Monday, 11 May 2015

I'll Fix You - Hal Ellson

A realistic novel of Juvenile Delinquency


PEDIGREE BOOKS 
UK
FIRST PRINTING 1958

From the Reviews of

Hal Ellson's Books

"Mr. Ellson, who has worked as a recreational therapist with juvenile delinquents is undoubtedly telling an authentic story...Morbidly fascinating and shameful piece of social history."
-New York Herald Tibune

"A hard, fast, tough, tight-fisted novel...For strong stomachs and those who like their reading terse and breathless."
-Virginia Kirkus Review

"The results of adult callousness towards children...are depicted with shocking impact...Duke is a powerful condemnation of a society that robs children of their youth."
-Justice

"It is a surprise to come across so excellent a book as DUKE...Such a book depends of course on one thing, namely truth-the authentic truth of real conditions, the psychological truth of individual reactions, the artistic truth of presentation and the moral truth of facing evil that exists right under our noses."
-Dr. Frederic Wertham, the noted psychiatrist in American Journal of Psychotherapy

Wednesday, 22 April 2015

Reefer Madness

 






REEFER MADNESS
TREVOR L. HUGHES
ZEPHYR PUBLICATIONS
1989-1997

Pretty cool 'dope' fanzine from the people at Hawkfrendz, it ran to 11 issues in total, 10 issues for Volume 1 and just the single issue for Volume 2. Features lots of vintage comic strips, cover art and other 'dope' related features, this is well worth picking up if you see it.

Saturday, 21 March 2015

Spirit of 69 Skinzine - Issue 3


Spirit of 69
Skinzine

The third issue of this fanzine dedicated to the Spirit of 69 skinheads and it is as good as the previous two issues. Featuring articles on Subba Culture, Laurel Aitken and Sound Men, as well as reviews and news. If you're interested in Skinheads or Skinhead music, this is well worth picking up, if not it's just nice to have a physical zine rather than an online one, go buy it!

Thursday, 19 February 2015

Dropout - Martin Yoseloff

"The haunting novel of a girl adrift...and a generation in torment..."a reading experience not to be missed." New York Times


LANCER BOOKS 73-770
NEW YORK, USA
FIRST PRINTING 1968
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY E. P. DUTTON AS "THE GIRL IN THE SPIKE-HEELED SHOES' 1949

"ABSORBING"
-Miami Herald

"Tenderness, understanding and the poetry of simple lives are the keynotes of this novel."
- Oklahoma City Oklahomen

"Martin Yoseloff, with a delicate perceptiveness of the shades of virtue and evil, here takes the old pattern of a small town girl 'with no mother to guide her' falling into questionable associations, keeping poor company, hunting up temptations as if she had not been tempted enough. Nut Mr. Yoseloff alters the old pattern-decidedly for the good."
- Pasadena Star News

"This could be a dull and lustful tale, bur Mr. Yoseloff fills it with so much compassion, and writesnwith such skill, tht one cannot help being fascinated. It has many of the qualities of Stephen Crane's Maggie."
-American Mercury

YOU WILL NEVER FORGET MAYBELLE REARDON!

Wednesday, 18 February 2015

Subba Culture Fanzine


Subba Culture 
Fanzine

A new or newish fanzine called "Subba Culture" and if you like the kind of books featured in The Cool World then this will definitely be of interest to you. Full of street stylish fun, fashion, music, film, books and other similar toned stuff. Three issues out already and it is limited to 200 numbered copies per issue, be quick before they go, I wasn't quick enough for issue 1 and I missed out...so if anyone has one, I need a copy! 
If you want a copy, check the link for Subba Culture, they do mail order and if you don't want a copy, check out the site anyway, it's great!

