Teddy Boy - Ernest Ryman

MICHAEL JOSEPH 

1ST PRINTING 1958

LONDON, UK

COVER ART BY DONALD GREEN

JIMMIE ALBAN is a Teddy boy whose career ends in murder, and this is the story of his successive steps on the path towards an unusually mean and horrible crime. But it is only towards the end of the story that the paths of Jimmie Alban and Charlie Bowker cross. Charlie also claims to be a Teddy boy, but in his case the reasons for a distorted view of life become apparent as we follow his progress through Fulwood, which is an Approved School-one of those places to which we send youthful delinquents.

Life at Fulwood, seen through the eyes of one of the instructors, is never dull. 'Laughter and jeers, violence and courage, cheating and generosity were daily in evidence...Teachers were dealing with lads who had, in many ways, had a greater experience of the world than themselves....We had to make ordinary, decent living attractive to lads who had known the luxury of West End hotels and the excitement of nocturnal prowlings and gang activities.'

In this book delinquents come alive as human beings. Moreover, at Fulwood, Teddy boys form only a minority among the simple-minded, the psychopaths, and boys with perverted cleverness. In their life together they show resentment of all authority, and a constant, clamorous demand for attention and affection. There are many amusing passages in the story, much adventure, and surprising dignity.

Teddy Boy is not a documentary dealing with facts and figures. Its emphasis is on human beings.

A Kind Of Loving - Stan Barstow

MICHAEL JOSEPH

FIRST PRINTING 1960

LONDON, UK

COVER ART BY ADRIAN BAILEY

Set against the background of a West Riding industrial town. A Kind of Loving is the story of a boy's physical infatuation with a girl whom he does not love. When, in his loneliness and romantic dream of the ideal mate, Victor Arthur Brown pursues Ingrid Rothwell he little realises the emotional crises in store for him nor how the events of the next two years will change his life; and in its examination of Vic's predicament the book takes on the wider significance of a study of some of the pitfalls which endanger youth as it fumbles its often uncharted way into adult life.

But this novel is no moral tract. The racy vernacular of the narrative is alive and vigorous and plunges the reader at the outset into the world of Vic's home, his working life, and his troubled relationship with Ingrid.

A Kind of Loving is a far cry from the civilised novel of manners, yet Victor Brown is no 'hero with a broken bottle.' He is to a great extent the prisoner of his own respectability - a respectability which, though it becomes strained to breaking point in the course of his relationship with Ingrid and her mother, the pseudo-refined and arrogant Mrs Rothwell, eventually combines with his innate decency and kindliness to determine him to seek an unselfish solution to his predicament. To do, as he puts it, 'what's right' and hope for 'a kind of loving' that will carry him through.

Going To Meet The Man - James Baldwin

MICHAEL JOSEPH

LONDON, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1965

COVER ART BY DAVID BATTLE

As a novelist, an essayist and a playwright, James Baldwin has proved himself a writer of beautiful and powerful prose. In Going To Meet The Man it is possible for the first time to read a collection of his short stories, a collection which can only add to his stature.

Although it is not Baldwin's aim in writing fiction to be an apologist of the Negro cause, nor of any cause other than that of literature, the racial conflicts which are tearing at the lives of so many Americans today are never far from the surface. The traditions of Negro and white are forcefully evoked and examined, and the pain which the author feels at the plight of his fellow Negroes never once blurs his deep compassion for the frailties of mankind.

Running through his stories like a theme is the role of inherited prejudices in shaping man's destiny. There is the child in The Rockpile who can never be forgiven by his God-fearing father for his illegitimacy; the child in This Morning, This Evening, So Soon who has grown up in France, free of guilt that his father and mother are of different colours, but who will be brought to awareness of this fact when his parents return with him to the States; the child in Sonny's Blues who learns to understand his father through being told of the death of an uncle he never knew; and, in a horrifying finale, the man in Going To Meet The Man whose hatred has its roots in a scene from his boyhood where his parents and other white people watch with jubilation the mutilation and lynching of a Negro 'criminal'.