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This is the first book-length study of Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, the largest and most dynamic Australian pulp publisher to emerge after World War II. Although best known for its cheaply produced, sometimes luridly packaged, softcover books, Horwitz Publications played a far larger role in mainstream Australian publishing than has been so far recognised, particularly in the expansion of the paperback from the late 1950s onwards. Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback examines the authorship, production, marketing and distribution of Horwitz pulp paperbacks. It includes ground-breaking material on the conditions of creative labour: the writers, artists and editors involved in the production of Horwitz pulp. The book also explores how Horwitz pulp paperbacks acted as a local conduit for the global modern: the ideas, sensations, fascinations, technologies, and people that came crashing into the Australian consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s.

Katherine Bode has argued that authorship of Australian pulp fiction was strongly gendered, with a small number of female writers concentrated in traditionally female-oriented genres such as romance, and a ‘prevalence of male authors ref lecting the high proportion of genres aimed at a male audience’. This assertion is echoed by one of the few scholars to have undertaken work on the female authorship of pulp, Erin A. Smith. Smith, whose work mainly focused on pre-war pulp magazines such as Black Mask, argues that while women – and she mentions two, Erika Zastrow and Katherine Brocklebank – wrote for the magazine and other women edited it and other pulp publications, ‘they were clearly second-class citizens of this trashy literary underworld.’ While I will argue that questions concerning the pulp genres that women wrote and who comprised pulp's readership are somewhat more complex than Bode asserts, she correctly identifies the male-dominated nature of the industry. This ref lects the wider post-war literary field in Australia, with only 20 per cent of all novels published between 1945 and 1969 written by women. Susan Sheridan puts forward several reasons for the relative marginality of women writers during this period, including difficulty finding time to write due to family responsibilities and economic insecurity, lack of publishing options, and the male-dominated institutionalisation and professionalisation of Australian literary criticism that occurred from the 1950s onwards.While several women did write for Horwitz, female pulp writers in Australia and elsewhere were doubly marginalised: not only did they have to contend with a male-dominated industry, but their work fell on the wrong side of cultural and literary value constructions. This goes someway to explaining the dearth of scholarship on the subject of female pulp writers. In addition to work by Smith, the only aspect of female pulp publishing to have received any sustained academic inquiry has been the lesbian pulp fiction published in the United States between 1950 and 1965. Starting with the publication of Tereska Torres's Women's Barracks in 1950,Roughly five hundred mass-market paperbacks with lurid covers featuring half-dressed woman and promising accounts of ‘forbidden love’ flooded news-stands and drugstore displays. They featured mostly sensationalised stories about the sexual taboos broken in a variety of all-female environments – schools, prisons, the military – or in bohemian venues like [New York’s] Greenwich Village.

Horwitz dealt with both levels of Australia's post-war censorship system. The majority of the company's paperbacks were published locally, putting it under the jurisdiction of state censorship authorities. But Horwitz also reprinted overseas pulp paperbacks and sought access to copies of foreign titles for the purposes of study and local publication that were prohibited, bringing the publisher into direct contact with Australia's Commonwealth level censorship system that dealt with imported print material. A core challenge in researching this history is the intense secrecy with which book censorship was carried out in Australia for much of the last century, a fact which was particularly pronounced in relation to pulp and popular material. Of the nearly 16,000 publications banned by Customs between 1920 and 1973, all but around 500 titles were considered of no literary merit, and hence, their prohibition was deemed of no public interest and not reported by Customs, not even when the list of banned books was released in 1958. These publications were simply confiscated at the place of entry with no record kept. Domestically produced publications or material passed by Commonwealth Customs but deemed obscene and indecent by state authorities was seized in police raids that were seldom reported in the media. As one commentator described it in a 1964 article, the situation regarding state-based censorship of Australian publications was a rarely talked about ‘shadowy half-world of pressure groups, Chief Secretaries [a now defunct Australian state government position that oversaw senior police and coronial staff ], the Vice Squad and Gordon and Gotch, our largest magazine distributor, an often erratic interpretation of what is obscene and indecent takes place prior to due processes of the law’.A glimpse into the extent of this activity by law enforcement in one Australian state, Victoria, is provided by the records for the Council for the Promotion of Cultural Standards (CPCS), a coalition of civic and religious groups established to ‘maintain high moral standards in the cultural life of the community, in particular, literature, art, music and amusements’.The CPCS was established in Melbourne in October 1956 and was active until the mid-1960s.

