Pulp Friday: The Flower People

The Flower people“Super-zap them all with love. That’s the Hippie slogan. And they mean you.”

The cover of this week’s Pulp Friday speaks for itself, The Flower People by James Holledge.

I mean, like, wow man, that is one far out cover.

The Flower People was published in 1967 by Scripts Publications, the outfit set up by Horwitz Publications in the late sixties to release its racier titles. Thanks to Melbourne pulp collector Brian Coffey for alerting me to this wonderful title and allowing me to copy it.

Holledge featured recently on this site as the author of Kings Cross Black Magic and Teenage Jungle. A former clerk who became part of the stable of in-house writers brought together by Horwitz in the early sixties, his specialty was salacious journalistic tracks parading as sociological expose.

He’s in fine form in The Flower People, billed as an “inside expose” of hippy culture, delving into everything from free love, their profligate use of contraception, rejection of “square society”, drug use and radical politics.

“Super-zap them all with love. That’s the Hippie slogan. And they mean you.” Readers must no doubt have found the idea hippies coming to get them, in their suburban homes, to turn them on, alarming and alluring, especially if the hippy concerned looked the one on the cover of this tome.

Honestly, Holledge was born several decades too early. Had he been alive and at the peak of his creative powers today, there is no doubt he would have been a gun reporter for The Herald Sun or A Current Affair.

The back cover text of The Flower People is reproduced below in all its counter cultural glory.

Enjoy.

The Flower people back

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2 Responses

  1. I’ve got my Dad to thank too, for sure! First I quickly devoured his collection of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L Sayers, before discovering that he was keeping Peter Corris on shelf that was previously out of reach!

    Then came Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’, of which I now own four copies. I always have an old Peter Corris paperback in my handbag. At the moment it’s Heroin Annie – great reading for trams, queues and such! 🙂

    From there I headed to Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs before finding Ian Rankin and Val McDermaid. Then came the Scandinavians, with the Martin Beck and Wallander serials!

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