Pulp Writing

By Toni Johnson-Woods Pulp- A collector’s book of Australian pulp fiction covers pg 6

“Because pulp fiction was written, edited and published within weeks, the stories have an immediacy rarely found in other fiction. They present contemporary readers with a snapshot of Australian culture in the 1940s and 1950s. The language is informal and largely vernacular, the slang of a bygone age: women are ‘frails’ and men are ‘palookas’. Buried in the pages are the dominant ideologies. Science fiction ponders political, moral and economic issues surrounding atomic weapons, man’s inhumanity to man and daydreams of utopian societies without war. In the face of increasing female employment, romances explore the lonely fate of the career woman and reinforce traditional assumptions that a woman’s place is in the home. Westerns concentrate on property ownership. Early crime fiction exposes fear about the ‘mob’, the mafia, no doubt spurred by post-war immigration.”