The Immortal - Walter Ross

FREDERICK MULLER LTD

FIRST PRINTING 1958

LONDON, UK

Johnny Preston, the handsome, tough idol of a million teenage fans, was born into a crazy, mixed-up generation of postwar American adolescence. Soon his ability to convey emotion on a movie screen made him one of its leading representatives. But adulation wasn't enough for Johnny. He had to move faster and live wilder than everyone else. He had to drive his car hard and fly a 'plane carelessly, for kicks-and one day that was the end of Johnny Preston.

With a major film starring Preston still to be released, the studio wasn't talking much about the ghoulish free publicity that it was getting from the teenagers, who rioted around his grave chanting that Johnny wasn't dead.

Others were not so reticent. There was a woman, old enough to know better, but, like the others, tempted by the something that hung like a charm around Johnny Preston. She kept a diary. The girl from the acting school had a shorthand record of her life with Johnny. The psychoanalyst whose male patient initiated Johnny into homosexuality had only to go to his detailed, clinical file. The film starlet talked off the record to a journalist about her relationship with Johnny, and it was a lot franker than the article which subsequently appeared in a magazine. And there was a press agent who had a couple of things to add about a personality that was extravagant even by Hollywood standards.

In this novel Walter Ross builds up, with astonishing skill, a character-study of a talented young man who sought the unattainable and who became so much a part of the world of illusion and shadow that he seemed to exist even after his death.

Strike Heaven On The Face - Charles Calitri

FREDERICK MULLER LTD

FIRST PRINTING 1959

LONDON, UK

In this novel of tremendous impact, Charles Calitri tells the story of a courageous man, a typical American small town...and a discovery that threatened to blow the town off its staid foundations.

It started with rumours about what was going on in the high school-talk of clandestine love affairs, violence, whispers of a sex club.

Walter Davis, the new dean of Barthorne High, determined he would find out about it and do what he could to correct it, to protect the students. He felt as responsible for them as he did for his own daughter and sons. But when he assembled the shocking facts, he ran into a stone wall of opposition from those whose attitude was: "It's none of our business; they didn't do it in the locker-room....We're not a social welfare organization."

With the lines drawn, the conflict exploded, and before it was over, parents, teachers, students, school and county officials had taken sides. The roots extended deep into the heart of Barthorne itself and in one way or another almost everyone was involved.

The story of how Dean Davis brought the town together out of a situation that almost tore it apart is thrilling and inspiring. It is filled with people you come to know and like or dislike, just as you do their counterparts in your own town. For Barthorne is much like any other community-composed mainly of decent, fair-minded people with the same educational problems as your own.

Here at last is a positive, hopeful novel about a generation in anguish-the parents as well as the children. The story of Walter Davis's battle with bad jnfluence, ignorance, fear and indifference, dramatically told by an author who has devoted his life to teaching, bears the authentic and sometimes terrifying stamp of truth.