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16. Australian pulp fiction

Chosen by:
Mr Christopher Wood,
National Centre for Australian Studies

Gaile, Mark

One of the unsung highlights of Monash University’s Rare Books Collection is undoubtedly its large collection of Australian pulp fiction, assembled as part of a wider commitment to collecting artefacts of ‘popular culture’. The local industry for pulp fiction was born literally overnight with the outbreak of World War Two and the subsequent banning of all non-essential US imports, amongst them pulp fiction magazines. By the early 1950s, scores of publishers had entered the field, the more prolific and enterprising amongst them turning out hundreds of cheaply-produced paperbacks per year across a variety of genres, in the main, crime, westerns, romances, war and science fiction, all with lurid cover art provided by local artists. The novels and novelettes themselves were almost exclusively the work of Australian authors, who adopted pseudonyms which sounded authentically American and used US settings for their stories. Some of these authors were astonishingly productive. Len Meares wrote almost 800 westerns, mainly as ‘Marshall Grover’, Gordon Clive Bleeck wrote around 300 works across all genres under a variety of imaginative pseudonyms and Alan Yates contributed several hundred crime titles as ‘Carter Brown’. The latter were phenomenally successful, sporting punning titles such as Good-Knife Sweetheart, Bella Donna Was Poison and The Bribe Was Beautiful and selling around eighty million copes worldwide. The Rare Books Collection has extensive holdings of these authors and many more from the 1940s and 1950s.

The item chosen for this exhibition, The Skeleton Murders by the pseudonymous Mark Gaile, has been selected from the Rare Books Collection’s unparalleled holdings of wartime Australian pulps and is indicative of what has been assiduously collected over the last decade or so. One of many bibliographically unrecorded local pulps in Monash’s collection; it was produced by Currawong in Sydney in the early 1940s. With their slogan ‘You can’t go wrong with a Currawong’ and emphasis on publishing the work of Australian authors, along with utilizing the skills of local cover artists, they were a popular and productive firm throughout the 1940s. Equally popular at the time and equally well-represented in the Collection are thousands of works produced from around 1940 to the early 1960s by such Australian firms as New Century Press, Action Comics, Cleveland, Horwitz, Invincible Press and Frank Johnson. The Collection has been formed on such a broad scale that these books are supplemented at Monash with slightly smaller, though no less important, holdings of US and UK pulp material in similar vein from the 1910s through the 1960s, material which influenced and informed the Australian pulp fiction industry in its heyday.

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