Tuesday, 17 February 2015

Come Back On Monday - Sheila Solomon Klass

"A white teacher, a problem student, a week of crisis in a Harlem school"


ABELARD SCHUMAN  
NEW YORK, USA
FIRST PRINTING 1960

This is the story of a week of crisis in a school situated in one of New York's seething slums - the "pit" of Harlem.
Deborah Lieb, a dedicated and devoted teacher, is on the staff of Henry D. Thoreau Girls' Junior High, a school to which incompetent teachers are exiled, in which administrators and much of the staff apathetically serve out their sentences while awaiting transfers, a school where "come back on Monday" is a favorite teachers' dodge to get rid of problem students - most of them Negroes and Puerto Ricans reflecting the fears and angers and tensions of a depressed community.
The crisis arises when Deborah Lieb is accused by a reporter for a Negro tabloid of being anti-Negro. caught by the cyclopean forces let loose by this accusation - the Negro "hate" sheet relentlessly pursuing its racial enemies, and the white school administrators eager to secure advancement by "keeping the lid on" their problem school - Deborah finds her job threatened, her own values and self-assurance weakened. During this same week, she must deal with the problem of Barbara Jones, one of her brightest Negro students and a potential delinquent, haunted by the memory of the drunken bum who violated her in a tenement basement when she was twelve years old. Deborah must also cope with the pettiness and back-biting of some of her colleagues - the old maids, the Negro toadies, the narrow minded disciplinarians who are far more concerned about keeping order i the hallways than about a miscarriage in the classroom.
By skillful use of parallel narration, the author holds the mounting suspense of Deborah's story before us, while introducing an amazing gallery of characters. Teachers, principals, students - all are unforgettably etched for the reader.
Yet if this novel were nothing more than photographic realism, it would fall short of its purpose. For the theme of this book is implicit in its title; there must be time and love for hapless youngsters such as the ones that Deborah and the few responsible teachers befriend. It is this sense of compassion which illumines this engrossing and exciting novel. It is a genuine cry from the heart.

Monday, 16 February 2015

The Jungle - Nelson Algren

"A great novel of lawless youth" 

"A book of the hour...close to the raw" -New York Times

AVON BOOKS T-185
NEW YORK, USA
NO DATE 1950's
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK AS BY THE VANGUARD PRESS AS 'SOMEBODY IN BOOTS' 1935

"A powerful and disturbing book, which does not shrink from the harsh facts of violence, rape and human wretchedness."
-New York Sun

"Frank and brutal...violence and transcient, narcotic beauty"
-Washington, D.C., Post

The forthright story of Cass McKay : 
his father, a devil by his own admission-
his brother, an unmanly drunken wreck-
his sister, a gentle girl enslaved by hunger-

-and of that small, restless section of our youth of both sexes, which - in the absence of proper parental supervision - rides the rods that lead to degradation and delinquency.

"This book should be read, reread and studied."
-Washington, D.C., Post

"Sizzling from the griddle of experience"
-New York Times

Sunday, 15 February 2015

Satchmo : My Life in New Orleans - Louis Armstrong

"The Colourful Vice-Ridden Days Of New Orleans"


ACE BOOKS 146
LONDON, UK
FIRST PRINTING 1957
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY PETER DAVIES FEBRUARY 1955

New Orleans - with its savage, joyous struggles for existence; its vigorous, warm personalities, its brutalities, its poignancy. New Orleans, the cradle of jazz and of all-time king of jazz - Louis Armstrong. This is a one-man success story with a difference, for Armstrong came up the hard way, and Satchmo gives us here the whole incredible, vital tingling Armstrong history from the slums of his childhood through reformatory to the time he left his fabulous Mississippi city and headed out trumpeting for Chicago and the world.

Saturday, 14 February 2015

Knuckle Girls - Richard Allen


NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY 3651
LONDON, UK
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
FIRST PRINTING DECEMBER 1977

'That's it, folks. Roll up and see the infamous Ina Murray. Get your tickets here, missus. Watch her give 'em knuckle. If you're very good and applaud loudly she'll even smash a glass in some bloke's face. That's terrific. It's the greatest. Ina rules, okay!'

Ina Murray has become a problem. Beaten by her father, she has learned to hate; humiliated at school, she has learned to 'fight for her rights'; brutalised at an approved school, she has learned to terrorise and maim. Now, at eighteen, Ina faces a charge of malicious wounding, even 'intent to kill'. And only now do social workers and probation officers attempt to discover what brought Ina to that vicious combat of bicycle chain and copper wire amid a circle of cheering supporters.

