AustLit
Welcome to the World of Pulp
Among AustLit's many records are thousands of pulp novels from the early to mid twentieth century, the result of research by Dr Toni Johnson-Woods into popular publishing in Australia.
This exhibition showcases some of those works, with an illustrated guide to some of Australia's most prolific authors of pulp westerns. The authors covered here all wrote for Australian publishing house Cleveland Publishing, which was still publishing westerns to December 2019, when it unfortunately closed up its long business.
The images here were provided by Pat McPhilbin, collector of westerns, who graciously provided copies of his collection's covers to enhance AustLit's records.
Des R. Dunn was born in Mackay in the late 1920s, and began writing pulp for Cleveland Publishing in the 1950s. No one knows precisely how many novels he wrote: AustLit lists 396, as well as 91 novellas. He wrote crime and detective novels with such titles as Target for a Tigress and Don't Die on Me, Diana, and westerns such as Never Corral a Coward and Sam Colby ... Deceased.
He not only wrote prolifically, he was also prolific in his use of pseudonyms: he wrote as Brett Iverson, Morgan Culp, Sheldon B. Cole, Adam Brady, D.R. Dunn, Matt Cregan, Gunn Halliday, Shad Denver, Larry Kent, and Walt Renwick, and possibly others.
Dunn died in 2003.
Born in Wales, Philip Holden arrived in Australia in 1953. He worked first as a farmer and then, from 1961, as a deer hunter in New Zealand. His experiences in these years were later included in a number of books on hunting, both instructional (Wild Pig in Australia, 1994) and autobiographical (The Deer Hunters, 1976). After returning to Australia in the late 1960s, he began penning westerns.
By the time he left Australia again for New Zealand, this time permanently, he had written almost fifty novels for Cleveland Publishing. Like many pulp writers, he wrote under a range of pseudonyms: the ones we have identified include Lee Chandler, Cord McAllister, and Lee Holden.
Holden died in 2005, still based in New Zealand where he had been settled over thirty years.
Paul Wheelahan was not only an author of pulp westerns, he also worked as an illustrator for pulp publishers and for the burgeoning Australian comics industry, including inking for Stan Pitt's Yarmak: Jungle King comics. He also launched two of his own novels into the industry: The Panther (1957-1963, with the Tarzanesque central character raised by panthers) and The Raven (1962, in which an aristocrat falsely accused of a crime stalks a ruined castle in England).
Wheelahan wrote nearly two hundred westerns for Cleveland Publishing under multiple pseudonyms, including Emerson Dodge, Brett McKinley, Ben Jefferson, Adam Bonnard, E. Jefferson Clay, Ben Nicholas, Matt James, and Ryan Bodie.
Keith Hetherington has written prolifically for radio, television, and pulp publishing houses. In the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote for Melbourne television giant Crawford Productions, penning scripts for Homicide, Division 4, and Matlock Police, including several that appear in our Writer in Television History project.
As a pulp novelist, he is responsible for, by our count, nearly 400 novels, and possibly more: adventure, crime, war, and westerns.
As well as his own name, Hetherington has published under eleven confirmed pseudonyms, including Johnny Colt, Tyler Hatch, Brett Waring, and Hank J. Kirby.
Leonard Meares, better known by his most-famous pseudonym, Marshall Grover, is a legend in the genre, author of at least 731 novels by our reckoning. His work includes the Larry and Stretch series, which was translated into Norwegian in the 1960s, and the Big Jim series, which was translated into Swedish, also in the 1960s.
Unlike other pulp writers, he didn't dabble too far in other genres, penning only a handful of crime pulps compared to his over 700 westerns. His career only slowed down when Horwitz, the company for which he did most of his writing, reduced their paperback publications, effectively retiring their stable of in-house authors.
While 'Marshall Grover' was Meares' most popular and frequent pseudonym, he also used others, including, on occasion, his birth name.
Anthony Scott Veitch was a script-writer as well as a prolific novelist. In the 1950s and 1960s, he wrote a range of scripts for ABC and BBC radio, including adventure dramas set in the Northern Territory (Hart of the Territory, 245 episodes, 1951 to 1960, and Overland Patrol, 39 episodes, 1965-1967), spy thrillers (Nicholas Quinn, Anonymous, six episodes, 1966), and historical fiction (The Young Pioneers, 28 episodes, 1967-1968).
Veitch's westerns mostly pre-date his television work, appearing from the early to mid-1950s down to the mid-1970s. For them, he adopted the pseudonym 'Scott McLure'; although one work appeared by 'Dan Kestrel' and three by 'J. Cobb Collier', he was among the more restrained of western writers in his use of pseudonyms.
Veitch died in 1983.
Roger Green is an enigma. We know he was born in East Sussex and arrived in Australia, probably with his family, given his youth, in 1950. And we know he wrote westerns under a series of pseudonyms, including the wonderful 'Sundown McCabe'.
He began publishing westerns in the 1950s or 1960s, and was still publishing with Cleveland down into the 1990s.
Further Reading
Websites
Cleveland Publishing home page.
Pulp Fiction: An Australian Popular Fictions Project (AustLit).
Essays
Hall, Kenneth. 'The Era of the Pulp Western'. Studies in the Western 19 (2011): pp.25-33.
Johnson-Woods, Toni. 'Crikey It's Bromance: A History of Australian Pulp Westerns', Sold by the Millions. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012, pp.141-161.
---. 'Gone but Not Forgotten: Australian Pulp Fiction 1939-59', National Library of Australia News, 15.3 (2004), pp.19-21.