Category Archives: Scripts Publications

Pulp Friday: Ricki Francis, Nero

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

“The frank, revealing story of a male prostitute.”

By far the best home-grown Australian pulp produced in the sixties and seventies came from a little known publishing house called Scripts Publications.

I’ve long wondered about the nature of this low rent operation and their bizarre roster of pulp paperbacks.

The mystery has now been solved thanks to John Harrison’s marvellous history of vintage adult paperbacks, Hip Pocket Sleaze. According to Harrison, Scripts was the in-print Horwitz used for is racier pulp titles. Key themes included crime, bikies, black magic, Japanese prison camp exploitation, and a voyeuristic fascination with the exploits of drug users and sex workers in Kings Cross, Sydney’s notorious red light district.

According to Hip Pocket Sleaze, “a total of sixteen paperback titled [were] published per month at the height of their popularity in the mid to late 1960s, with each title having an initial print run of 20,000 copies.”

For these titles Horwitz mostly used most cheap photographs for covers, something which gives the books a wonderful fly on the wall expose feeling.

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is a classic example, Rick Francis’s, Nero, published in 1971.

I don’t know who Rick Francis is, if indeed that’s his real name. But, if the other titles listed at the beginning of Nero are anything to go by, he did a damn fine line in paperback sleaze – The Butch Girls, The Sex Life of a Model, Innocents Behind Bars and The Bikies.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, True crime, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: The Spungers

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

This Friday’s pulp offering comes via Line of Sight author, David Whish Wilson.

Julian Spencer’s The Spungers was put out in 1967 by Scripts, a publishing company based in London, Melbourne and Sydney, that released a lot of the more explicit Australian pulp fiction I’ve come across from the sixties and early seventies.

As I’ve written previously, the sixties saw Australian pulp publishers start to produce kitchen sink and exploitation fiction, often dressed up as lurid exposés of drug use and sexual promiscuity. These fed off mainstream society’s fears of youth rebellion and changing sexual standards.

The focus of many of these tales was Sydney’s Kings Cross, which in the sixties became well known as a centre for prostitution, sly grog and drugs, often to meet the demand of American servicemen on R&R during the Vietnam War.

The Spungers is a classic piece of exploitation pulp dressed up quasi social commentary on the declining moral values of youth in the sixties. Not that much has really changed. Update the language a bit and whack in a TV crew from A Current Affair and The Spungers would be right at home in Australian in 2011.

The inside front cover blurb is priceless:

“The Vicious, sordid activities of a scruffy Kings Cross beatnik clash with those of a young surfie who decides to spend a misspent holiday rorting up the Cross.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Scripts Publications

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Peril in the sex jungle: sixties Australian pulp

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Andrew Nette| 9 Comments

The popularity of my recent post on the hey-day of Australia’s local pulp fiction industry in the 1940s and 1950s has provided me with an excuse for a reprise, this time with a selection of pulp paperback covers from the 1960s.These are sourced from the titles I’ve collected over the years from opportunity shops and second hand books dealers, hence the poor condition of some of the covers.

I don’t know of any history of pulp fiction publishing in Australia in the sixties and early seventies (but I’d would love to hear from any reader that does).

Although the local publishing industry was hit hard when restrictions on the import of foreign paperbacks were lifted in 1959, it was by no means eradicated.

In addition to local reprints of foreign titles, publishing houses such as Horwitz, Cleveland and Scripts continued to pump out a selection of titles, including crime, westerns, war and romance stories.

As was the case in the UK and America, in the sixties Australian pulp publishers started producing kitchen sink and exploitation fiction, often dressed up as lurid exposés of drug use and sexual promiscuity. These fed off mainstream society’s fears of youth rebellion and changing sexual standards.

Exhibit A is the following selection of locally produced pulps that expose the sleazy underbelly, real and imagined, of Sydney’s Kings Cross.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Horwitz Publications, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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