The Railyway Station Kiosk

Australia has published large numbers of paperback fiction books since settlement, with Fergus Hume's The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1886) seen as the start of the modern style. Up until the 1920s, the NSW Bookstall Company published more than 200 cheap paperbacks, mainly crime fiction, sold through their chain of railway station kiosks. For many the golden era remains the immediate postwar period, when Australian authors such as Carter Brown, Marc Brody and Larry Kent (all pseudonyms) ruled the newsstands. Their trademarks were lurid covers and a sensational tabloid style usually based on American themes and slang. At the time these books were widely dismissed as trash.