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Category Archives: Australian noir
Postcard From Cambodia

Back in 2016, I contributed a story to an anthology of crime fiction published by Spineless Wonders, called Crime Scenes. The story, a piece of noir writing called ‘Postcard From Cambodia’, was set in Australia and Cambodia, and I have always thought it was one of my better short fiction efforts. An abridged version of ‘Postcard From Cambodia’ was performed live a couple of years back at a bar in Sydney and was broadcast a couple of days ago on community radio 2RPH as part of ‘Little Fictions On Air’ program along with a brief commentary. For those who are interested, you can listen to the story being read by the show’s presented, Kate Liston-Mills, here.
It is certainly an experience listening to one of your stories being performed on radio, but I’ll let you be the just of whether it works or not. If you do enjoy the story I would encourage you to pick up a copy of Crimes Scenes. It is available in hardcopy from the Spineless Wonders site, and for your Kindle here. It has some terrific Australian crime stories, including work from the late Peter Corris, Tony Birch, Leigh Redhead, Angela Savage and David Whish-Wilson, among others. … Read more
Posted in Asian noir, Australian crime fiction, Australian crime film, Australian noir, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, David Whish-Wilson, Leigh Redhead, Peter Corris
Tagged Asian noir, crime fiction in Cambodia, David Whish-Wilson, Leigh Redhead, Little fictions, Peter Corris, Postcard from Cambodia, Short fiction, Tony Birch
Carter Brown and the Australian craze for faux American crime fiction

In 1950s Australia, one author – writing pulp novels about detectives and cities he’d never visited – gave birth to a phenomenon. I’m over at the CrimeReads writing about Australia’s most successful, least critically recognised, 20th century author, Alan Yates aka Carter Brown, and the popularity of faux American crime fiction in post-war Australia. You can read the entire article at their site here. … Read more
Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp paperback cover art
Tagged Al Wheeler, Alan Yates, Audrey Armitage, Australian pulp fiction, Bill Williams, Carter Brown, faux American crime fiction, Horwitz Publications, K. T. McCall, Marc Brody, Mickey Spillane, Muriel Watkins
10 great Australian westerns

To mark the UK release of The True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), Justin Kurzel’s bold reimagining of the sage one of Australia’s most famous myths, bushranger Ned Kelly, the British Film Institute asked me to write about my ten favourite Australian westerns. Not only is Ned Kelly Australia’s most famous bushranger – the name given to convicts who had escaped and survived Australia’s harsh environment to become outlaws – his legend forms a mini industry in film and television. In addition to Kurzel’s, Kelly has been the subject of eight films. The Kelly filmography forms part of a larger of body of Australian westerns, made by overseas and local concerns. You can read my piece in full at the BFI site here.
Posted in Australian crime film, Australian noir, Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Bryan Brown, Crime fiction, Ozsploitation, Westerns
Tagged Australian westerns, Bryan Brown, Justin Kurzal, Ned kelly, Sweet Country (2019), The True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), Westerns
M and my top 10 reads for 2019
It is no exaggeration to say I have been eagerly anticipating Samm Deighan’s monograph of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film. I love the film and I am a big fan of Deighan’s movie writing, so the combination is bound not to disappoint. And it didn’t.
As Deighan puts it in her introduction, M ‘exists in a liminal space between urban social drama, crime thriller, and horror film’. It was arguably the first serial killer film, long before the FBI coined the term in the early 1970s. Anchored by a superb performance by Peter Lorre as the paedophiliac child killer, Hans Beckert, it was certainly the first motion picture in which a serial killer was the central protagonist. Another crucial innovation was the way in which Lang depicted the character of Beckert in a not entirely unsympathetic light. This same sensibility would have a influence on some subsequent serial killer cinema, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror/thriller, Psycho.
Deighan discusses M’s broader social and political themes, including the film as a critique of modernity and a text for Germany on the brink of totalitarian control, appearing as it did a year before the Nazi’s assumed power and Lang had to flee the country.
Another fascinating aspect of the book is the discussion of how the themes in M would echo in Lang’s subsequent work, particular the threat of the lawless mob violence and what is perhaps the director’s most defining idea, how even the most noble individual is capable of brutal murderous thoughts and actions.… Read more
Posted in 60s American crime films, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Black pulp fiction, Crime fiction and film from Mexico, David Whish-Wilson, Dystopian cinema, Film Noir, Horror, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Non-crime reviews, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp paperback cover art, Rollerball, Science fiction and fantasy
Tagged Alfred Hitchcock, alse Dawn, Angela Nagle, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, David Whish-Wilson, Fitz Lang, Hannelore Cayre, Holloway House, Ira Levin, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jeff Sparrow, Kill all Normies, Kinohi Nishkawa, Lawrence Osborne, M (1931), Nada, Nick Riddle, Only to Sleep, Peter Lorre, Psycho (1960), Rosemary’s Baby, Samm Deighan, Serial killer films, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Undergound, The Damned (1963), The Godmother, Trigger Warning: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right., True West
Blowback: late 1960s and 1970s pulp and popular fiction about the Vietnam War
If you are still on the fence about purchasing a copy of my new book, Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and the Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, the site CrimeReads is running a couple of extracts from the book. The first is my piece, ‘Blowback: late 1960s and 1970s pulp and popular fiction about the Vietnam War’.
The conflict in Vietnam cast a long shadow over pulp and popular fiction in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Vietnam veterans were hunted by small town redneck police in David Morrell’s 1972 novel, First Blood, dealt drugs in Vern E Smith’s The Jones Men, and staged an abortive bank heist in Dog Day Afternoon, both published in 1974. In the Lone Wolf series ex-New York cop and Vietnam veteran, Burt Wulff mounted a fourteen-book battle from 1973 to 1975 against the drug dealing criminal organisation, ‘The Network’, in which he treated the streets of America’s major cities as an extension of jungles of Southeast Asia. Vietnam was the training ground for many of the characters that populated men’s adventure and crime pulp in the 1970s. More broadly, Vietnam’s traumatic impact on American society would become a cypher through which pulp and popular fiction name checked cultural fragmentation, growing disillusionment with the American dream, dishonest and unaccountable government and corporations, and the power of the military industrial complex.… Read more
Posted in 70s American crime films, 80s American crime films, Asian noir, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Belmont Tower Books, Black pulp fiction, Blaxsploitation, Book cover design, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Crime film, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp paperback cover art, Robert Stone, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980
Tagged CrimeReads, David Morrell, Dog Day Afternoon, First Blood (1972), Pulp and popular fiction about Vietnam, Pulp fiction in Asia, Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and the Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 to 1980, Vietnam War