Espresso Jungle - W. Howard Baker

SEXTON BLAKE LIBRARY No. 435

FLEETWAY PUBLICATIONS LTD 

FIRST PRINTING SEPTEMBER 1959

COVER ART BY SYMEONI AND MARC STONE

SKETCHES FOR NOVEL BY MARGARET HIGGINS

in an espresso cellar-club in Soho the Beat Generation hoodlums planned violence and terror

Too Late To Mend - Thomas Rainham

A story of teenage thuggery in London's East End

ARROW BOOKS 502

FIRST ARROW EDITION 1958

FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY HURST & BLACKETT LTD 1957

Smithy was a young thug who absorbed every bad influence and rejected every good one; at his school in London's East End he was in a special class for 'incorrigibles'-a class of hoodlums as ignorant and vicious as himself. When he leaves at fifteen, his sinister values are already formed. All he wants is easy money to spend on clothes and girls. From petty theft and fraud he graduates to robbery with violence; then, on the eve of his seventeenth birthday, comes disaster-he is involved in murder! Here is the horrifying story of young gangsters told with superb skill and deep feeling; you may dislike Smithy, but you will certainly not forget him.

Sinners Don't Cry! - R. C. Dickson

They searched for the sound. Tried to find it in the pain of their passion...the scream of her surrender...the rage of his rape...

PERIOD PUBLICATIONS M-102

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA

FIRST PRINTING AUGUST 1961

SINNERS DON'T CRY -

Her life was one big roman candle. And when it exploded inside her she really came alive. She couldn't cry...she was too busy living. She wasn't sorry for what she was doing...only for what she wasn't doing.

Like this novel sings, man. Like it's alive. Make the scene on tour with a velvet-throated thrush with a golden body in front of a mad group of jazz-men who take their kicks where they find them. 'Cause that's livin'. Real livin.'

Hotrod Sinners - Don Elliott

Wanton Paula Was the Passion-Prize at The End Of the Race!

BEDSIDE BOOKS 1222

NEW YORK, USA

FIRST PRINTING 1962

HOTROD GIRL.....

Hold the stick low, tromp down on the pedal, and listen to it winding out! Listen to the roar in your ears! Was it a wheel he clutched in his hands, or was it Paula? Whip up through the gears, listen to the engine-throb steady down to a sweet hum as the miles shot backward under the hurtling wheels! Was it a cut-down car, its horn blaring the clumsy stockers off the road, or was it the lust-spell Paula wove? Did he know? Did he care? Or was he - were all the members of the hotrod gang - going to blast themselves to sinful, endless, lust-burned hell in the passion-clawed arms of the hot-eyed

...GANG WITCH!

The Scene - Clarence L. Cooper

"A shattering, uncompromising novel of drug addicts"

FOUR SQUARE 1524

FIRST PRINTING AUGUST 1966

FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ANTHONY BLOND LIMITED 1960

Sometimes with raw brutality, always with compassion, this uncompromising novel sweeps the labyrinth of pushers and prostitutes, the police ready to spring on The Man who controls the entire dope operation, to reveal the half-world of drugs, known as the Scene.

It is a world where sensibilities are tuned to heights as well as depths, as in the hauntingly moving affair between Andy Hodden and Taylor Mayo. A world of conflict in which men are tested to their fullest, as in the searchingly described characterisations of the two competing detectives of the Narcotics Squad. A world that reaches into the very core of society: the police, the courts, industry, the rich and the poor - none are immune from the infection of the Scene.

Only someone who himself has been an addict, as the author was, could describe so unforgettably 'the panic', the time of no dope, and portray withdrawal so convincingly. 'The Scene' is an important, gripping novel about a side of life that should not be ignored.

A Glasgow Gang Observed - James Patrick

EYRE METHUEN

LONDON, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1973

(A PAPERBACK ISSUE WAS ALSO ISSUED SIMULTANEOUSLY)

FRONT COVER COURTESY OF THE DAILY RECORD

BACK COVER COURTESY OF ALLAN THOMPSON

During the course of his first year as a teacher at an approved school in Scotland, James Patrick became acquainted with 'Tim', a Glasgow boy of sixteen. Following a suggestion - half invitation, half challenge - to come and see for himself how the boys spent their weekend leaves, he agreed to do so. The only possible way for him to do this was to masquerade as a friend of Tim's from the approved school and join the 'Young Team', the gang of which Tim was the 'leader-aff'.

In the course of a dozen weekend excursions, spread over four months, James Patrick donned his disguise, met up with the gang and watched them at close quarters. This book offers more than a frighteningly authentic picture of the behaviour, speech patterns and attitudes of young teenagers alienated from conventional adult society. It brings to life many of the members of the gangs and their family background. We see them at a party, playing football and just talking. We meet 'the King', the leader of all the local gangs.

The result of the author's hazardous double game is a real contribution to the understanding of juvenile gang behaviour - relating it not only to the past history of Glasgow but also to comparable and contrasting types of behaviour in Britain and America. In concluding that the gangs in Glasgow provide an outlet for pathological behaviour, the author underlines the importance of a full and proper understanding of the gang sub-culture on the part of those institutions, such as the approved schools and the courts, which have to deal with them.

Down These Mean Streets - Piri Thomas

"A stunning autobiography of corruption and innocence"

BARRIE & JENKINS 

LONDON, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1970

JACKET DESIGN BY BARRY MARTIN

DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS is the document of one man's journey from childhood to maturity; it is at once moving and terrifying, shocking and tender, touching and stunning.

Piri Thomas, son of Puerto Rican parents - one dark, one white - was born in New York's Spanish Harlem and grew up in those "mean streets." From the time that he first ran away from home at the age of fourteen, the author records the sometimes poetic, sometimes brutal story of his life.

In Spanish Harlem Piri Thomas did not so much grow up as erupt into manhood, through street fights, gang rumbles, drugs, homosexuality, petty thievery, girls, hospitals, the merchant marine, illegitimate parenthood, and ultimately an attempted robbery of a New York nightclub, the shooting of a Policeman, and a long prison sentence.

Finally, in that world of isolated conflicts and constant threars from guards and fellow prisoners alike, the man emerges, through various influences and experiences, with a clearer understanding of himself and a knowledge of those streets through which he has moved to maturity.

But Piri Thomas's memoir is not merely his story - for shooting through these pages are figures that create a vigorous yet brooding world of family gaiety, sudden pain and sorrow, violent impulses and aching wonder: his brothers, sisters, and parents, his friends, the people of the streets, and those of the prion. 

The language is the most corrupt of the city and also that of the most innocent reaches of the human heart, and it reveals overwhelmingly a man's deep masculine integrity and his need to understand himself and why he does what he does.