Term Of Trial - James Barlow

HAMISH HAMILTON

LONDON, UK

 FIRST PRINTING 1961

COVER ART BY FRITZ WEGNER

JAMESS BARLOW'S new novel brings the oldest struggle in the world, the endless fight between good and evil, into IVc classroom in the slum Railway Street Secondary Modern School. Here are, under the care of Graham Wier, forty pupils, most of them dull, indifferent and hostile, but a few eager and worthwhile.

Wier, shabby, idealistic and sensitive, is a small man-many of his pupils are obviously far stronger than their teacher. His main enemy in IVc is Mitchell, a fifteen-year-old with the physique of a man and the cunning of his slum environment.

Mitchell's plans include the seduction of Shirley Taylor. In a form of pupils not very willing to learn, Shirley is outstanding. She is a shy, honest, likeable girl, attractive to Mitchell because of her physical appearance and to Wier because of her sincerity. But the battle is more complicated than Wiers knows, for Shirley is in love with her teacher. She is subtle despite her youth and persuades Wier to coach her at home. After a series of innocent episodes, Shirley concludes that her teacher is at last in love with her, and in a London hotel, she declares herself. But Wier's affections are those of a teacher; he rejects her-gently, even reluctantly, but irretrievably. Her love turns to immense hatred. Knowing how it will hurt him she goes with bitter eagerness to be soiled by Mitchell, and with a cunning heart and a shy face complains to her mother of Wier's behaviour.

A charge of indecent assault is brought against Wier and the evidence is alarming. Events that were tender, innocent, now assume a guilty aspect. His trial in the magistrate's court and the effect of the trial upon his life form the climax of the book.

James Barlow's last novel, The Patriots, was one of the big fiction successes of 1960. Film rights were sold for a high price, and it was the Book Society's Choice, has been published in America and is now being translated into nine foreign languages. Term Of Trial, with its frank understanding of today's young delinquents and the awful power they can command, will, we believe create a still greater sensation.

Frail On North Circular - Macgregor Urquhart

BOARDMAN 380

FIRST PRINTING 1962

LONDON, UK

COVER ART BY MCLOUGHLIN

The body was discovered in the River Roding, not two hundred yards from the busy North Circular road. It was that of a young redhead, and it was dressed only in underclothing. Cause of death was immediately obvious-a stab wound in the heart. Sergeant Renning discovered the body. Chief Inspector Smarles got the case-and Renning along with it.

A curious man, Smarles. Untidy, scruffy almost, careless of externals, sometimes oblivious of his physical surroundings, yet all the time aware on the five planes of awareness of what really matters.

His investigations centre on a dingy restaurant, the type of place known to its habitues as a caff. Here the weak-minded son of the manageress entertains hid friends-the boys already well on the road to delinquency, the girls matching them stride for stride. There is, too, a senile seller of call girl lists, a dim ex-pug, a tired and faded prostitute. And behind them all, manipulating them as though they were puppets, the sinister figure of the Guv'nor. But everyone is too frightened to give Smarles his name.

So Smarles-a dirty rozzer as he often tells himself-investigates. But in a way quite strange to most fictional detectives. He listens to the talk of delinquent youth, he puts up with the officiousness of Sergeant Renning. He thinks bitter thoughts about his superiors, is offensive to his juniors. And finally, he pounces.

Here is a novel as fresh and original as the conception of Chief Inspector Smarles. The Chief Inspector will probably never be promoted, but readers will not complain so long as he remains the same wholly original figure.

The Kids - Tony Parsons

NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY 450 02911 5

LONDON, UK

FIRST PRINTING JULY 1976

Blondie, Dogend, Rod and Chiv are THE KIDS OK

They are the kids of today, the toughest in their tough world of high-rise flats, pills, booze, careless violence, petty crime, casual sex and drugs.

The kids cut a violent swathe through the East End, terrorising dance-halls, schools and soccer grounds. It is a life that leads to Borstal and the big, bad world of organised crime and dealing heroin to the grand people from across the tracks.

But the good times don't roll for ever, and violence breeds violence - as The Kids discover, to their cost.

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'.

Soho Spiv - Ben Sarto

MODERN FICTION

LONDON, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1949

COVER ART BY PERL

Million-Sale Ben Sarto Shocks London with his new "SOHO SPIV"

The Deadly Sex - Jack Webb

BOARDMAN 303

LONDON, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1960

COVER ART BY MCLOUGHLIN

Sammy Golden, police-detective, and Father Shanley, the astute but kindly parish priest, are involved with murder and delinquents-among other things-in Jack Webb's most exciting mystery to date.

Sammy is told to acquire a hangover and then report for duty. This is an unorthodox order, but on it hangs the catching of a cop-killer, the murderer of one of Sammy's friends. Sammy does as he is told. Perhaps he is overzealous because his head aches so that he can hardly think, and when he turns up, still on orders at a roadhouse called The Seven Club, he is ready for both beer and trouble. He has plenty of both before the evening ends.

The excitement starts when Sammy meets a blonde-a girl whose looks are one-in-a-thousand-and saves her from a fracas that starts in The Seven Club. Father Shanley tries to reach Sammy, but Sammy is moving so fast that their paths seldom cross in this suspense-filled story.

The Tiger Aamong Us - Leigh Brackett

BOARDMAN 200

LONDON, UK

FIRST PRINTING 1958

COVER ART BY MCLOUGHLIN

Walter Sherris - successful, happy, good husband and father-made just one mistake: he took a walk along a dark road one night. Without warning, a car raced toward him and screeched to a stop; out piled five young men intent on violence. To the accompaniment of wild brainless laughter, Walter Sherris was beaten to the ground.

He awoke in a hospital nine days later. And from that moment his pleasant life became a nightmare, more horrible than those he had wrestled with in those nine days of unconsciousness.

Walter Sherris wanted revenge: for the broken leg and the pain; for the doubts he now had about his pretty, gay wife; and for the countless and nameless others who had been mauled by the thrill seekers, the sadists, the compulsive slayers.

The police were evasive, almost disinterested. There were no witnesses. So Walter Sherris set out-alone-to trap the tiger.