Scholars have largely ignored the book cover as a field of inquiry generally until they began to conceptualise it as a key element of Gérard Genette's work on ‘paratext’, those aspects that are part of a conscious effort to frame and inform the public reception of a printed text. Debate about the limitations of Genette's approach aside, his work provides a useful framework for exploring important paratextual elements of Horwitz paperbacks. There was the title, often no more than three words long, which was sometimes changed as the book moved across geographical borders or, in the case of a work originally in hardback, appeared in paperback, a process during which the company's editors often tried to make the title more provocative in tone than the original. Another element was the author's name, often a pseudonym, and especially important in the case of a popular series. Other paratextual elements included a ‘blurb’, a short punchy line of prose used to describe the story, which mobilised emotionally hard-hitting and sensational sounding words. The blurb was written by one of Horwitz's editorial staff or, in the case of a book that had originally appeared in hardback, lifted from a newspaper or magazine review. Horwitz paperbacks occasionally also featured the words ‘complete and unexpurgated’ to indicate an original and unabridged work. The practice of placing these words on the cover originated early in the American paperback revolution in response to publishers who cut or shortened original hardcover texts for their paperback release, often due to paper shortages. The Federal Trade Commission responded by forcing publishers to note on the front cover if the text of a book had been abridged or significantly changed. In terms of framing a pulp paperback's public reception, the words ‘complete and unexpurgated’ also became a shorthand code for material that was likely to be more adult and salacious.Important paratextual elements were contained on the back cover of Horwitz books. These included a summary of the story or passage from the text, almost always centring on its most thrilling or explicit themes. In the case of titles by popular Horwitz authors in the 1950s, the back cover also included an author photo, as well as a short biography that mined the writer's life for sensation in such a way as to collapse the distinction between their real identity, their pulp persona, and the category of fiction they wrote.

According to Johnson-Woods, the decision in 1959 to lift import restrictions on foreign print publications entering Australia had a significant impact on local pulp paperback publishing. ‘Overseas paperbacks flooded the local market; overnight, [pulp] publishing houses shut down and local authors found themselves out of work.’ While the move was in no way a death knell for Australian pulp publishing, it ended a period during which the industry was largely protected from external competition. There were also important flow-on impacts for Australian publishing more broadly. Foremost among these was what can be described as an increase in the commercial metabolism of the industry, mainly centred on the growing prominence of the paperback. It is important to examine the 1959 decision in a little more detail as it is an aspect of the country's publishing history about which little detailed scholarly work has been undertaken. The Canberra Times reported on 1 August 1959 that the Australian government had ‘decided upon a sweeping easing of import restrictions’, which would ‘almost bring to an end discrimination against imports from dollar countries’. The elimination of import restrictions from dollar countries was part of a wider trend throughout the Commonwealth in the late 1950s, as governments shrugged off economic measures put in place during the war years to save foreign currency. Certainly, in relation to print material, the 1959 decision appears to have been the culmination of a gradual winding back of import controls by Canberra in response to a continued improvement in overseas trading conditions and the country's balance of payments. In early 1958, for example, restrictions were loosened on most American magazines, and what the trade magazine Newspaper News referred to as ‘better’ quality magazines were permitted freedom of entry. Other American publications, including comics and fiction titles with censorable content, were excluded from the adjustment. The August 1959 decision removed the categories or qualifications that publications from dollar sources had to meet to qualify for entry altogether, except those related to censorship. According to one contemporary account, the change was sudden and made without consultation. Local publishers made hastily organised representations to the Department of Trade ‘pointing out the seriousness of the threat to Australian publishers, printers, authors and artists, but the reply was that the restrictions had not been meant as a tariff but only to save dollars and that the government is now committed to freedom of trade’.

