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Old 11-08-2017, 10:15 PM   #1
Pulpmeister
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Newspaper Fiction in Australia

Newspaper Fiction in Australia

Before WW2, Australia's fiction publishing, specially popular fiction, was negligible. Most Australian authors had their books published in the UK, and copies dribbled down to Australia through the usual channels. Or not.

Or so I thought, until I discovered the amazing world of newspaper fiction.

With a small population widely dispersed, bookshops were something the average Australian found only when venturing the big smoke. Rural newspapers filled the gap with endless serials and short stories. Here was a world inhabited by authors who seldom saw their work between hard covers.

In the second half of the 19th Century a woman crime write, Mary Helena Fortune, (died 1911) produced hundreds of detective stories and several novel-length serials, all published in Australian newspapers, mostly under the name "Waif Wander". One single volume of selected crime stories was published as a book. That's all. Unfortunately, few if any issues of the weekly newspaper which published most of her work survive. It is almost all lost. The only serial of hers to survive is Dan Lyon's Doom (1885) which I have extracted and turned into an ebook.

An American example is newspaper-man, Broadway and Hollywood producer Mark Hellinger (1903-1947), who wrote many hundreds, possibly thousands, of short-short stories for his New York newspaper, in the O Henry mould. I found over a hundred of them in Australia's wartime newspapers, no doubt for the benefit of American forces in Australia. But few if any ever made it between hard covers.

Back in Australia, an author I'd never heard of appeared in a series of articles published in 1933 about Australian writers. It was revealed he was the author of numerous newspaper serials, and further revealed that in 1920-1924 he had walked around Australia. That's 10,000 miles on the route he chose. His name was Aidan de Brune, (1874-1946).

I joined with Project Gutenberg Australia and Roy Glashan's Library to identify his output and (since de Brune is in the public domain in Life+70) there are now digital editions on-line. Nineteen novel length serials, two novella serials, and eighteen short stories, all except one published in Australian and New Zealand newspapers between 1926 and 1935. HTML only at Gutenberg Australia, and epub at Roy Glashan's Library.

His writing would inevitably have found a home in pulp books and magazines if Australia had any such thing in the 20s and 30s. The stories are basically rather gaudy crime yarns, although there is a trilogy: Dr Night, The Green Pearl, and Whispering Death, which steadily veers into fantasy by the end (gravity powered aircraft without engines...) and features a very unlikely Asian villain who is as different from Fu Manchu as you can imagine: a small, colourless man of uncertain central Asian origin whose principal obsession is raising money by any means possible (invariably criminal) to recreate a long-dead central Asian kingdom of which his distant ancestors were kings.

Most of the stories take place in and around Sydney, although the earliest known is set in Perth Western Australia and one of the novelettes in north Queensland.

A more recent example of newspaper-only fiction is Vince Kelly (1898-1976), a Sydney based crime and political newspaperman who is best known for several non-fiction books; but he also published, at my last count, 260+ short stories featuring Detective Inspector Price, an elderly old style cop in Sydney's CIB, and his sidekick the impetuous young Detective Richardson. Any of these would be at home in EQMM. The period for these stories is roughly 1941 to the late 50s. Only one collection has ever been made from this huge output.

Ploughing through many other old papers, I found vast numbers of serials by authors I'd never heard of, which were often sub-headed "by the author of..." and a list of even more obscure titles. Many, I suspect, never appeared as books, and many of the authors' names, I further suspect, were pseudonyms anyway. (Aidan de Brune's real name was Herbert Charles Cull). Quite a few were anonymous.

There's a Ph.D. thesis somewhere in all this! (Or at least a B.A. in Literature...)
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Old 11-09-2017, 02:38 PM   #2
ZodWallop
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Hey, thanks. That was pretty interesting.
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