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.

Zip-Gun Angels - Albert L. Quandt

A Powerful Story of Teen-Age Girls Who Fight Recklessly for Life and Love!

ORIGINAL NOVELS NO. 721

1ST PRINTING 1952

NEW YORK, USA

The streets swarm with them. The city slums pour them out into the world, and then leave them to take care of themselves...and in their way, the girls do. Some of them take the "easy" road, with men in bars and on street corners. Others fight for decency and a home and future. Some are beautiful, and dream of using their bodies to win fame and applause...and men with the money to give them what they want. Others are plain...but they're still female, with all the urges and yearnings of ripening women.

They all start out on the streets of the city...and from the beginning it's a battle...for food, for decency, for love. Boys in the same predicament form themselves into gangs, and fight with broken bottles and zip-guns, defying the world to stop them...

THIS IS THE STORY OF ONE GIRL WHO FOUGHT WITH EVERYTHING SHE HAD, WITH BODY, WITH HEART, AND FRESH YOUNG BEAUTY...AS THE LEADER OF A NEW KIND OF STREET GANG...A GANG OF TOUGH AND BEAUTIFUL GIRLS.

Undertow - Helen Parkhurst

The Story of a Boy called Tony

G. BELL & SONS

1ST PRINTING 1964

LONDON, UK

Undertow is the biography of Tony who, in his twenty-seven years of life, experienced crime, punishment and redemption. Bred in New York's Harlem, the son of Italian parents, he took part in his first hold-up at the age of thirteen and graduated to a five-year sentence for peddling heroin at the age of seventeen. On his release from prison he married and attempted to earn an honest living but, through his wife's folly, was obliged to leave the sanctuary he had found in Connecticut and return to New York. There he was shot by his former associates and his body thrown on the municipal garbage dump.

Tony's story is true. Indeed, large sections of it are vividly told in his own words recorded by Miss Helen Parkhurst, the distinguished educationalist who became Tony's counsellor during his long struggle to break with his past. Her book has all the inevitability, and something of the poetry, of a Greek tragedy-a man's progress towards personal integrity which is achieved only at the cost of his life.

In his foreword Mr C. A. Joyce writes: 'This is a book that should be in every Teachers' Training College Library and it should be read by all who are concerned with the adolescent in Clubs and elsewhere...If you do pick it up you will find it difficult to put down.' Tony's history will be of close interest to the general reader as well as to teachers, to all who work with young people, and to sociologists.

The Wanton Boys - Mark Oliver

A shattering novel about Italian street gangs, their hates, lusts and perverse and brutal ways in a world that scorns and damns them

PYRAMID BOOKS G567

1ST PRINTING DECEMBER 1960

NEW YORK, USA

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY DOUBLEDAY & CO 

COVER ART BY TONY KOKINOS

The Wanton Boys is a brutally realistic story of Pasquale Rossano, a young boy, who ran away from the fishing village he grew up in. He joined other street urchins in Naples where they sought love, a little food and warmth and where they tried to find a place in the sun of life.

These urchins were scorned, fore-doomed and damned by the world to a living hell of a bat-filled, rat-infested, diseased-filled existence. They learned cruel lessons that only the young must learn when adult life is thrust upon them. They learned the bestiality of animal lust and forbidden passion from prostitutes and homosexuals; they found that they were less than human and that the poor, the starving and the weak have no place in life.

This is every wayward youth's story-an unflinching, true-to-life, memorable novel that you will not soon forget.

B-Girl - Robert Novak

NO LIFE FOR A VIRGIN

ACE BOOKS S-174

1ST PRINTING 1956

NEW YORK, USA

PIED PIPER OF HOT JAZZ

From Basin Street to Broadway, Chuck was it-the boy with the golden lip! When he picked up his trumpet for a solo, the crowds went wild. And wherever he played, there was always a girl who knew what Chuck wanted-and was willing to play a one-night stand. Until Irene sang her way into the little band-and Chuck's life.

Maybe her voice wasn't really good, but the customers liked it. And then, abruptly, the song changed, the notes went sour. Irene found herself caught up in a whirling crescendo of discord, and, somehow, somewhere Chuck was in the center of it all-composing the score for the mad music.

This Passing Night - Clive Miller

SECKER & WARBURG 

1ST PRINTING 1963

LONDON, UK

COVER ART BY LAZLO ACS

Here is an American novel about youth, new and big and different in the way that West Side Story was big and new and different. Clive Miller's first novel, adult in approach, searing in authenticity, in style recalls Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. In content it penetrates to the quick, exposes rawly as an open wound the lives and attitudes of American youth today: the privileged young people of private schools, Harvard and New York, and the youth of Brooklyn gangs.

Richard Pierson and Amadeo Magini grew up together in Brooklyn and then their lives separated. The world of Pierson was not without conflict and doubt, frustration and desire, but it was firmly rooted in the confident axis of college, Harvard, New York and its suburbs, and there was always Europe to escape to if the design of life proved unforeseen and unwelcome. Magini's world was equally firm rooted, but against a setting of violence and brutality in which power was the ultimate value and survival a constant struggle.

As Richard Pierson and his friends seek love and purpose in their lives, Amadeo Magini seeks a truce between the Cheetahs and the Noble Magicians. On the Cote d'Azur a young American and an Italian girl have a lyrically romantic affair, and in a Brooklyn cinema against the pounding background of rock-and-roll there is a brutal rape. The lives and worlds of Pierson and Magini cross once again before the powerful and violent climax: the rumble between the Cheetahs and the Noble Magicians.

This Passing Night contains scenes of devastating violence juxtaposed with scenes of great tenderness, quiet and private alongside the brutality of rumble and rape. By turns romantic and violent, it is always truthful and convincing. The effect is like a cold shower on a hot day: of great immediacy and utterly refreshing. Clive Miller has made an impressive start to his literary career.

A Rage To Kill - B. E. Lovell

Young Hoodlums...out to Maim and Murder!

DIGIT BOOKS D253

1ST PRINTING - NO DATE

LONDON, UK

Private investigator Edge Hannegan had sent his partner, on a routine mission. But Danny never reported back. His bloody, beaten body lay in an alley, surrounded by garbage...and all the evidence said it was the work of some thrill-crazed young punks...

This is the gripping story of a manhunt on Terror's dark pavements.