I can still vividly recall a black-and-white photograph of my late father on holiday at Surfers Paradise, on Queensland's Gold Coast, in the mid-1950s. The photograph, which I no longer have, showed him wearing dark sunglasses, his hair styled in the neat crew-cut he favoured all his life. He is sitting on the beach reading Kiss and Kill a pulp mystery novel by Carter Brown, first published in 1955 by Sydney-based Horwitz Publications (hereafter referred to as Horwitz). Male, late twenties, an ex-serviceman, on the cusp of entering the country's burgeoning middle class, my father was what many would have then viewed as the typical pulp fiction reader. And Carter Brown's exotic brand of American-style crime fiction was a cheap, portable form of escapism in a country only just shrugging off wartime austerity and still a year away from the introduction of television. My father had a large selection of pulp paperbacks on the shelves of his den. In addition to his Carter Brown novels, I remember books by Marc Brody, another American-style pulp crime series penned by an Australian author for Horwitz. I spent many hours in my teens thumbing through these books, the cheap paper yellowed with age, searching for explicit passages. But it was the cover art that most fascinated. Tough, trench coated male private investigators, femmes fatales in a range of provocative poses, nearly always depicted against modern urban backgrounds. The images and the seamy cadence of the titles offered a glimpse into an exotic interior world of post-war Australia.Kiss and Kill was one of approximately 300 novels – the precise number is unclear – penned by Brown, a pseudonym for Alan Yates, a mid-century Australian crime writer whose career spanned the late 1940s to his last novel, The Dream Merchant, in 1977. Horwitz was in the habit of sensationalising the biographical details of its authors to collapse the distinction between their real identity, their authorial persona and the genre of pulp fiction they wrote. The back cover of Kiss and Kill featured a photograph of the bespectacled ‘Peter Carter Brown’ (Yates), as the author was called early in the series, alongside the following biographical details:Born in London, he circled the globe as a film technician, salesman and publicity writer before discovering he could add honey to his bread and butter by writing crime.

One rule dictated Horwitz's list throughout its time as a pulp paperback publisher: it had to sell. ‘Saleable was the operative word in those days. It had to be about sales otherwise we wouldn't have existed,’ recalls Lyall Moore.If we sold one book about a certain subject and it worked very well, we put out as many as we could to follow it. Conversely, most books at some point would’ve died in the backside and we would probably have stopped doing them.No sales records have survived for The Lady Is Murder but it must have performed well as Horwitz subsequently signed a contract with Yates to pen an ongoing Carter Brown series, beginning with two, 20,000-word books a month. Yates’ widow, Denise, would tell an interviewer much later that her husband signed a 30-year contract, paying him a pound per 1,000 words and then a pound per 1,000 in royalties after the first 18,000 copies had been sold. Within a few years Horwitz was doing print runs of 30,000 to 40,000 for each Carter Brown. In a double page advertisement in the July 1958 issue of Ideas About Books and Bookselling, Horwitz claimed Carter Brown had a monthly readership of 100,000 in Australia and ‘has achieved the phenomenal sales record of 17,000,000 copies in five years.’ Although these figures are impossible to confirm, they nonetheless provide some indication of the publishing success enjoyed by the series. As has already been noted, the strongest theme of the pulp fiction published by Horwitz from 1945 to the mid to late 1950s, was its American or, more accurately ‘faux American’ nature, of which the Carter Brown books are the best-known example. In addition to providing an important insight into the evolution of Horwitz's publishing model from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the Carter Brown phenomenon also enables a deeper discussion as to why faux American pulp proved so popular in Australia after the war.Leopard Skin Print and Murder: Examining the Carter Brown FormulaCompiling an exact bibliography for Yates's output over the period from the late 1940s, when he wrote his earliest pulp fiction for Action Comics to his last novel in 1977 (he died in 1985) is difficult, not only due to his output but also the fact that so many of his books have been reissued, often multiple times, some with different titles.

