"I want the gams"

A piece of Australian pulp fiction, a digest-sized paperback of 98 pages from 1962. Max Strong was a series character by Australian hack called Robert Dudgeon.* Strong had a magazine of his own name in Finland, but there were also stories about other characters by other writers (and some fillers, too, this one has a story "Oil Rain" by someone called Ron Miller).

The cover is.. well, eh.. grunt.. groan.. nice? I don't know the illustrator and I don't know what the Australian digests looked like, so I can't begin to guess if this is original or what. I haven't read the book (just bought it earlier today), but as I've said here (or somewhere else) before, the Australian crime fiction was usually below their Western fiction, which is weird.

* House pseudonym, says Pat Hawk's pseudonyms catalogue. The primary writer was Frank S. Greenop (who has also written as Jess Beaumont, Walt Dundee and Hart E. Martin; you can guess the genre by his 'nyms). Others included such authors as Uell Stanley Anderson and William Listle Stuart. Pat Hawk also mentions American writers having written as Dudgeon: Jack Ehrlich and William Fuller. He also mentions Victor Hanson, whom I've thought to be British. What's going on? (And to make matters worse, Finnish bibliographer Simo Sjöblom states, for some reason, that the Max Strongs published in Finnish in the early sixties were actually written by Lennart Hoffren, a Finnish hack from the sixties and seventies! I don't know where this info is coming from, but it is very doubtful.)

[Digging further into Hawk's Pseudonyms, it seems the Dudgeon name was used (in pirated editions?) with reprints of Ehrlich's and Fuller's novels, presumably in German. The same with Vic Hanson. Hawk's notes are not always very clear.]