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Tag Archives: Horwitz Publications
Carter Brown and the Australian craze for faux American crime fiction

In 1950s Australia, one author – writing pulp novels about detectives and cities he’d never visited – gave birth to a phenomenon. I’m over at the CrimeReads writing about Australia’s most successful, least critically recognised, 20th century author, Alan Yates aka Carter Brown, and the popularity of faux American crime fiction in post-war Australia. You can read the entire article at their site here. … Read more
Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp paperback cover art
Tagged Al Wheeler, Alan Yates, Audrey Armitage, Australian pulp fiction, Bill Williams, Carter Brown, faux American crime fiction, Horwitz Publications, K. T. McCall, Marc Brody, Mickey Spillane, Muriel Watkins
Lockdown recollections of the outside world and the wonder of Space Age Books

I was saddened over the Eastern weekend to hear of the death of Mervyn ‘Merv’ Binns on April 7, at the age of 85. Binns was a major participant in Melbourne science fiction fandom going back to its earliest days in the 1950s, and established Space Age Books, Australia’s first specialist science fiction bookshop, and a frequent bolt hole for myself and no doubt so many other teenagers, desperate to escape the boredom of long suburban weekends in the 1970s and 1980s.
I only met Binns once, but his passing feels particular poignant given the circumstances we currently find ourselves in, unable to leave our houses and take part in Melbourne’s physical public culture, a field in which Binns once played a small but important role, to go to the pub with friends, browse in a bookshop or go to the cinema or film club screening.
But more than this, memories of Space Age Books briefly made concrete my fears about one of the unintended consequences of the (very necessary) restrictions evoked to combat the Covid-19 virus – its potential impact on the few remaining cultural holdouts that make living in Melbourne feel special compared to a lot of other places: bookshops, including the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, independent cinemas and cinema clubs, record stores, and other speciality businesses that deal in material cultural items and experiences and, just as importantly, provide a space to engage in face to face discussion about them.… Read more
Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Dystopian cinema, Horror, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Science fiction and fantasy
Tagged Horwitz Publications, Lee Harding, McGill's Newsagency, Melbourne bookshops, Melbourne science fiction, Mervyn Binns, Open Leaves Bookshop, Robert Bloch, Ron Smith, science fiction, Space Age Books
‘An Explosive Novel of Strange Passions’: Horwitz Publications and Australia’s Pulp Modernism
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
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
Tagged Australian pulp fiction, Horwitz Publications, Joseph Conrad, Midcentury pulp fiction, Post war Australian pulp, pulp modernism, Ruth Park
Pulp Friday: Australian football pulp
With the 2018 Australian Rules Football Grand Final almost upon us, it is only fitting that today’s Pulp Friday post has a football theme, this 1964 novel by Horwitz Publications, John Dalton’s Violent Saturday.
Sport was the subject of a certain niche of Australian pulp fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. Horse racing and boxing were the main topics, presumably because they chimed with pulp’s supposedly male, working class readership. But I have seen local pulp about car racing, swimming and even tennis.
To my knowledge, however, Violent Saturday is the only Australian pulp novel ever published that has Australian rules football as its subject (and I would love to hear from any readers if they know of any other examples). This is probably not as strange as it first appears. Nearly all Australia’s pulp publishers were based in Sydney and the Australian rules football was resolutely Victorian until the late 1990s, when the code started to become national.
Violent Saturday is the tale of small time country footballer who makes it to the ‘big league’ in Melbourne and a club that will do anything to win. As the back cover blurb puts it: ‘The coach’s ruthless, relentless tactics turned his team into lethal gladiators prepared for every form of violence.… Read more