio and Virginia. It opens with the return of a soldier from the carnage of the Pacific war and his drift into religious madness over the terminal sickness of his wife. The other characters include a couple of evangelical Christians who perform at church services (one of whom has a bizarre side-line involving spiders), a corrupt backwoods law man and a husband and wife team of roaming serial killers who like to photograph their dead victims in sexual positions.

This is rural noir with major kick. But no matter how sexually and physically deranged things get (and they get very deranged), Pollock avoids the temptation to play the story for cheap thrills. There is real humanity in these stories, even the most wretched of his characters struggle for meaning.

Pollock’s bio says he dropped out of school and worked a succession of blue-collar jobs before taking up writing and The Devil All the Time is his first book. He also has a collection of short stories called Knockemstiff, which I’ve just ordered.

Seriously, just take my word and read this book. It’s the product of a dark, unhinged brilliance and I loved it.

Cruel Poetry and The Dead Women of Juarez are available through Serpent’s Tail Press. The Adjustment is available as an e-book on Amazon. The Devil All the Time is available through Random House.

One local blog I’ve been following for a while now is Permission to Kill, run by my mate, David Foster. Its main focus is all things espionage fiction and film related, but David also covers of on a wide variety of pulp miscellany, including crime fiction and film.

I was particularly pleased to see a recent review on his site of the excellent but little known1985 Australian crime flick, The Empty Beach. Starring Bryan Brown, Ray Barrett, Nick Tate and Belinda Gibbin, The Empty Beach is based on the Peter Corris novel of the same name. David was nice enough to let me re-post his review, which appears below.

Bryan Brown IS Cliff Hardy. It is perfect casting. It’s a shame that this film wasn’t a hit, because I would have loved to see Brown play Hardy again and again. He could be doing it to this day, pumping out a tele-movie each year – and I would be first seated, ready and eager to watch it. But alas, not to be.

For those not familiar with the character of Cliff Hardy, private investigator, he is a creation of Peter Corris and first appeared in the novel The Dying Trade in 1980. Since then he has been releasing Cliff Hardy stories regularly – at least thirty of them – the last I am aware of, is Appeal Denied which was released in 2007. I am sure Corris has released a couple more since then. I realise I could quickly validate this with a quick Google search, but after the Christmas break I am a bit short of cash, and if I don’t know that they exist, then I won’t go hunting for them.

The story, which is set in Sydney, starts with a wealthy businessman (for that read black marketeer and poker machine king), John Singer, who is 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. That is the last that is heard from Singer. It is surmised that he fell overboard that day and drowned.

Two years later…
Cliff Hardy meets Mrs. Marion Singer (Belinda Gibbon), who wishes to employ him. She has received a note from an anonymous source, claiming that her husband is still alive – but not looking too well. She realises it might be a hoax, but wishes Hardy to look into the matter.

Hardy’s investigation leads him to a newspaper reporter, Bruce Henneberry (Nick Tate), who reported on Singer’s disappearance at the time. Henneberry thinks something fishy is going on, and it is related to his latest piece of investigative journalism. He also has all the dirt on the city’s corrupt politicians, businessmen and gangsters. He keeps this dirt all on a series of tapes that he has stashed away. But things turn messy when Hardy witnesses Henneberry’s murder, in the surf, at Bondi Beach. Then it becomes a race to track down Henneberry’s tapes, with Hardy, the police, and Sydney’s underworld all set on a collision course.

The Empty Beach is an old school detective movie, but set in Sydney in the 1980s, which means some of the music, fashion and haircuts have dated. But other than that it still holds up quite well. It is played lean, hard and fast with all the requisite plot convolution that a detective story like this should have.

At the time of writing, The Empty Beach remains sadly unavailable of DVD (or Blu-Ray), which I think is criminal, because the film, for movie-watchers who love the genre, is well worth watching.

A quick heads up that issue 9 of Crime Factory is out.

Highlights include a full length interview with US crime writer Scott Phillips (whose excellent book, The Adjustment, I finally got around to reading over Christmas), fiction by Dan O’Shea, Tom Piccirilli, Ray Banks and host of others, as well as our true crime column, ‘The Deposition’ and a host of other material guaranteed to satisfy all fans of noir, pulp and hard-boiled crime fiction.

My regular column ‘Setting Sun’ focuses on the rise of South Korean crime cinema, with reviews of three films, The Yellow Sea, LEE Joeng-beom’s The Man From Nowhere, and one of the most controversial films to come out of South Korea, I Saw the Devil.

You can download issue 9 as a PDF at out brand spanking new site here. A Kindle version is in the works, and will hopefully be out in the next week or so.

The site also has a reprint of an interview from the Crime Factory vault with US writer James Crumley (author of crime classics The Last Good Kiss and Dancing Bear, just to name a few) and blogs by regular columnists, Ray Banks, Leigh Redhead, Eric Beetner and the Nerd of Noir.

