Category Archives: Spies

Today’s Pulp Friday is a little known but interesting book, The Last Refuge by Edward Lindall, published in 1972.

It’s interesting for two reasons.

First, it was an attempt to set a spy thriller amid the radical student politics taking place in Australia in the early seventies.

The second reason is the publisher, a little known Melbourne-based pulp publishing outfit called Gold Star Publications.

The main character of The Last Refuge is Jay Landon, an Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation agent, assigned the mission of infiltrating and destabalising a group of Maoists, led by Peking agent, Clyde Mansell. The Maoists have left their inner city terraces for the wide expanse of the Australia’s north to wage guerrilla war against US multinationals stripping the country of its mineral wealth.

Lindall’s real name was Ernest Edward Smith, an Adelaide based journalist and writer who penned 13 books, mainly crime and thrillers, but also some science fiction. He died in 1979. The Last Refuge, the only of his books released by Gold Star Publications, taps into the very real politics of what was the most physically and politically aggressive of the radical student groups operating on Australian campuses in the early seventies.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

“There’s always two sides to any story.… Read more