'Girls used only to resort to psychological bullying...Now they're moving in gangs and using bicycle chains, knives and clubs. In fact they're beginning to behave in a way once only associated with the roughest of boys.'
-HENRY CLOVER, PRESS OFFICER OF THE NATIONAL UNION OF TEACHERS

Friday, 13 February 2015

The Warriors - Sol Yurick

"The most powerful novel of the world of  teen-age gangs since 'The Amboy Dukes'

"A brutal and terrifying book, a deeply significant work of art" - The Cleveland Plain Dealer


PYRAMID BOOKS X-1466
NEW YORK, USA
FIRST PRINTING AUGUST 1966
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON AUGUST 1965
COVER ART BY HARRY SCHAARE

WAR IN THE STREETS
The night of July 4th. In the Bronx, a city-wide convention of gang leaders moves to organize New York's teen-age gangs into an army of 100,000 strong. But mistrust leads to insult and insult into open warfare, and soon the police move in. Suddenly, six members of "the Family" - the Coney Island Dominators - are alone on enemy terrain, hunted down and terrified for their lives. Their desperate flight back to the safety of Brooklyn becomes a journey filled with violence, a modern Odyssey gone terribly wrong, an adventure into every imaginable crime against mind and body...

"Stunning"
-New York Herald Tribune

Thursday, 12 February 2015

The Man With The Golden Arm - Nelson Algren

"The classic modern novel of drug addiction on which the sensational Frank Sinatra film was based"


ACE BOOKS H414
LONDON, UK
FIRST ACE BOOKS EDITION 1961
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY NEVILLE ARMSTRONG 1959

the Man with the Golden Arm

Carl Sandburg says of Nelson Algren

"Great qualities of insight into people, a heart of pity, a gift of cadence and song, and often when you near heartbreak he throws in comic relief. The interwoven police, politicians, gamblers and thieves, fixers and hustlers, the jargons of the night-clubs and prisons, these are here in The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren makes his living grotesques so terribly human that their faces, voices, shames, follies and deaths, can linger in your mind with a strange midnight dignity. I join with Ernest Hemingway in hoping that Algren lives on, holds to his standards, and writes a long shelf of books."

Wednesday, 11 February 2015

The Violent Gang - Lewis Yablonsky


PELICAN BOOKS A802
MIDDLESEX, UK
FIRST PRINTING 1967
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY COLLIER-MACMILLAN 1962
COVER PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER BARKER

When in June 1957 a fifteen-year-old polio victim was beaten to death by the Egyptian Kings gang in a New York park, a new kind of 'killing for kicks' violence had burst upon the American scene. The author of this book entered the world of two New York gangs, the Dragons and the Balkans, to discover the youths' real motives, hidden from the police, from other social workers, and even from themselves. His investigations reveal that the violent-gang member is a displaced person, unable for various social and psychological reasons to associate with others, within a gang or outside it. The gang itself emerges as a loose grouping, more a vehicle for its members' fantasies and desires for status than a well-oiled criminal machine. Traditional methods of gang control, which have accepted the power of the gang on its members' own valuation and attempted to divert it to more worthwhile ends, may be merely aggravating the problem. Professor Yablonsky himself suggests some totally new methods of control, based upon the revolutionary Synanon experiments in group control.

Tuesday, 10 February 2015

The Girl In The Spike-Heeled Shoes - Martin Yoseloff

"All The Boys Had Maybelle's Number"


POPULAR LIBRARY 573
TORONTO, CANADA
FIRST PRINTING APRIL 1954
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY E.P. DUTTON JULY 1949

SHE'D SHOW THEM!

When Maybelle Reardon came to Kenyon High that morning the boys looked at her queerly and the other girls ignored her completely. She knew that Dennis Morrisey had told.

But what had happened in her room yesterday had been Dennis' fault. How could they blame her? All right, she decided angrily. The next time it would be her own fault. She'd give this town something to really talk about!