And that’s just our opening shot in terms of what the Crime Factory gang has in store for you this year.

So what are you waiting for? Get over there are get some.

Pulp Curry is going to be taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period, returning in mind-2012.

It’s shaping up to be a big one for me writing-wise. My manuscript, tentatively titled Cambodia Darkness and Light, will be published as an e-book in the US some time in the second half of 2012, by Snubnose Press.

I also have short fiction appearing in a number of publications. Max Quinlan, an Australian-Vietnamese ex-cop and the main character in Cambodia Darkness and Light, will be making an appearance in issue two of Noir Nation, in a story called ‘Homeland’.

Gary Chance, a tough, ex-Australian army veteran who now makes a living pulling heists for anyone who’ll pay, will appear in The One That Got Away, an anthology of Australian crime fiction by Dark Prints Press, out February.

Chance will also feature in a story by me in Crime Factory: Hard Labour, out in March. Hard Labour is an anthology of crime stories by authors either born in Australia or residing here.

Rather than just complaining about the narrowness of the local crime fiction scene, Melbourne’s Crime Factory crew, myself, Cameron Ashely and Liam Jose, have decided to get active and do something about it. We’re establishing Crime Factory as a publishing business, revamping the website and Hard Labour is our first offering.

Although the exact line-up has yet to be finalised, so far it’s looking pretty impressive, if I do say so myself, including stories by known players Adrian McKinty, Leigh Redhead, Helen Fitzgerald, David Whish Wilson and Angela Savage, and up and comers such as myself and others. I can also announce that we have snagged the first even 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 and demand publication in March 2012.

We have some other surprises up our collective sleeves for the next 12 months, but that’s enough for now.

Oh, yeah, amid all of that I have to find the time to serious start on the manuscript of my next book.

Have a great Christmas and New Year and roll on 2012.

“One of his companions had sworn to betray him. But how and when.”

The last Pulp Friday for 2011 features the work of Simon Harvester, a British pulp writer best known for the character of Dorian Silk. Silk was a globe trotting Brtish spy with an unlimited ability to speak languages and understand local customs and a fairly obvious attempt by the author to cash in on the James Bond craze of the sixties and early seventies.

Harvester also wrote pulp fiction featuring other characters, most set in Asia, of which the two books in this post are both examples.

Published in 1969, The Chinese Hammer concerns another spy, Heron Murmer. A British forey into the space race results in a missing rocket, pilot and tape with valuable data. Murmer is sent to the Himalayas to retrive it only to discover that there is a traitor amongst the colourful group assembled for the mission. Is it the half caset reporter? Maybe the native guide, Jimmy?

Dragon Road, features Harvester’s other creation, Malcolm Kent, a former British soldier, now engineer, who makes a habit of getting tangled up in international intrigue in the Far East.

How many modern day spy books do you see with an engineer as the main character?

All of Harvester’s books appear to have been published by McFaden Bartell Books in the US. For those who are interested, there’s a great run down of Harvester’s work on site Spy Guys and Gals.

The back blurb of Dragon Road sums up the feel of Harvester’s work nicely:

“Who was the  seductive Chinese woman who watched him so intently?

Beneath half-closed lids, she observed his every move. Kenton, trying desperately to get across the border into Burma after exposing a Communist cell, knew his fate might lie in her graceful hands.

Was she a Communist tool, sent to lure him into China-and certain death? Or the mistress of a wealthy planter, as rumour had it? Or just a lonely woman attracted by his masculinity?

Kenton had to endure four days of unbearable tension, shattering suspicion, and attempted murder before the showdown finally came- and he learned who the real enemy was… “

I cheated a little and, in addition to my top five, gave a few honourable mentions. Money Shot, Christa Faust’s first Angel Dare novel (the second having recently come out), Frank Bill’s short story collection Crimes in South Indiana, Roger Smith’s Dust Devils, and Yvette Erskine’s gritty police procedural The brotherhood were all in contention for my top five in 2011.

But my final list was:

5. Butcher’s Moon – Richard Stark (University of Chicago Press)

I waited ages to read Butcher’s Moon by Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake. It was almost impossible to get a copy until University of Chicago Press, which has been gradually re-leasing all the Parker books, published it. 

First released in 1974, Butcher’s Moon was the last Parker book before Westlake took a 23-year rest from the character. It takes Parker back to the familiar territory of his earlier books The Hunter and The Outfit, hot on the trail of money owed him by the mob. A failed heist sends Parker to an amusement park where he stashed $73,000 during a previous caper several years earlier. Parker enlists the help of his only friend, another thief called Grofield. Little do they suspect but they have just walked into the middle of a civil war between two rival organized crime factions.

Possibly the best Parker book written and that’s saying something.

