Category Archives: Pulp fiction

Pulp Friday: Sharks in Australian pulp fiction

Posted on April 3, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Pulp fiction has long been fascinated by sharks, and pulp published in Australia is no exception.

Being attacked by them, hunting them, sighting or being threatened by them, or just marvelling at large they grew, sharks were a perennial pre-occupation in local Australian pulp paperback fiction from the 1950s to the 1970s. They also appeared regularly in the pages of the Australian equivalent of men’s adventure pulp, publications like Adam and Man.

Although I have not included any of this material in the images below, sharks were also a staple of popular tabloid magazines like Pix and Australasia Post. Referred to in Australia as ‘barbershop magazines’, these now defunct weeklies presented punters with a steady diet of girls in bikinis, racy jokes, Hollywood gossip, and masculine adventure stories.

Many of these were set in heavily exoticised parts of the South Pacific and Asia. But there was also a rich variant that took place far-flung parts of tropical northern Australia and the outback. These latter stories depicted a sort of Australian weird – a land of gnarly, weather beaten eccentrics (much like Captain William E. Young on the cover the Shark Hunter, published by Horwitz in 1978), who had dangerous livelihoods in unimaginably remote parts of the country, and did battle regularly with the threat posed by the country’s uniquely lethal fauna, including sharks.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: memoirs of a cover girl

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

So much of the allure of pulp fiction, whether it was in magazine or paperback format, revolved around the cover art. It was designed to impart a gamut of sensations, from the simply outré and thrilling, to downright lurid and shocking. And the central design aspect of the majority of this material was a woman, usually provocatively posed and scantily clad, depicted ‘in media res’, Latin for ‘in the middle of’ things. Publishers hoped that this would generate interest from the passing buyer, who they believed was usually male and, looking at the cover, would start to fill in the mental blanks and purchase said print material to read and discover for themselves if they were right (how disappointed they often must have been).

We know virtually nothing about the women who were the cover model subjects for these covers. This is what makes Eva: men’s adventure supermodel a vital book. It is the first work I can think of that actually provides the inside story of one of the women who worked in the pulp fiction industry, told by the woman herself.

The individual concerned, Eva Lynd, was born in Sweden in 1937 as Eva Margareta von Fielitz. She arrived in New York in 1950 at the age of 12, eventually started to do theatre and by the second half of the 1950s was appearing in small roles in television and film.… Read more

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Posted in Men's Adventure Magazines, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art

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Pulp Friday: Australian pulp’s Spanish Connection

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Andrew Nette| 18 Comments

One of the tasks I set myself over the Christmas/New Year period was to start putting my pulp paperback collection into plastic bags. It is amazing that these fragile constructions of cheap paper, glue and card, never meant to last more than one read, have survived for almost half a century, and for a while now I’ve been thinking I should treat them with far more care.

Among my collection are a number of Larry Kent novels, which are incredibly hard to find in the wild nowadays. Most of these were purchased as a single lot on a random visit to a second-hand bookshop in the New South Wales coastal town of Ballina (better known as the home of the Big Prawn statue) during a beach holiday many years ago.

In the process of bagging these books I took the chance to do a little digging into Larry Kent’s little-known Spanish connection, which this post will examine, as well as being a long overdue coda to Cleveland Publications, until it closed early last year the last remaining player in the once large and boisterous post-war pulp publishing industry in Australia.

Cleveland was founded by Jack Atkins in Sydney in 1953. New Zealand born, Atkins was an entrepreneur and horse lover. For a time, he was also the secretary of the NSW branch of the conservative Democratic Labor Party, which split from the Labor Party over its links to communist influenced trade unions in 1955.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp fiction set in Asia, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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‘An Explosive Novel of Strange Passions’: Horwitz Publications and Australia’s Pulp Modernism

Posted on December 23, 2019 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

I am jazzed to have had published the first of what I hope is several peer reviewed articles flowing my from the research for my dissertation. “An Explosive Novel of Strange Passions” Horwitz Publications and Australia’s Pulp Modernism,’ appears in the latest edition of Australian Literary Studies Journal. It is open access until April next year.

Here is the abstract for the piece: The scant academic attention Australia’s pulp publishing industry has received to date tends to focus on pulp as a quickly and cheaply made form of disposable entertainment, sold to non-elite audiences. This paper will examine Australian pulp fiction from a different standpoint, one which links New Modernist Studies and the history of the book. This approach, referred to as pulp modernism, is used to question the separation of low and high publishing culture, dominant for much of the twentieth century. I apply this methodology to late-1950s and early-1960s Australian pulp fiction by examining the Name Author series released by Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, one of the largest pulp paperback publishers in the decades after World War II. The series took prominent mid-century Australian authors and republished them in paperback with covers featuring highly salacious images and text. The series offers a glimpse into a uniquely Australian version of pulp modernism.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, British pulp fiction, Horwitz Publications, New English Library, Pulp fiction, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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M and my top 10 reads for 2019

Posted on December 22, 2019 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

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

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Posted in 1960s American crime films, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Black pulp fiction, Crime fiction and film from Latin and Central America, 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

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