"The author avoids bawdiness in a story that is essentially sexy and comes up with a tale that moves his readers to compassion for his fictional heroine."
- Atlanta CONSTITUTION

Monday, 9 February 2015

God's Junkie - Sonny Arguinzoni with Jorunn Oftedal Ricketts


"THE MIRACLE STORY OF GOD'S JUNKIE AND THE ADDICTS CHURCH"


LOGOS BOOKS L-314
NEW JERSEY, USA
LOGOS PRINTING 1971
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY JIM HOWARD

'An exciting true story!' - Nicky CRUZ "Run Baby Run"

'Those who have read my books will want to read this one' - DAVID WILKERSON "THE CROSS AND THE SWITCHBLADE"

"Sonny Arguinzoni is doing great work for God...It is time the story was told...You will not put this book down until you have read it completely...This is a story of God's power in action."

- DAVID WILKERSON, author "THE CROSS AND THE SWITCHBLADE"

Part of Sonny's story was in Run Baby Run...now you can read the exciting account of God's Junkie...there is hope for the one involved in drugs, sex, rebellion...miracles do happen and Sonny Arguinzoni and his addicts church see them every day.

- NICKY CRUZ, author "RUN BABY RUN"

Sunday, 8 February 2015

The Butchers - Leonard Bishop

"They Lived And Loved By The Law Of The Streets"


POPULAR LIBRARY SP11
NEW YORK, USA
FIRST PRINTING OCTOBER 1957
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY THE DIAL PRESS JULY 1956
COVER ART BY HOOKS

"TIMELY...POWERFUL...TRUE!"
-Dallas TIMES-HERALD

The frank, realistic story of a teen-age gutter-scrapper, who learned all he knew about life in the sordid streets and tenements of New York's Lower East Side.

It is also the story of three girls - a downtown floozie, an uptown fancy girl, and one decent woman - for whom he slugged his way out of the slums and broke the deadly hold of the Syndicate that owned him, body and soul.

"FURIOUSLY ALIVE"-New York HERALD TRIBUNE
"POWERFULLY, RELENTLESSLY WRITTEN"-Chicago SUN-TIMES
"TOUGH AND TENDER"-Washington POST & TIMES HERALD
"PASSION AND COMPASSION"-Bridgeport POST

Friday, 6 February 2015

The Blood Circus - Thomas K. Fitzpatrick

"First came 'Hell's Angels' - now on the sex and terror trail 'The Beasts'


NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY NEL 2611
LONDON, UK
3RD PRINTING NOVEMBER 1972

They're mean, vicious, sadistic. Sex and motorcycles are their scene.
They are THE BEASTS - a motorcycle gang to rival HELL'S ANGELS.
They've got the people in California living in terror, so the law decides to plant a man amongst them - but even he isn't prepared for the mind-blowing plans that their psychopathic leader devises...

Thursday, 5 February 2015

How Rough Can It Get? - Joe Weiss

A startling story of modern youth

AVON BOOKS 582
NEW YORK, USA
NO DATE
SPECIALLY REVISED AND EDITED FOR AVON BOOKS


here is a picture
of present day New York City which
is overwhelming in its force and originality.

It is the story of a group of young men
and the hungers and frustrations that drive 
them from girl to girl, from job to job -
and which turns the city into a battleground
of human frailty, with no holds barred.

Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Black Boy - Richard Wright

"A Scorching Story Of A Negro Adolescent In A Hostile World"


ACE BOOKS H269
LONDON, UK
FIRST ACE BOOKS EDITION 1959
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY VICTOR GOLLANCZ 1945

A picture of suffering, squalor, and injustices: Richard Wright's account of his childhood makes painful but absorbing reading.
-Peter Quennell: DAILY MAIL

It is a distressingly truthful account of the life of a Negro boy...One of the few books I've read that I know I shall never forget.
-NEW STATESMAN

This is a grim book - it's bound to be, because it gives you the human aspect of a terrifying problem.
-B.B.C. BROADCAST

The best review of Black Boy would be in two words: 'Read it.' A record of loneliness, bewilderment and poverty.
-TIME AND TIDE

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Only Lovers Left Alive - Dave Wallis


PAN BOOKS X464
LONDON, UK
FIRST PAN EDITION 1966
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY ANTHONY BLOND 1964

Smashing, looting, killing, loving-
the teenagers take over all Britain

'a shattering sensational novel...a real original'
DAILY EXPRESS

The adults have committed suicide with Easyway pills, and the teenagers have taken over. Free to smash, loot and love as they like, the gangs roar through the streets on their expendable 
brand-new motorcycles in search of disappearing stocks of lipstick, petrol and food. Free of adult control the youngsters commit every sin but hypocrisy...until they meet the future.