4. The Dying Trade – Peter Corris (Allen and Unwin)

The private investigator was languishing in almost complete obscurity in Australian crime fiction before Peter Corris wrote The Dying Trade, the 1980 debut of the now legendary fictional Australian private investigator, Cliff Hardy, which I read again this year.

A former insurance claims investigator, Hardy is hired by a shifty property developer to discover who’s behind harassing phone calls to the man’s sister. It’s a violent, hard-boiled mystery, the apparent simplicity of the case inverse to the reality of what’s really occurring. No sooner has Hardy taken his first beating than the secrets of the developer’s rich and powerful family come tumbling out.

Corris’s geographic and cultural map of Sydney is keenly informed by a very Australian, perhaps pre-economic deregulation sense of class. Hardy may bump up against pimps, thieves, con men and murderers, but in the bigger picture he knows their deeds are small-beer compared to the crimes of the rich.

3. Manifesto of the Dead – Domenic Stansberry (The Permanent Press)

This year I discovered Domenic Stansberry. Manifesto of the Dead is a noir story that takes as its main character the late crime novelist Jim Thompson. At the end of his career, short on cash and mired in alcoholism, Thompson takes a script writing job he hopes could be his one last shot at fame. Instead, he finds himself being framed for the murder of a young starlet.

Stansberry’s writing is fantastic, as is his noir sensibility, sense of history and ability to convey Los Angele’s cultural and physical geography.

2. The End of Everything – Megan Abbott (Picador)

Is there anything Megan Abbott can’t do brilliantly? First she writes a string of historical noir novels set in the forties and fifties with women as the main characters. Then she writes The End of Everything, a deceptively simple book about two 13 year-old girls, Lizzie and Evie, coming of age in a nameless suburb in seventies Middle America.

One night Evie goes missing. Has she run away or was she taken? The police have nothing to go on as rumours spread like wildfire. What does Lizzie know? A hell of a lot more than she realises. Abbott’s jump into the territory of suburban teen angst could have delivered a simple Virgin Suicides-type tale. Instead, it is something much darker and confronting.

Abbott’s also a master of allowing class, sex and social observation to collide in a way that does not take away from the precision of her plot and characters.

1. Falling Glass – Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail)

If the Irish are taking over crime fiction, McKinty is leading the charge. The central character of Falling Glass is Killian, a tough as nails Tinker criminal. His ambition to go straight has been derailed by the Irish economic crisis and, reluctantly, he’s back to doing other people’s illegal dirty work. A rich Irish airline executive hires him to find an ex-wife who has fled with the businessman’s two kids. While it seems like a straight out missing person case, of course it’s a lot more. In particular, there’s the matter of the lap top she carrying with her, the only thing apart from her children she won’t let out of her sight.

The prose in Falling Glass is razor sharp. His scene of character and place is finally rendered with a minimum of words. Nothing feels stretched or overplayed. Roll on 2012, when his next book, The Cold, Cold Ground is released.

“The frank, revealing story of a male prostitute.”

By far the best home-grown Australian pulp produced in the sixties and seventies came from a little known publishing house called Scripts Publications.

I’ve long wondered about the nature of this low rent operation and their bizarre roster of pulp paperbacks.

The mystery has now been solved thanks to John Harrison’s marvellous history of vintage adult paperbacks, Hip Pocket Sleaze. According to Harrison, Scripts was the in-print Horwitz used for is racier pulp titles. Key themes included crime, bikies, black magic, Japanese prison camp exploitation, and a voyeuristic fascination with the exploits of drug users and sex workers in Kings Cross, Sydney’s notorious red light district.

According to Hip Pocket Sleaze, “a total of sixteen paperback titled [were] published per month at the height of their popularity in the mid to late 1960s, with each title having an initial print run of 20,000 copies.”

For these titles Horwitz mostly used most cheap photographs for covers, something which gives the books a wonderful fly on the wall expose feeling.

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is a classic example, Rick Francis’s, Nero, published in 1971.

I don’t know who Rick Francis is, if indeed that’s his real name. But, if the other titles listed at the beginning of Nero are anything to go by, he did a damn fine line in paperback sleaze – The Butch Girls, The Sex Life of a Model, Innocents Behind Bars and The Bikies.

The back cover blurb of Nero is speaks for itself:

“He would do anything for $100.

Nero was a male prostitute who enjoyed his work.

Men, women or neuter… he gave the maximum sexual satisfaction to any client with the money to pay. Sydney’s top male stud and he was heading for international fame. In the peculiar world of prostitution Nero was a star, different a gentleman, but with a pleasure gift that made women scream with pleasure, delirious with excitement.”

And check out Hip Pocket Sleaze, available here. It’s a must have resource for any serious pulp fiction fan.

Rural crime fiction is big at the moment.

US authors like Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone and The Outlaw Album) have been writing “country noir” for years. Arguably people like Jim Thompson did it for a long time before him.

