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- Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback
- 50 years of Milano Calibre 9 and the crime cinema of Italy’s ‘years of lead’
- The mystery of Billy Rags
- Sessions from two-day City Lights symposium on Dangerous Visions & New Worlds book now available to watch
- Pulp Friday: More late 1960s and 1970s pulp and popular fiction about the Vietnam War
- The bleak, propulsive noir of Georges Simenon’s Romans Durs
- Dangerous Visions & New Worlds: the reviews so far & upcoming two-day City Lights SF symposium
- My cultural highlights of 2021
- Ten underappreciated American noirs of the late 1950s and 1960s
- Melbourne launch of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction 1950-1985
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Category Archives: Noir fiction
Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback
I know that this site has not been getting quite as much attention from me as usual over the last year. This is largely because I have been so busy with various book projects. A quick update on these might be in order.
First up is my academic monograph, Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback. Out via the Anthem Press Studies in Australian Literature and Culture series in early July, it now has a cover and is available for pre-order. It is in hardcover, with a price that reflects the fact that it is being targeted at institutions and, in particular, libraries, in the first instance, but I have negotiated with Anthem for a much cheaper paperback version of the book will be released by Anthem next year.
Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback originated in a PhD I took at Sydney’s Macquarie University and turning it into a monograph has taken a considerable amount of my time over the last year. Regular readers will no doubt be familiar with Horwitz, as the publisher of many of the paperback covers that I post on this site. My study is the first book length examination of Australian pulp and one of the few detailed studies I am aware of a specific pulp publisher to appear anywhere.… Read more
Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Australian television history, Book cover design, British pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Crime fiction, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds Radical Science Fiction 1950 to 1985, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction & Youth Culture, 1950-1980, Gold Star Publications, Horwitz Publications, Men's Adventure Magazines, Mickey Spillane, Noir fiction, Pan Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp paperback cover art, Science fiction and fantasy, Scripts Publications, Sticking it the the Man Revolution and Counter Culture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950 1980, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers
Tagged Anthem Press, Australian pulp fiction, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds Radical Science Fiction 1950 to 1980, Down and Out Books, Girl Gangs Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture 1950 to 1980, Gunshine State, Horwitz Publication Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback, Horwitz Publications, Orphan Road, PM Press, Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction 1950-1980
The mystery of Billy Rags
Crime fiction is just far too large a literary field to aspire to anything near being a completist in terms of reviewing. That said, the British noir author Ted Lewis has been something of a favourite on this site. I reviewed Jack’s Return Home aka Get Carter (1970) and its two sequels, as well as the novels Plender (1971) and GBH (1980). But there is one more Lewis work I want to tackle, Billy Rags, originally published in in 1973 and which, coincidentally has just been re-released by No Exit Press in the UK.
Billy Rags is very closely based on the life of the real British criminal John McVicar. Just how closely I’ll get to directly. McVicar was an armed robber, declared ‘public enemy no 1’ by Scotland Yard in the 1960s, until he was apprehended and given a 23-year sentence. He was also a serial escapee and after his final arrest in 1970 received a 26-year sentence but was paroled eight years later. McVicar was also something of a uniquely 1960s/70s phenomena, the self-aware/educated working class career criminal turned author and commentator on prison reform, a major social debate in those two decades. He studied for a university postgraduate, wrote an autobiography, McVicar by Himself, published in 1974, and authored a couple of other true crime books.… Read more
Posted in Book Reviews, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Crime film, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Ted Lewis, True crime
Tagged Billy Rags, Charlie Richardson, GBH, Get Carter (1971), Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir, Goronwy rees, Jack's Return Home, John McVicar, Mark Chopper Read, McVicar (1980), McVicar by Himself, Nick Triplow, Plender, Roger Daltry, Sweeney 2 (1978), Ted Lewis, Tom Clegg
The bleak, propulsive noir of Georges Simenon’s Romans Durs
If forced to nominate any positives at all out of the last two years of global pandemic, it is the increased time I’ve had to read. In the first year of Covid I made good on a long-standing desire to read John le Carré’s George Smiley books. A literary focus of 2021 was the work of the Belgium born writer, Georges Simenon. Simenon’s output was a staggering 400 novels, although some have claimed he wrote as many as 500. The best known of these is his acclaimed series of crime procedurals featuring the French police detective Jules Maigret, 75 of which appeared between 1931 and 1972 (Simenon died in 1989). But my interest in Simenon is in his other, somewhat more shadowy body of work, his so-called romans durs or ‘hard novels’: tightly plotted, intensely psychological, often quite slim stand-alone volumes that have so far yielded some of the best noir fiction I can remember reading.
My latest piece for the US site CrimeReads, on the bleak psychological noir of Simenon’s Romans Durs is live and can be read in full here.… Read more
Book Review: The Snow Was Dirty

For reasons that I have not quite been able to pinpoint, over the last couple of years I have found myself reading more and more older crime fiction. The most recent of these was on the recommendation of a US crime writer I have recently had a bit to do with on Twitter, called Max Thrax, Georges Simenon’s The Snow Was Dirty – or Dirty Snow as it appears in some territories – originally published in 1946.
I had, of course, heard of Simenon but must come clean that before doing some research about him as a result of reading The Snow Was Dirty, knew virtually nothing about him or his work. Indeed, without any basis, I had dismissed as a writer of cosy procedurals.
No one knows exactly how many books Belgium born Simenon wrote over the course of his career. There are not many authors you can say that about. He started off in the 1920s, like so many mid century writers, as a pulp hack, working under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms. In the 1930s he started to churn what would become approximately 75 novels featuring the fictional French police detective, Jules Maigret, many of which were subsequently adapted for radio and the screen, large and small.… Read more