Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980
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Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781629634586 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PM Press |
| Publication date: | 09/21/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 26 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
TEENAGE JUNGLE
Pulp Fiction's Juvenile Delinquents
THE PULP DELINQUENTS
The Teenage Crime Wave and 1950s Pulp Fiction
Lurking alongside the usual crop of romance novels and historical fiction, American literary successes of 1947 included a tough tale of delinquent rebellion — The Amboy Dukes. Written by New York native Irving Shulman, the book chronicles the grim, violent (and invariably short) lives of teenage street gangs in east Brooklyn's Brownsville neighbourhood. Set in the summer of 1944, the book recounts the exploits of 16-year-old Frank Goldfarb and his titular gang of Jewish hoodlums. Shulman gives full play to the Amboy Dukes' gritty lifestyle of sex, violence and crime; but also has a sharp eye for the gang's aura of effortless cool:
The boys stood around on Saturday nights, ready for action. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, they stood on the corners and discussed the deadly gossip of rackets: whores, guys who were cut up, and the dough you could make from one sweet job ... The bunches spoiled for a fight, and their technique was swift and murderous: a kick in the ankle, a hook to the groin, a clout behind the ear — then some well-placed kicks in the kidneys and head, and the victim was ready for the ambulance ... They wore open-collared sports shirts or white, blue or brown buttoned down oxford shirts, and their ties were tied neatly in broad knots. Nonchalantly they swung long key chains that hung from a right or left belt loop, and the keys spun in continuous enlarging and contracting circles. The boys sported duck-tail haircuts: long, shaggy, and clipped to form a point at the backs of their heads. Their slick vaselined hair shone in the reflections of light.
A hit with readers, The Amboy Dukes quickly went to a series of editions, notching up sales of nearly three and a half million by 1955. The book concludes with anti-hero Frank slain by an erstwhile comrade, but the novel's success prompted Shulman to produce loose sequels, Cry Tough! (1949) and The Big Brokers (1951). The Amboy Dukes also caught Hollywood's attention. Universal Pictures quickly released a (bowdlerised) film adaptation, City Across the River (1949), while Shulman himself branched into screen-writing, producing an early treatment for the iconic teen picture, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), before penning a 1961 novelization of West Side Story, the stage and screen musical smash.
But the success of The Amboy Dukes also heralded the rise of a tough, new genre in American popular fiction — the juvenile delinquency or 'JD' novel. From the early 1950s to the early 1960s US publishers cranked out literally hundreds of tales that paraded the sensational misdeeds of the nation's errant youth. With alluringly garish covers and eye-catching titles — Juvenile Jungle (1958), The Little Caesars (1961), Teen-Age Mafia (1959) — JD literature was a breathtaking world of switchblades, zip-guns and gang rumbles. Bold, brazen and brimming with brutality, the JD novels were spawned by a combination of the social, economic and political shifts that were transforming postwar America and revolutionising the world of US publishing.
Originally released as a hardback by the publishing giant Doubleday, The Amboy Dukes won moderate critical praise. But it was only two years later, in 1949, that Shulman's novel attracted significant attention, following Avon Books' launch of a paperback edition and a consequent leap in sales. The book's success was indicative of the way the paperback format was transforming American publishing. Of course, paperbound books were hardly new. The commercial possibilities of paperbacks had already been demonstrated in Germany during the 1930s, where John Holroyd-Reece, Max Wegner and Kurt Enoch had set up Albatross Books and successfully produced a range of mass-market paperbacks whose innovations in size, typography and layout became the industry standard. And in Britain the Albatross format was imitated by Allen Lane's launch of Penguin Books in 1935, which revolutionised British publishing through the introduction of high-quality, inexpensive paperbacks. But American talent was also quick to appreciate the paperback's potential.
Leading the way, entrepreneur Robert de Graff joined forces with publishers Richard Simon and Max Schuster in 1939 to found Pocket Books, which soon became a market leader with its paperback reprints of classics, light novels and popular non-fiction. The company's success was partly due to the low price of its books (25 cents) and their attractive presentation, but it was also a product of the firm's innovative distribution. Whereas hardback sales traditionally relied on bookshops, de Graff (a seasoned pressman) saw how a much broader market could be reached via the distribution systems used for newspapers and magazines. Hence, Pocket Books were racked up in newsstands and in drugstores and cigar shops; a strategic masterstroke that in the first year clocked up sales of more than 1.5 million.
Following Pocket Books' success, rivals vied for a share of the pie. For instance, Avon Books — publisher of The Amboy Dukes — started out as magazine publisher, J.S. Ogilvie Publications, but was bought up by the newspaper distributor American News Company (ANC) and relaunched in 1941 as Avon, a paperback imprint that directly challenged (and closely imitated) Pocket Books' releases. More competitors quickly appeared. Dell was launched in 1942, followed by Popular Library in 1943; while Ian Ballantine (formerly director of Penguin's American operations) set up Bantam Books in 1945, followed by Ballantine Books in 1952. And in 1948 Kurt Enoch (who had fled Nazi Germany and settled in the US) established New American Library, initially publishing paperback reprints of classics, then original mysteries, romances and adventure stories.
But it was Fawcett, a major magazine publisher and newsstand distributor, who most extensively blazed the trail of paperback originals. As the distributor of New American Library's Mentor and Signet imprints, Fawcett soon saw the potential of paperback sales and in 1950 launched its own Gold Medal Books — the industry's first major line of paperback originals. Specialising in westerns, mysteries and thrillers, Gold Medal had churned out over 9 million books by the end of 1951, with many novels quickly going to three or four editions. By 1953, then, the paperback trade was burgeoning and the business magazine Fortune could trumpet "The Boom in Paper Bound Books", estimating that the previous year had seen national paperback sales of 243 million in a market worth over $69 million.