And the sub-genre has caught on big time in Australia. Think about the popularity of books like Chris Womersley’s Bereft and Honey Brown’s The Good Daughter.

Now Woodrell and others have got some stiff competition from the latest country noir sensation, Frank Bill, whose book Crimes in Southern Indiana is getting rave reviews in the States and is now even available in selected book shops in Australia.

Make no mistake, the 17 stories in Bill’s book are gritty, nasty and raw.

The collection kicks off with ‘Hill Clan Cross’, about the consequences of a drug deal gone wrong. ‘Them Old Bones’, one of bleakest and, for my money, best pieces, depicts a man who whores his daughter to pay for the cancer treatments of his wife.

‘Beautiful Even in Death’ starts off with a man killing his mistress in cold blood when she threatens to reveal their relationship. It’s a spur of the moment act that unbeknownst to him has been witnessed by his son.

You get the picture.

Bill writes about people who have been abandoned by conventional society, are barely managing to make a living. It’s an almost post-apocalyptic landscape, where industry and union jobs have been replaced by meth addiction, domestic violence and the lingering post-traumatic shock of America’s various imperial wars, a place populated by veterans, dopers, bare-knuckle fighters, abused women and children and avenging parents.

The author lives in Southern Indiana, works in a factory, and has been contributing stories for years to the large and well-read network of crime fiction web magazines in the US. His writing is razor sharp.

Take this description:

“The sound the axe made going in was god-awful, but when she pulled it out to finish him, the sound made was damning. Like a dog chasing and biting at a passenger car’s tires only to have its bark replaced by the crunch of its skull between rubber and pavement.”

Or this, about the slow death of a marriage:

“Thirty-five years of matrimony and his words carved into bone, panging worse than her cancer. With age, the man had been moulded into a sickness she’d ignored far too long, didn’t know how to deal with.”

Crimes in Southern Indiana signals the arrival of major new talent.

It was probably a mistake to dive straight from Bill’s work into Honey Brown’s Miles Franklin nominated The Good Daughter.

The Good Daughter’s main character is Rebecca, a smart girl from the wrong side of the tracks in a small town in the Blue Mountains. Her mother has died of cancer, her step father works as a long haul truck driver, a job that often takes him thousands of miles away.

She’s attracted to Zach, a young man awkward beyond belief and with major problems of his own, including a stepbrother no one talks about and a mother who has just gone missing.

When Rebecca agrees to drive Zach’s mother into town, she unwittingly becomes the last person to see her alive, dragging her into a dangerous adult world she is ill equipped to deal with.

Although it was marketed as a crime mystery, I found The Good Daughter had more in common with many of the coming of age in rural Australia books on which so much of Australia’s popular literary canon is based.

The subject matter is dark, mainly involving sexual infidelity and hypocrisy, the type of behaviour that wouldn’t get a second glance from the hardened subjects in Bill’s stories.

Brown’s book is for the most part engaging and full of beautifully written scenes and characters. Like this:

“Zach’s father is not a big man. He is lean like many farmers – tall and brown-haired. He reminds Zach of that generic settler – those men leaning against horse-drawn carts in old photos. Any one of those faces in sepia-tinted shots taken in the main streets of towns when they were wide and dirty – long bodies and folded arms, men with an adolescent way about them but with hard gazes fixed down the camera lens. Some days that sepia tint seems to have coloured his father’s hair, coloured his clothes – he can be standing in the yards, dust rising around him, a rust coloured sun setting behind him, a sheep dog at his feet, and you’d swear you’d stepped back in time.”

There seems to be a bit of a trend on in Australia at the moment towards beautifully written books, like The Good Daughter, that are marketed as crime but only seem to have a marginal engagement with the genre.

Some people will no doubt think that’s an unfair observation. Others will claim books like The Good Daughter represent an attempt to expand the definition of crime writing in Australia. Whatever the case, they sell well. Nothing wrong with that.

I’m aware my comments put the acid on me to define more clearly what I think is and isn’t a crime novel, something I haven’t fully worked out yet and which will have to be the subject of a future post.

Crimes in Southern Indiana is available through Amazon. Penguin Viking publishes The Good Daughter.

This is the blog entry I’ve been hoping to post on Pulp Curry for a long time now.

My unpublished manuscript, currently titled Cambodia Darkness and Light, has found a home.

It’s going to be published as an e-book in the United States next year by the good folks at Snubnose Press.

Haven’t heard of them?

Hmmm, perhaps that not surprising, especially if you are in Australia. But you’re going to. And soon.

Snubnose is a small outfit that specialises in crime fiction e-books, but they have big plans.

They have a great slate of authors planned for publication in 2012, including Heath Lowrance (whose first book The Bastard Hard I reviewed on this site several months ago), Nik Korpon, Chad Rohrbacher, fellow Aussie Helen Fitzgerald and Dan O’Shea, just to name a few of them.

