Tag Archives: Melbourne Writers Festival

Noir at the Bar Melbourne redux & other upcoming literary events

Just updating Pulp Curry readers about some literary events I’ll be part of in August and early September.

First up, Melbourne’s second Noir at the Bar will take place on Tuesday, August 15, at Grub Street Bookshop, 379 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. Some of Melbourne’s best noiristas will be on hand to read their crime fiction to you. Featuring Des Barry, Annie Hauxwell (author of the Catherine Berlin crime books), Jessica Curry, Ian Rogers (author of The Student, which I recently reviewed on this site) and Laura Elizabeth Woollett, whose short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, has been published by Scribe. Yours truly will be doing MC duties on the night.

The first Noir at the Bar Melbourne event earlier this year had a great crowd and a great atmosphere and we are hoping this one will be the same. Kick off is 7pm. Entry is free, the drinks will be cheap & there will be books for sale. So, come and support some great authors and Melbourne’s coolest second hand bookshop. More details are available at this link. Hope to see you there.

August also sees the annual Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) at which I’m involved in a number of events. I’ll be interviewing Tom and Meg Keneally about their historical crime fiction series of books, The Soldier’s Curse and The Unmourned, on Saturday September 2 at Dandenong Library and Sunday, September 4, at ACMI Cinema 1.… Read more

Pulp Friday: Outback Heiress

Outback Heiress Horwitz 1963

“Her past was a secret but she couldn’t hide her feelings for this daredevil cropduster!”

It wasn’t just men who wrote for Australia’s burgeoning pulp publishing industry in the fifties, sixties and seventies, many women did, too.

One of these was Irena Dickman AKA Rena Cross, the author of today’s Pulp Friday contribution, Outback Heiress, published by Sydney company Horwitz in 1963.

Biographical details for Dickman, like many local pulp authors, are thin on the ground. She was born in England and arrived in Australia in 1950. She appears to have been one of the stable of local writers put together by Horwitz in the early sixties.

The Austlit site credits her with twenty books. Her subjects included nurse and doctor yarns and torrid tales set in Sydney’s Kings Cross. The latter include Model School (publishing in 1963 under the pseudonym Christine James) and Flat 4 Kings Cross (three editions of which were published, in 1963, 1965 and 1966, under the name Geoffrey Tolhurst).

The Keys of Corruption another of her books (written as Rena Crane), was an Australian take on one of pulp’s favourite obsessions in the sixties – wife swapping.

If this post has piqued your interest about Australian pulp, join me on August 30 at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Federation Square, for an illustrated talk about the hidden history of Australian pulp publishing in the fifties, sixties and seventies, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.… Read more