'Grim and often macabre, this contemporary fantasy has a vigorous fertility of invention, rattling pace and dialogue that crackles with vitality'
BIRMINGHAM POST

'arresting and terrifying'
NEW YORK WORLD-TELEGRAM

Monday, 2 February 2015

Boot Boys - Richard Allen

By the author of 'Skinhead' and 'Suedehead'


NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY 450 01697 8
LONDON, UK
6TH PRINNTING APRIL 1975

First there was 'SKINHEAD'
Then came 'SUEDEHEAD'
Now there are 'BOOT BOYS'

Tom grinned, bringing his fist down with a chopping motion on the back of the United fan's neck. He felt the blow jar his muscles. He kicked as the man slumped.

Then the boots went in - hard. Muffled moans lost themselves in the frantic chanting from the terraces.

"Boot Boys! Boot Boys!"

Sunday, 1 February 2015

Must I Die? - Francine Wenzell

"A gutter-girl she became a gangster's moll...and then a tycoon's toy..."


DIGIT BOOKS D293
LONDON, UK
FIRST WORLD PUBLICATION 1959

MUST I DIE

This is the tough story of Toni, a young girl who was born in the slums of New York's waterfront strip. She becomes involved in a smuggling racket...and eventually a kidnapping.

But Toni has he big moments too...when a millionaire takes her up and shows her the town. It doesn't last though and, in the end, Justice exacts its price for wrong-doing...

Saturday, 31 January 2015

The Angry Time - Leonard Bishop

"THE TOUGH YOUNGER SET PROWLS THE BACK ALLEYS OF PASSION AND VIOLENCE"


MONARCH BOOKS K53
DERBY, CONNECTICUT, USA
FIRST PRINTING JANUARY 1961
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY FREDERICK FELL 1960

THE TOUGH ONES

THE PLACE: A corrupt boys' reformatory, where the systematic practice of violence and vice has driven the angry inmates to the breaking point.

THE PEOPLE: The Keepers - led by Head Guard Clawson, who gets his kicks tormenting weaker boys - while his wife Gretta gets hers from the tough ones. 

The Inmates - led by Waxy, a street gang leader who wants savage revenge on his captors - and Kenny, a delinquent who wants to go straight.

THE PAY-OFF: A prison break that rocks the institution, when 50 emotionally warped teen-agers run riot - with Gretta Clawson their No.1 hostage!

Friday, 30 January 2015

The Beat Generation - Albert Zugsmith

"The shocking and revealing novel of a generation gone wild based on the sensational MGM motion picture release"


BANTAM BOOKS 1965
NEW YORK, USA
1ST PRINTING APRIL 1959
MOVIE TIE-IN

THE BEAT GENERATION
is the searing story of the restless, jaded men and women, with no aim in life except a new sensation-drugs, "way-out" jazz, perverted sex, actual crime.

THE BEAT GENERATION
is especially the story of rich, young Stan Belmont, who had known every thrill. Now his only kick was - rape.

THE BEAT GENERATION
is an MGM release, a spectacular Albert Zugsmith production starring Steve Cochran, Mamie Van Doren, Ray Danton, Fay Spain, Maggie Hayes, Jackie Coogan, and Louis Armstrong  and his All-Stars.

Here's the big novel
of the restless ones who hop from thrill to thrill, the groovy cats who call themselves Beatniks-try anything for kicks but are never satisfied-
THE BEAT GENERATION 
is their story

Thursday, 29 January 2015

Hell's Kitchen - Benjamin Appel

"Teen-Age Vice Amid The Slums Of - Hell's Kitchen"


LION BOOKS 95
NEW YORK, USA
1ST PRINTING AUGUST 1952

A STINKING SLAB CUT OUT OF A GREAT CITY...