That’s some serious emerging and established indie crime writing talent and I’m thrilled to be able to count myself among them.

It’s also great to get a crack at the US e-book market, which is far bigger than it is in Australia and growing at a rapid pace.

Of course, you’ll also be able to get the e-book here.

The blurb on the Snubnose site describes my book as “a hard-boiled novel about a Vietnamese-Australian ex-cop searching for a missing businessman in mid-90s Cambodia that brings to mind the novels of Martin Limón.”

The comparison is pretty cool. Limon’s books feature Sueno and Bascom, two US military police based in South Korea in the early seventies, and they’re great.

Anyway enough of my talk. The point is, next year you’ll be able to read my book and judge for yourselves what you think.

The fact it’s finally going to be out there is a little scary, very exhilarating and a feeling I’ll never get bored of.

A while ago on this blog I wrote about the 1981 Ivan Passer movie, Cutter’s Way.

Based ased on the 1976 cult novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg, it’s one of the best crime films to deal with the impact of America’s war in Vietnam.

But it gets a run for it’s money by a little known film I’ve recently discovered, Who’ll Stop the Rain (AKA Dog Soldiers) made several years earlier in 1978.

Who’ll Stop the Rain a paranoid, hard-boiled road trip through America’s counter-cultural underbelly and a devastating indictment of the impact of the conflict.

The film opens with war correspondent John Converse (Michael Moriarty) trapped in the middle of friendly fire. His voice over as he surveys the resulting carnage tells us:

“Military command has decided that elephants are enemy agents because the Vietcong use them to carry supplies. So now we’re stampeding the elephants and gunning them down from the air…In a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.”

A former liberal disgusted by the war, Converse decides to buy two kilos of uncut heroin in Saigon and smuggle it back to California, where he plans to sell it at an enormous profit.

He approaches his old marine corpse buddy, Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), now a Tai Chi performing, Nietzsche reading merchant seaman, to deliver it to his wife, Marge (Tuesday Weld), in return for a thousand dollars.

Hicks successfully smuggles the drugs into the States and visits Marge, who unbeknownst to both men has developed a serious prescription pill habit in an attempt to counter the loneliness and despair she feels at being separated from her husband.

Although Hicks has written to his wife to tell her about Converse’s visit, she’s shocked when she realises exactly what is happening.

“He must have really flipped over there,” she says.

“He’s not the only one,” replies Converse.

Unfortunately, all three of them are painfully unaware of just how many toes they have tread on by deciding to set themselves up in the drug trafficking business.

Converse and Marge narrowly escape capture by a couple criminal psychopaths led by Antheil, a bent drug enforcement agent, a great turn by Anthony Zerbe (Matthias, the head mutant in the 1971 version of The Omega Man).

When John returns home expecting to pick up the drugs, he’s captured by Antheil, tortured and taken along by the crooked cops as they pursue the Converse, Marge and the drugs.

Who’ll Stop the Rain reeks of paranoia and corruption. The government, in the form of Antheil, is as corrupt as the criminals. Converse is an archetypal noir anti-hero, who jumps with abandon into the mess he has created. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to screw up this badly,” is the only justification he gives for his actions.

As Hicks, Nolte is a sort of buff Travis Bickle. “All my life, I’ve been taking shit from inferior people. No More.” He’ll do anything to evade capture, including giving Marge, his pill-popping companion, heroin, to keep her going

As he and Marge flee they come across remnants of America’s decaying counter-culture, bent film execs and middle class swingers who do drug deals over a glass of chablis and sitar music. Eventually they end up in an abandoned hippie commune in New Mexico, where the final confrontation takes place.

Who’ll Stop the Rain is adapted from Robert Stone’s wonderful 1974 book, Dog Soldiers. Stone doesn’t often get the plaudits he deserves for being one of America’s best noir writers. If you are in any doubt about just how good his work is, check out Hall of Mirrors, the 1967 book on which the movie WUSA, with Paul Newman, was based.

WUSA numbers among that great batch of noir/neo noir films made in the seventies, when the Hollywood studio system was in crisis and desperate to give anything a try.

Who’ll Stop the Rain is another. I don’t know why more people don’t know about this film. It’s terrific.

“She was tough as the hoods she worked with – until she met a man who made her feel like a woman.”

I’m feeling like some classic pulp today. And they don’t come any more classic or pulpier than this 1958 first edition paperback by Dell Publishing, Syndicate Girl, by Frank Kane.

Kane was a New York based pulp writer who wrote nearly 40 pulp novels in a career spanning from 1947 to the late sixties. This included numerous short stories, 29 novels featuring the Big Apple private eye Johnny Liddell and numerous stand alone books, including Syndicate Girl.

If you want to know more, the Thrilling Detective website has a great post on Kane.

I don’t really need to say anything else, except the back cover blurb is as classic as the front cover.

