My new crime fiction book deal
Plus the death of Kath Pettingill and true crime on the Australian screen
PULP CURRY
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Latest episodes
Mackenna’s Gold (1969)
Gold, ghosts and frontier violence
Heat and film: My highlights from the Cinema Ritrovato Festival 2026
I had heard for years from friends about how good Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival is.
The lost Parker films
The two film adaptations of Westlake's master thief nobody talks about
Down with the guilty pleasure: Appreciating Jack Cardiff’s Dark of the Sun
The concept of a guilty pleasure is up there with the word problematic as my most despised terms when it comes to cinema.
Matt Dillon's City of Ghosts and film as a personal time machine
I have been thinking a lot lately about the way that film can act as a personal time machine.
Ghost messages: Australia’s lost television horror anthology, The Evil Touch
Evil Touch
Barbara Loden's Wanda as a neo-noir and a new book on the art of Renato Fratini
Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) is one of those movies that appear perennially on social media as a lost film.
The Only Living Pickpocket In New York
and other cultural preoccupations over a cold Berlin winter
Forget it, Stanley, it's Chinatown
In praise of Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon
Dead to shame: the ballad of the Asia hand
In the early nineties I lived for several years in Vientiane, the sun bleached, run down, quasi-communist capital of what was then one of the more remote countries in Asia – actually, it probably still is – Laos.
My Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy dream cast
While I work on some new Substack material, please allow me to repost one of my older and most popular posts.
In search of a Proletarian Bond
The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, kickstarted the modern fascination with spies.
Hard Rain Falling
I was in a Berlin bookshop recently and noticed a brand spanking new Penguin Modern Classics edition of Don Carpenter’s 1966 novel Hard Rain Falling. I don’t know who is overseeing the cover design on some of the Penguin Modern Classics releases, but they need a raise, because they’re work is stunning, including on the new edition of Carpenter’s book.
Helmut Käutner's Black Gravel and the lost decade of German cinema
I have written previously here about my love for German director Helmut Käutner’s 1961 noir, Schwarzer Kies, or translated into English, Black Gravel. It is without doubt my favourite German noir and one of my favourite noirs from the period of late film noir more generally.
Jane Gallion and the Tao of the female smut writer
The counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies provided rich fodder for pulp writers.
'Under the tinsel and glitter - something ugly.'
Australian pulp fiction's Spanish connection
Everything was like that. Nothing was exactly like that.
The Baader-Meinhof gang on the big screen
James Coburn's Hard Contract
If he was still alive, James Coburn would’ve been 97 a few days ago.
The last good British gangster film
Sexy Beast and 10 other great British gangster movies