Five avenues wide, stretching from the saloons of 8th Avenue to the rotting docks on the Hudson River, slashing north two or three slum-ridden streets - that was Hell's Kitchen.

Where kids were born and became thugs before they got thrown out of school, and died before they were old enough to vote - their bullet-splattered flesh eventually staining the pavement just another shade darker. Where backyard clubs taught the delinquents to be gangsters and the gangsters to be killers.

One man knows this stinking slab cut out of a great city, knows it better and tells it better than any man ever before him. That man is Benjamin Appel. Here is a book that throbs with all the pulse of life and lechery, of heroes and hoodlums, of innocent painted dolls and prostitutes. When you read Hell's Kitchen you will know why William Saroyan said: "Benjamin Appel-you are the best story writer in America."

Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Run Tough, Run Hard - Carson Bingham

"A High Voltage Story Of Violence And Vice Among Over-Privileged Teen-Agers" 

 
MONARCH BOOKS 194
DERBY, CONNECTICUT, USA
1st PRINTING APRIL 1961
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
COVER ART BY RAY JOHNSON

Teen-Age Trouble

All at once, life was much too complicated for young Brad Dixon...

There was his parents' disapproval of his love for virginal Mitzi Gaines...There was the problem of Deedee Sayers, hot-eyed and hot-lipped, who constantly tried to arouse his nascent manhood...and wanton Dale Sayers, Deedee's mother, who thought Brad would be a nice change from the tired businessmen who beat a path to her bed...

Finally, there were the Black Vampires, juvenile delinquents on motorcycles, who repelled Brad even though their dedication to debauchery and wanton destruction appealed to the dark side of his nature.

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Punk Rock - Richard Allen

 

NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY 450 03731 2
LONDON, UK
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
1ST PAPERBACK EDITION DECEMBER 1977

The Punks are on the march - and the Teds are out to nobble them

The clash can mean nothing but violence and bloodshed but that doesn't stop reporter Raymond Kerr from following along to get his story.

His investigation is thorough, from the way they dress to the way they make love - and the way they fight. He meets the punks on their own ground. He meets their idols and their hangers-on. And he meets the Teds, their sworn enemies, whose savage hatred will stop at nothing...

Monday, 26 January 2015

Bonnie - Hugh Barron


"They called her the princess of the motorcycle gangs"

NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY 2854
LONDON, UK
1ST PRINTING NOVEMBER 1970

Bonnie came from a respectable, well-to-do home. And was she ever bored!

Her flesh cried out for the thrills of danger, speed, punishment. She craved the torment and rapture that only one society on earth could offer her. The Apaches - a lustful, barbaric biker gang.

She abandoned her young body to their rituals. She flung herself into their crazed way of life. This to her WAS life. Till the stink of death drifted in...

By then, of course, it was too late for Bonnie.

HUGH BARRON, bestselling author of DOLLBABY and FUN CITY, now reveals the horror of the leather-clad, heavy metal world of the motorcycle gangs.

Sunday, 25 January 2015

The Warriors - Sol Yurick


PANTHER BOOKS 2218
LONDON, UK
1ST PRINTING 1967
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY W.H. ALLEN LIMITED 1966

WAR ON A CITY

'Shocker is a favourite word used about books. This is one that truly merits it. It's West Side Story and then some. And nobody's singing I Feel Pretty...
Yurick isn't just concerned with crude violence. He really digs deep into the customs and conventions of these kids at war with the adult world.'
- Alan Forrest, SUNDAY CITIZEN

'The Warriors is the story of youthful delinquency to end all such tales. Nothing is left to the imagination-And the imagination boggles'
- Liverpool Daily Post

'The best novel of it's kind I've read, an altogether perfect achievement. I'm sure that to many it will sound like sacrilege but I have to say that I think it a better novel than LORD OF THE FLIES'
- Warren Miller

In the Bronx, eight boys, long sideburns and crew-cut tops, thick sweaters despite the heat, and sneering looks on their murderous Irish faces, mounted the crosstown bus. The driver felt the back of his neck turn to ice.