“Network of corruption.

‘That was a nice job, Mary. Real nice.’

She smiled. ‘They always are, when I do them.’

The fat man shrugged. ‘This wasn’t an easy one. He was a smart cop.’

‘Not so smart,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

Mary Lister would do anything for a price. Kill a man, love him, whatever paid the most money. She didn’t know the meaning of fear-or passion. And then she met Mal Waters…”

Dark Pages: Volume One tries to answer the question: What is noir/hard-boiled like all over the world? What does it mean in your country and how does it read?

The anthology contains twelve stories from authors in USA, England, Ireland, Poland, New Zealand and Canada. There’s a few contributors whose work I’m familiar with, including pulp hack Paul D Brazill (and Paul, if you’re reading this, that’s a compliment) and Julia Madeleine, and a whole lot who I’m looking forward to reading for the first time.

I’m one of two Australian contributors.

My story, ‘One Ashore in Singapore’, is the second tale of mine to find its way into print featuring the character of Gary Chance. Chance is a tough as nails ex-Australian army veteran who now makes a living pulling heists for anyone who’ll pay.

My first Chance story ‘Two Men and a Car’, appeared in Crime Factory: The First Shift, published earlier this year by indie US crime publisher, New Pulp Press. You can order Crime Factory: The First Shift here at Barns and Noble and Amazon.

Chance will also appear in early 2012 in an anthology of local crime fiction by a new Australian publisher, Dark Prints Press. Titled The One That Got Away, it features crime stories by Australian, UK and American writers, including Lawrence Block. It will be released in early 2012. Pre-orders are available from the Dark Prints Press website.

Dark Pages: Volume One is available now for Kindle at Amazon.

“Instead of bourbon in the file I keep the savage ghost of murder.”

As front cover blurbs go, that’s a pretty good one.

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is Trouble is My Name by Stephen Marlowe, published by Five Star Paperbacks.

There’s no publication date on this book.

Through the wonder of the Internet, I discovered that Five Star Paperbacks was the pulp in-print of Mayflower paperbacks.

It did produced a range of crime, horror, Gothic romance and science fiction books in the late sixties and early seventies. I found a nice little selection of some of their titles at an interesting site called Vault of Evil, if you want to check them out

Five Star Paperbacks also licensed a number of hardboiled mysteries and thrillers from the famous US pulp publisher, Gold Medal Books, including Trouble is My Name.

Marlowe was a US crime writer, best known for creating Chester Drum in 1955. He wrote science fiction and crime under at least five pseudonyms that I have been able to find.

Trouble is My Name featured Drum and was originally published in 1957.

I’d be curious to know whether the back cover blurb on the original was as salacious as that on the Five Star Paperback version:

“My Code?

Here is it. I’m Chester Drum, professional at violence.

Bring Me your troubles, bring me your pimps and panderers and prostitutes and extortionists and grifters and marks and dead-beats and rear-end-kissing heirs and ambulance-chasing lawyers ready to split a fee.

Bring me your irate husbands and nymphomaniac wives and thieving sons and savage killers.

Bring me your… hell, you get the idea.

Violence is my trade. Trouble is my name…” 

Falling Glass by Adrian McKinty is one of my best reads for 2011.

How much did I like it?

About thirty pages in, I put it down, went onto The Book Depository website (sorry bookshop purists) and bought myself two of McKinty’s earlier books

That’s how much.

I’m a late convert to McKinty’s work, but am now a keen follower. I’ve just finished Dead I May Well Be, his debut book, which showed the promise which led to a book like Breaking Glass.

I’m also very excited to discover that he has a new novel coming out early next year, The Cold Cold Ground. As the publisher’s blurb describes it:

“Belfast. Spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts … and a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera. Sergeant Duffy really is in a no-win situation. As a Catholic policemen, it doesn’t matter which side he’s on, because neither side trust him. The first book of a new fast-paced, gripping trilogy laced with dark humour, Cold, Cold Ground is a brilliant depiction of Belfast at the height of the Troubles—and a cop treading a thin, thin line.”

The central character of Falling Glass is Killian, a tough as nails Tinker criminal. His ambition to go straight has been derailed by the Irish economic crisis and, reluctantly, he’s back to doing other people’s illegal dirty work.

His first job sees Killian flying to America for a little debt collecting. But Killian needs one more big score before he can get out of the life. This comes when a rich Irish airline executive hires Killian to find an ex-wife who has fled with the businessman’s two kids. The businessman wants the kids back so he can play happy families with his new wife, an Italian model.

In the book’s opening scene, wife number one and her children narrowly evade capture by armed men, a wonderfully atmospheric scene set in a down at heel caravan park.

While it seems like a straight out missing person case, of course it’s a lot more. In particular, there’s the matter of the lap top she carrying with her, the only thing apart from her children she won’t let out of her sight.

