Monday 6 March 2017

Baron's Court, All Change - Terry Taylor

A young man's diary about London....the darker side of London....


FOUR SQUARE BOOKS 1231
FIRST FOUR SQUARE EDITION 1965
LONDON, UK
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY MACGIBBON & KEE 1961

'The place where I live is called Greater London. To get to the London which isn't so great you have to board a tube train which goes on a twenty minute journey above ground till you come to a station called Baron's Court...At that point, where the train first goes into the tunnel, you are leaving Greater London, where the natives starve themselves to buy a new car...and enter the manor of the real London'.

The hero of this novel, a shocking engaging teenage refugee from Greater London, recounts his experiences of the real London. Here he joins a Spiritualist group where he finds a woman who supervises his initiation into more earthly mysteries. A meeting in a jazz club leads him into partnership with a dope peddlar. From then on things begin to move fast-too fast...

Sunday 5 March 2017

Mix Me A Person - Jack Trevor Story



W.H. ALLEN 
FIRST PRINTING 1959
LONDON, UK
COVER ART BY 'KING'

At a time when most crime stories conform increasingly to one or two well-worn patterns, it is refreshing to come across so original a writer as Jack Trevor Story, whose short novel, The Trouble with Harry, was made into a successful film by Alfred Hitchcock. This new book, his first full-length thriller, is a thoroughly unusual, originally planned and entertaining novel.

Harry Jukes is a rock 'n' roll, skiffle-playing Teddy Boy convicted of the murder of a policeman, but Dr. Anne Dyson, a young and somewhat unconventional psychiatrist, is convinced he is innocent, and sets out to prove it. How she does so keeps the reader spellbound.

The author's huge sense of humour gives the book an altogether unexpected quality, and his ingenious weaving of plot and sub-plot compels attention. This book is at the same time a cynical and sentimental, a crude and accomplished, slice of life-in fact an explosive experiment in impudence which adds up to one of the most inventive thrillers in years.

Saturday 4 March 2017

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.

Friday 3 March 2017

The Cool Crowd - Albert T. Quandt

The story of Vinnie - Lolita of the New York Streets


PAPERBACK LIBRARY 52-224
FIRST PRINTING JULY 1963
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS CELLAR CLUB 1951

vinnie

At fourteen she was ripe with knowledge of sex and every kind of evil. Her companions were cool, hard-eyed young hoodlums. Her meeting places were the cellar clubs of New York's West Side. The price of swinging with Vinnie was to offer her a new kind of kick.

Shocking, explosive, savagely realistic-a frightening novel of today's thrill-hungry youth

Thursday 2 March 2017

Road Kid (The Dark Adventure) - Howard Pease

Teen-Agers on the Prowl


BANTAM BOOKS 1110
FIRST PRINTING MAY 1953
NEW YORK, USA
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY DOUBLEDAY
AS "THE DARK ADVENTURE 1950

IT'S A THRILLER, WITH IMPACT"

says the New York Times of this compelling and dramatic story of high school kids (some of them from our "very best families") on the bum.

"An honest attempt to tell, in a thrilling adventure story, some of the real problems of youth and delinquency-with no punches pulled."
-San Francisco Chronicle

Wednesday 1 March 2017

Hooked (Narcotics: America's Peril) - Will Oursler and Laurence Dwight Smith

The Brutal Truth About Dope And Crime


POPULAR LIBRARY 528
FIRST PRINTING OCTOBER 1953
NEW YORK, USA
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY DOUBLEDAY 1952 
UNDER THE TITLE NARCOTICS: AMERICA'S PERIL

DOCUMENTARY THRILLER

"This book is a documentary set down with the drama and pace of a thriller. Its villains are drug peddlers at home and abroad, its heroes the Federal agents who wage a ceaseless war against them."
Buffalo NEWS

In boxes labeled "machinery," in secret rooms of ocean liners, in bandages, brassieres and hollow crutches, dope worth millions crosses American borders. School girls prostitute themselves for a "fix," honest men turn gunmen to support "the habit" -while "pushers" prosper in a deadly racket.

Can America survive the international dope conspiracy? Here is the answer in a challenging, courageous book that sounds the battle cry against the underworld.

Tuesday 28 February 2017

Myself and I - Constance A. Newland

Here is the intimate and completely frank record of one woman's courageous experiment with psychiatry's newest drug LSD 25


FOUR SQUARE BOOKS 1261 
FIRST FOUR SQUARE EDITION 1965
LONDON, UK
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY FREDERICK MULLER LTD 1963

LSD 25

'I travelled deep into the buried regions of the mind. I discovered that in addition to being consciously a loving mother and respectable citizen I was unconsciously a murderess, a pervert, a cannibal, a sadist and a masochist. But in the wake of these dread discoveries I lost my fears and achieved complete sexual fulfilment.' With unsparing honesty, Mrs. Newland presents a minute by minute account of her penetration into the still uncharted regions of the unknown. She reveals how she purged, under the influence of the powerful psycho-chemical LSD 25, the depths of human negativity. Examines her overcoming of the baffling problems of frigidity in a liberally-educated woman...recounts her weird fantasies and inexplicable nightmares. This terrifying but often admiring journey is reported with incredible candour.