July 4th, American Independence Day
The teenage gangs - white, Puerto Rican, Negro...
17-year-old youths juggling with snake-coiled bicycle chains, 15-year-old girl friends nursing knives in their pockets - declare a truce to their interminable warfare and stream out from the appalling slums into downtown New York. The snobs are going to be given a rumble. So begins, as rockets soar into the sky to explode into shimmering American flags, a night of madness, orgy, and murder. The reader will certainly finish THE WARRIORS awestruck on a new, unbelievable level of awareness.

Saturday, 24 January 2015

The Beatles in Help! - Al Hine

"The story of the Beatles new comedy in colour - Released by United Artists - Fully Illustrated"


MAYFLOWER DELL 0486
LONDON, UK
1ST PRINTING AUGUST 1965

THE
BEATLES
in
HELP!
also starring
LEO McKERN
ELEANOR BRON
VICTOR SPINETTI ROY KINNEAR
Produced by WALTER SHENSON
Screenplay by
MARC BEHM and CHARLES WOOD
Story by MARC BEHM
Directed by RICHARD LESTER
A Walter Shenson-Subafilms Production
Eastmancolor United Artists release

Friday, 23 January 2015

Cop Killer - George Bagby

"An Inspector Schmidt Mystery"


WDL BOOKS M914
LONDON, UK
1ST PRINTING 1959

COP KILLER
It wasn't a pretty world where Patrolman Bob Black walked his lonely beat. It was a jungle-world of cheap hookers, junkies, and smart alec kids who were tired, embittered old men at fifteen.

And one night, when Bob Black was keeping his solitary vigil, someone from that jungle came out of the shadows and made sure he would never keep it again.

Inspector Schmidt of Homicide and his shadow, George Bagby, realized that finding the murderer wouldn't be easy.

How could anyone find a killer in a jungle filled with killers - all of them cop haters.

COP KILLER

NOW, BLUE JEANS ARE ALWAYS WORN TIGHT AND NARROW...

But there's tight and then there's tight. And when they fit as tight as a skin, more naked than naked, then they have a special swagger that doesn't quite go with the clean-cut kid next door.

I mean the switchblade-set swagger.

It goes with the black-leather jackets, and those lousy ducktail haircuts, and those sullen-faced kids from the slums.

And sometimes it goes with murder.

Thursday, 22 January 2015

Walk Softly Walk Deadly - Lee Bergman

"A terror-ridden story of lust and raw emotion"


BELMONT BOOKS 90-282
NEW YORK, USA
1ST PRINTING MAY 1963

Anna      
"No, Larry, no," she repeated over and over. But one boy held her tightly, and the other pressed the point into her flesh...

WALK SOFTLY

Artie      
The young punk had him backed into a corner. Smiling, savoring the kill. The knife rose slowly to waist level. "Okay, man," he breathed, "Where do you want it?"

WALK DEADLY

Tomahawk
   The switchblade snapped out and in one slash he opened the sweater down the front. "What's the matter, Peggy," he taunted, "you ain't talking so smart now."

Chris
"To knife an enemy," the judge began, "is an uncivilized act. This is the case of a boy who knifed his own brother." The court was deadly quiet...

Acts of violence that are unforgivable...in "The street side story that is unforgettable." Here is a popular young novelist's masterpiece of passion and suspense. WALK SOFTLY, WALK DEADLY is already being hailed as one of the season's paperback greats.

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Teen-Age Mobster - Benjamin Appel

"Teen-Age Violence - and Adult Vice"


AVON BOOKS T-162
NEW YORK, USA
1ST PRINTING 1957
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS 'LIFE AND DEATH OF A TOUGH GUY'

YOUNG HOOD

Out of slum back alleys and the violent sandlots of Hell's Kitchen came young Joey Case-

an ordinary, decent kid who might have been your neighbors' son one year...suddenly turned vicious mobster, "lady's man," and brutal killer the next.

With unflinching honesty, yet depth and compassion as well, one of the truly big writers of our day now tells his story-as timely and terrifying as tomorrow's headlines-the story of a kid who made murder his chosen career...

"THE BEST ACCOUNT YET IN THE FORM OF A NOVEL OF A DEBASING PHASE OF OUR HISTORY..."
N.Y. Journal-American