Soon there’s a psychopathic Russian hit man on her trail and a host of other characters are drawn into the story, most of whom dwell in the shadows of Ireland’s troubled past.

The prose in Falling Glass is razor sharp. His scene of character and place is finally rendered with a minimum of words. Nothing feels stretched or overplayed.

Killian is tremendous character. Street smart, existentially torn, with a criminal pedigree that includes time working in New York and connections to the criminal elements of the IRA.

How he reconciles his position within a globalised Ireland wracked by economic crisis and the far older code of the Tinkers is also well rendered.

Falling Glass is available through Serpent’s Tail books. The Cold Cold Ground will be available locally through Allen and Unwin in early 2012.

This week’s Pulp Friday offering is for all the hardcore noir fans out there, Gil Brewer’s The Brat.

Brewer really is the aspiring pulp writer’s pulp writer. The author of dozens of sleazy sex/crime/psychological thrillers, he began his career writing for Gold Medal Books in the early fifties, also wrote under the Ellery Queen by-line, as well as using the pseudonyms Eric Fitzgerald, Bailey Morgan and Elaine Evans.

He kept up a punishing work schedule, once writing a book in three days. Between books he churned out hundreds of short stories for mystery and pulp magazines.

He died in 1983, after years of alcoholism, mental health problems and financial stress. Like most of the most accomplished pulp novelists, he only gained critical attention well after his death.

There’s a great site about Brewer, done by his estate, which includes full listings of his work, bio details and some great photographs. It’s called Gil Brewer, Noir Fiction Writer.

The Brat was first published in 1957. The edition above is 1958 and appears to be an overseas in-print judging from the currency denomination on the top right of the cover.

The Brat features femme fatale Evis Helling. The narrator, Lee Sullivan, is in for one hell of a surprise when marries Evis. No sooner are they away from her home in the Florida swamps, than Evis starts pressuring him to rob a bank. You just know it’s going to end badly.

The back cover blurb is a beauty and classic Brewer.

“THE BRAT…

She looked at the rotting, sun blasted shack, the one room where they all lived, slept, made love, died. Looked at the dusty lawn where no grass grew. At the steaming swamp, at her tobacco-spitting mother. Saw the sly, lustful eyes of her father’s friends. Then she looked at her own lush beauty.

Get me out of here, she prayed. Oh, please get me out of here!”

Like, wow.

It was a long wait for Drive, the subject of my last post, but well worth it.

Drive is not the only crime film I’ve been waiting for with anticipation. There are several others, headed up by the 2011 British film, Kill List. I’ve heard nothing but good things about this film and am still kicking myself I didn’t realise it was included in the Melbourne International Film Festival earlier this year.

Ben Wheatley, who did Down Terrace in 2009, directs Kill List. Down Terrace is the story of a family of low level drug runners who, almost literally, devour each other in an orgy of paranoia and violence as they attempt to unmask what they believe is a informer in their ranks. It is genuinely disturbing viewing.

The main characters of Kill List, Jay and Gal, are a couple of Iraq war vets and semi-professional hit men who take a contract to eliminate a list of three people. The movie starts off as traditional hit man story and then gradually morphs into a tale of horror, with a distinct Wicker Man feel to it

I’ll say no more. Check out the trailer here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqkqF–v1tg

Madman Films has picked up the film and there is word they intend to give it a mainstream release here in Australia some time in 2012.

Another film I’m busting to see is Cogan’s Trade. It’s based on the novel by George V Higgins, who also wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and was turned into one of the best heist films ever made.

Cogan’s Trade is about a professional enforcer who investigates a heist that goes down during a mob poker game. Brad Pitt does leading man honours as Jackie Cogan, backed up by Ben Mendelsohn, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins and Ray Liotta. It’s directed by Andrew Dominik who did Chopper back in 2000.

All I can say is, please Lord don’t let him fuck it up.

The Thais have not produced a decent crime film since the original Bangkok Dangerous in 1999. Here’s hoping Headshot breaks the drought.

Headshot is a cop-gangster thriller directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. It’s set in Present day Thailand. Tul is an honest cop who is blackmailed by a powerful politician for a crime he did not commit. Thrown out of the police, he joins a secretive group aimed at eliminating everyone above the law.

Shot in the head and wakes up after a three-month coma to find that he, literally, sees everything upside down. He begins to doubt his profession, but getting out is nowhere near as serious as it seems.

Headshot recently got a US release. Hopefully, it won’t be too long until we see it in Australia. You can view the trailer here.

Last but not least is Miss Bala, a Mexican film the title of which translates as ‘Miss Bullet’. Twenty three-year old Laura lives near the US border and sells clothes for a living. She decides to enter a beauty contest in the hope of winning some much needed money, but ends up getting caught up in a violent hit being carried out by a local drug gang. The gang let her live but recruit her to be their drug mule and arms trafficker.

