Australian pulp

The Sydney Morning Herald has a fascinating article about the country’s own brand of pulp fiction, with the usual fast-turning prose and lurid covers you’d expect from American-brand versions. More specifically, the only female pulp novelist to work during the heyday (1939-59) is profiled:

She was blonde, beautiful and brainy. And K.T. McCall was one of the world’s highest paid female crime writers, or so said the blurb on the book’s back cover.

Almost 50 years later Audrey Armitage, the real K.T. McCall, still laughs when she recalls her time as one of the country’s most prolific and popular authors.

"I think I was the only woman so it wasn’t hard to be the highest paid," she says.

This was before reality TV or Quentin Tarantino, and pulp fiction was the armchair entertainment of the day. In the 1950s Armitage, now 79, churned out 30 paperbacks under her pen name at the frenetic pace of one a month.

Pulp existed in Australia for a good reason — the banning of US paperbacks:

The boom lasted from 1939 to 1959 as local publishers filled the gap left by the banning – inspired by morals campaigners – of US paperbacks. In pulp fiction’s heyday new publishers sprang up everywhere and prospered – until the prohibition ended and cheaper imports flooded in again.

"A whole new industry was created," says Johnson-Woods. "But then the minute the ban was lifted, dozens of publishers closed down. It really illustrated to me how much protectionist policies can protect a local industry."

There is little left of the industry. Not many paperbacks remain intact – some are held by the National Library in Canberra, while many more are most likely gathering dust and growing yellow in boxes hidden under houses. Armitage’s house in Collaroy is perhaps one of the few tangible legacies – she used the £100 she earned per book to buy it.

Two publishers remain, although only one, Cleveland Publishing, is still in the pulp fiction business. The other, Horwitz, these days publishes magazines such as Mad.

For a good resource and used-bookstore emporium selling the old pulps, check out Warrigal Press, and this retrospective on Gordon Bleeck, considered to be the pulp fiction writer of the 1950s in the country. Also, the lamented Australian crime zine Crime Factory ran a retrospective on pulp a few years ago.