Back to home

Cabinet 2: Australian Pulps

Toni Johnson-Woods, Pulp: A Collector’s Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers. Canberra, A.C.T.: National Library of Australia, 2004. Special Collections NC973.5.A8 JP7

In order to write one of the first publications about the Australian pulp fiction industry and its writers, University of Queensland-based Dr Toni Johnson-Woods had access to the G. C. Bleeck Collection, and the large pulp fiction collection at the National Library of Australia, Canberra. As Johnson-Woods relates, K. T. McCall was actual real-life writers Audrey Armitage and Muriel Watkins, who, for each Johnny Buchanan novel, were given formulaic imperatives by the publisher. One was that there had to be three women in the story: a blonde, a brunette and a redhead.