I’ve heard great things about Miss Bala. The lead, newcomer Stephanie Sigman, is supposed to be particularly good. I’ve no idea when/if it’s heading to Australia. Check out the trailer here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxOhqJ98QJY

After months of anticipation I finally got to see Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive on the weekend.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a really good crime movie at a mainstream multiplex cinema. Maybe Ben Affleck’s The Town, although it went down hill fast whenever it tried to move away from the heist theme and get into the characters.

Drive is not perfect, hell what film is, but it was damn close in my view, certainly up there with the best contemporary crime films I’ve seen.

The movie is very loosely based on the 2005 book of the same name by James Sallis. Ryan Gosling plays ‘Driver’. By day he works as a stuntman and fixes cars in a garage owned by his mentor, Shannon (Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame, although he will forever be associated in my mind as the father from Malcolm in the Middle, which for me is what makes him come across as so bent).

Driver’s expertise at what he does is established in the film’s first ten minutes, a fantastic high-speed chase thought the streets of LA scene during which he eludes a police dragnet.

His credo is simple:

“If I drive for you, you get your money. That’s a guarantee. Tell me where we start, where we’re going and where we’re going afterwards, I give you five minutes when you get there. Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m yours, no matter what. Anything a minute either side of that and you’re on your own. I don’t sit in while you’re running it down. I don’t carry a gun. I drive.”

Driver is the ultimate anonymous outsider, living a life as stripped down as the cars he works on, until he becomes involved with a young woman named Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son. The two adults engage in a highly charged but strangely a-sexual relationship (the scene where Diver bonds with the woman and her child near a polluted creek off a causeway is fantastic).

The dynamic shifts abruptly when Irene’s husband is released from prison. He seems genuinely keen to go straight, but is pressured to commit a robbery by criminals who lent him money while he was in prison. Correctly assessing that Irene and her child are in danger, Driver agrees to act as get away driver for the husband so he can clear his debt.

Needless to say the heist goes spectacularly badly.

The next hour of the film sees Driver transformed into a cold-blooded killer as he attempts to protect Irene and extricate himself from the mess he’s in. Without spoiling the plot, there were several things the Driver does in the second half that made no sense to me in terms of his character.

That said I loved this movie. The cast of low life criminals, chief among them Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman, are genuinely creepy. The action is suspenseful, the heist scenes masterful shot, ditto the feel and presentation of LA.

The film also has a wonderful eighties vibe (think Michael Mann circa Thief and Man Hunter as opposed to his more bloated and self-important later films), everything from the moody synthesiser soundtrack to the opening credits.

What I liked most of all, is Drive is not afraid to be a genre picture, not afraid to be a noir.

Not really afraid of anything.

“A cold corpse becomes a hot assignment to curvy blonde, Mavis Seidlitz.”  

Today’s Pulp Friday is a triple shot of covers from one of my late father’s favourite pulp authors, Carter Brown.

Carter Brown AKA Alan Geoffrey Yates was a Australian-British author who wrote a massive 317 novels in a career that spanned from 1958-1985. Tens of millions of these were sold all over the anglo world.

Most of his stories were crime, although at the beginning of his career he also wrote horror and Westerns under the alias Tex Conrad. His books were published in Australia by Horwitz and in the US by Signet.

Cops and private investigators were his staple characters, the stories a mixture of sex and action, leavened with a bit of tough guy humour. The writing’s not brilliant, but, hey, that’s no surprise given how fast he churned books out.

His first Horwitz contract stipulated two novellas and one full length novel a month. He could write as much as 40,000 words overnight, reputedly with the assistance of Dexedrine which he used to stay awake for periods of up to 48 hours.

As was common practice on the part of Australian pulp writers in the fifties and sixties, all of his books were set in the United States.

The three covers reproduced here represent a good cross section of the main pulp paperback cover styles.

The Fabulous (Horwitz, second edition, 1961) has a wonderful men’s magazine feel, with a black and white photo of what the publisher presumably hoped readers would associate with the key character, “curvy, crazy blonde investigator” Mavis Seidiltz.

The cover art for The Lady is Transparent (Horwitz, first edition, 1962) is classic pulp. The story features Brown’s best known character, Al Wheeler.

As local pulp publishers moved into the late sixties, they often reverted back to photographic covers. The Deep Green Gold (Horwitz, 1968), another Wheeler story, is a typical example. The back cover blurb is great.

“She kicked off her sandals, threw off her halter, and unzipped her hipsters…. 

She gave me a slow, sensual smile, 

‘All I ask, Al,” she murmured, “is a little protection in return.’

She fell into his arms at the motel. Called herself Tracy Tension. said her husband was a double dealing gambler in Vegas, and she was on the run. Wheeler had never seen her before. But he was ready to play her game – even though a killer held the cards. Sometimes Lt Wheeler is just too red-blooded for his own good.”