Tag Archives: Australian Blaxsploitation

Pulp Friday: Operation Concrete Butterfly

“The Sydney Opera House opening was glitter and show – and then it became a  bloodbath.”

One of lessor known sub-genres of sixties/seventies pulp fiction was what for want of a better term could have been called ‘Blaxsploitation pulp’ (even though a lot of it was written by white authors).

It was big in the US and UK usually featured black PIs solving their cases in style at the same time as sticking it to the man or black revolutionaries seizing power and getting some pay back on whitey. You get my drift. New English Library, a UK pulp publisher, also released a series of semi-soft core porn novels featuring slaves and slavers in the pre-US civil war deep south.

I’ve never been able to find any example of this kind of pulp fiction in Australia, with the exception of today’s Pulp Friday offering, Operation Concrete Butterfly by Dick Peters.

To says this is a little known book is an understatement. I have not been able to find out any background on the author or Arkon Paperbacks, the outfit that published it in 1973. The publication notes suggest it might have been a subsidiary of Angus and Robertson Publications but I can’t be sure.

As for the plot, the back cover blurb gives a pretty good indication of what the prospective reader is in for.… Read more