Tag Archives: Pulp fiction

Pulp fiction at the Latrobe City Literary Festival

I am not sure how many Pulp Curry readers I have in Gippsland. In the event there are some, just a heads up that I’m appearing at the Latrobe City Literary Festival, in Traralgon, this coming Sunday, May 27. As part of a panel of talented folks, I’ll be talking about the history of Australian pulp fiction and the book I have co-edited, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950-1980. I’ll also have copies of the book for sale.

Full details of the event can be found here. It is free but numbers are limited so you need to register. Hope to see some of you there.… Read more

The power of pulp fiction: Girl gangs, biker boys & more

It takes scholarly love and a fan’s enthusiasm to devote oneself to putting together a 300-plus page book dissecting obscure pulp fiction. But that is exactly what Australian writers Andrew Nette and Ian McIntyre have done with Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980.

The respected site, Literary Hub, has a terrific piece by New York crime writer, Scott Adlerberg, talking about pulp fiction and the new book on youth subculture and pulp fiction that Iain McIntyre and I have edited. You can check it out in full on their site here.

Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980 is out now through PM Press.Read more

Behind the bamboo screen: Asian pulp covers of the sixties and seventies

Regular readers of Pulp Curry will by now be familiar with my obsession with pulp paperbacks from the fifties, sixties and seventies (previous posts on which you can be see here, here and here).

The following selection, sourced from my collection, is one I’ve wanted to do for a while now – Asian themed pulp paperback covers from the sixties and seventies. These are mainly from the United States with a smattering of Pan Books from the United Kingdom thrown in.

Not surprisingly, given the hysteria generated by the Cold War, the threat posed by the so-called “red menace” is a key theme of most of these titles, such as The Bamboo Screen, the story of an innocent Westerner thrown into “a savage world of spies and Oriental beauty,” a place where “life was cheap and love was a tool”.

Hong Kong was a favoured location for many of the do or die battles with Communism, as can be seen in Assignment Hong Kong and Twelve Hours to Destiny. Operation Hong Kong is one of a number of titles put out by Solider of Fortune magazine in the seventies: “Rainey has to stop Chinese agents from turning Hong Kong into a bloodbath”.

Other popular locations were Vietnam (Simon Harvester’s Battle Road), and jungles of Malaya in Mark Darby’s The Tigress, a place where “death stalked…with a Sten gun in its hands.”… Read more