In 1963, the Melbourne newspaper The Age ran a 12-part series on Australia's leading publishers. The first instalment focused on A&R, which from its beginnings a second-hand bookstore in 1884 in Sydney had, by the early 1960s, the article claimed, become the most powerful force in Australian bookselling and publishing. The journalist, John Hetherington, interviewed George Ferguson, the firm's 52-year-old managing director and grandson of George Robertson, its Scottish co-founder and the man who expanded the business from a book retailer into ‘a great publishing house’. Ferguson was still relatively fresh from seeing off a company takeover by New Zealand-born property developer Walter Burns, who had alienated A&R's board and staff by wanting to adopt a commercial approach and focus on books ‘of more popular appeal’. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ferguson's statements were laced with lofty sentiments about the mission of publishing quality literature and the challenge of continuing his grandfather's mission of expanding the market for Australian books overseas, not to make a profit, but because ‘It just seemed the right thing to do.’ ‘In publishing, there's one test you have to keep applying,’ Ferguson is quoted as saying, ‘not “Will it sell?” but “Is it good?” You have to keep on believing that […] You can't run a publishing house like a factory.’Towards the end of the series, The Age focused on Horwitz, under the title, ‘This Is the House That Paperbacks Built.’ The article began by describing Horwitz as having ‘the glossiest publishing offices in Australia’.Air-conditioned, strip-lighted and soundproofed, with pale tinted walls and functional, but elegant, furnishings, these are hardly less modern than a space ship. Compared with the offices of, say, Angus and Robertson, the dean of Australian publishers, they are rather like a 1963 car, splendid with chrome plate and streamlined tail fins, alongside a vintage model.Hetherington reported that while A&R published a hundred or so new books a year, Horwitz was releasing 18 to 20 titles a month and was the single largest player in Australia's growing paperback market. It was unashamedly business minded in its approach to publishing fiction, which was commissioned, written and marketed to specific editorial criteria that the company referred to as fiction ‘categories’ or ‘formulas’.

An advertisement in the 2 May 1955 edition of the monthly trade magazine Newspaper News (Fig. 3.1) announced ‘six long established companies, each outstanding in its own field, have amalgamated their administration into the new holding company, Horwitz Publications Inc. Pty’. These companies were all subsidiaries of what had until then been known as Associated General Publications, Pty Ltd, and their integration was an attempt by Horwitz to improve business efficiencies including, as the advertisement boasted, ‘one account – one point of contact’. The advertisement offers a glimpse into the size and diversity of the newly established publishing entity: seven newspapers, including the previously mentioned Sporting Weekly; six magazines, including the trade magazines Hospital Administration and Hotel and Café News; three magazines aimed directly at women, Our Home andSecrets, True Life, and one ‘Australia's most outstanding magazine for men’, Male. An example of the more salacious type of publication that was emerging in Australia in the 1950s, Male was a little-known foray by Horwitz into the segment of the male publication market referred to in the last chapter as barbershop magazines. These were known in America as the bachelor magazine or what would later be referred to as men's adventure or ‘sweat magazines’. Other publications mentioned in the Newspaper News advertisement include: the ‘pocket book’ series of Carter Brown and Marc Brody, as well as the Lion Books series of American crimefiction reprints; 30 comic titles, comprising 14 million comics annually; and a large number of non-fiction books, covering everything from cookery to Houses, Interiors and Projects written by well-known modernist architect Harry Seidler. The advertisement also mentions a ‘Calvert Publishing Co’, but whether this was the publisher referred to in the previous chapter is unclear. In 1956, the newly established entity moved into a specially built office complex at 400 Sussex Street in Sydney's CBD, called ‘Horwitz House’, designed by Seidler, which still exists in what is now the centre of Sydney's Chinatown. The Sydney Morning Herald had reported plans for the construction two years earlier, an eight-storey office block, built on the site of three existing buildings, with a completely glass front ‘protected from the sun's rays by adjustable aluminium louvers’.