The paperback bonanza was rooted in the economic upturn that followed World War Two. Disposable income and living standards rose, and publishers rode the tide of consumer affluence. One market was especially attractive. Wartime increases in youth's spending power were sustained throughout the 1940s and 50s, and by 1959 an awestruck Life magazine reckoned teen wallets to be worth around $10 billion per year. Industries scrambled to stake a claim in the teenage goldmine, and everything from rock-and-roll records to brothel-creeper shoes was pitched to young punters. Publishers, too, were keen to cash in. While paperbacks won a diverse readership, teenagers and young adults were squarely in the book trade's sights. In 1946, for example, Pocket Books launched the Teen-Age Book Show, a touring exhibition that pitched paperbacks to young readers; while throughout the 1950s New American Library had an educational sales department geared to penetrating the classroom market. Largely based on paperback reprints of classic titles, such initiatives were promoted as offering young readers easy access to literature deemed worthy and educational. But, alongside such earnest fare, there also existed a legion of titles whose sensibilities were less high-minded.
During the early 1950s critics regularly decried the flourishing paperback trade, arguing that the market was dominated by what was often dubbed "the three S's"— sex, sadism and the smoking gun. The point was not without foundation. Many paperbacks were gutsy tales of hardboiled tough-guys and racy dames; their scorching narratives matched by covers that bristled with sneering hoodlums and their improbably buxom molls. The formula had its roots in the traditions of pulp magazine publishers, many of whom had become major players in the new paperback business.
The 'pulps' — so called because of the low-cost, wood pulp paper they were originally printed on — were cheap fiction magazines renowned for their gripping themes and outré cover art. The genre's heyday was during the 1920s and 1930s when US newsstands were thronged with cheap, visually striking pulp titles such as Argosy, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective and Startling Stories, all proffering thrilling tales of mystery, crime and adventure. Paper shortages during World War Two brought a steady rise in costs and a decline in the pulps' circulation and, in peacetime, the pulps' sales were hit further by growing competition from television, comic books and paperbacks. But many pulp publishers survived by shifting into the paperback trade themselves. Pulp magazine specialists Leo Margulies and Ned Pines were quick off the mark, launching their paperback imprint, Popular Library, in 1942. Others soon followed. Pyramid Books, founded in 1949, was an offshoot of the pulp firm Almat Magazines, while Ace Books was set up in 1952 by A.A. Wyn, owner of the pulp publishing house Ace Magazines. Like Pocket Books and Fawcett, the pulp publishers exploited their established systems of magazine distribution and sales, and their new paperbacks did a brisk trade in newsstands and drugstores. And, as the companies' writers, artists and editors shifted from producing magazines to paperbacks, the pulps' generic themes, styles and subject matter were reincarnated.
Like the original pulp magazines, the new, pulp-esque paperbacks traded in the thrilling and the taboo. They were home to ruthless gangsters, hard-bitten detectives and brazen hussies. And, like the earlier pulps, the 50s paperbacks were adept at exploiting contemporary uproars and controversies, appropriating their concerns and motifs for narratives calculated to shock and sensationalise. It was a strategy to which delinquent teenagers were ideally suited. The theme of lawless street gangs offered a high octane mix of sex and violence, as well as a sharp bite of topicality at a time when America was seized by a wave of popular alarm about an apparent explosion of juvenile crime.
Unease about escalating levels of delinquency had bubbled since the late 1930s. In 1936, for example, the church-funded morality film Reefer Madness (originally titled Tell Your Children) had warned of the toll "evil" marijuana was taking on America's young. And in 1939, the upstanding publisher Little, Brown and Company released Designs in Scarlet. Written by Courtney Ryley Cooper (a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's redoubtable first director), the book lifted the lid on a world of CELLAR CLUBS AND JUKE JOINTS, where young thugs GET HOPPED UP ON LIQUOR AND DOPE, THEN ROB AND RAPE AND MURDER. Concern mounted during wartime, the FBI estimating that juvenile offending had leapt by as much as 40 per cent during the first six months of 1943. At the time the rise was widely seen as an insidious but temporary effect of social dislocation caused by the war. But when indices of youth crime continued to escalate during peacetime, alarm sharply intensified.
The early 1950s saw America gripped by the perception that delinquency was spiralling out of control. Gallup surveys show a brief peak of public concern in 1945, followed by a more sustained period of anxiety between 1953 and 1958. The fears were fanned by a tide of exposés in magazines, newspapers and newsreels, all purporting to depict a wave of juvenile crime frighteningly new in its scale and severity. The mood was captured by 1,000,000 Delinquents, a non-fiction bestseller of 1955 written by Benjamin Fine, the education editor of the New York Times. Drawing on a welter of news reports, surveys and academic research, Fine presented youth crime as a national epidemic, a threat to the survival of the American way of life. In 1954, Fine estimated, the number of delinquents in America had already hit the million mark — a figure which was set to soar to 2,250,000 within the coming five years, he warned.
Concerns about youth crime were shared in the corridors of power; signalled in 1953 by the appointment of a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to investigate the problem's nature and causes. The very existence of the Senate investigation helped to confirm the popular perception of delinquency as a major social issue, and the view was further confirmed in 1955 when Senator Estes Kefauver took over the Subcommittee's leadership. The Tennessee senator had earlier made his name heading a Senate investigation into organised crime and his appointment to head the Subcommittee on Delinquency lent the inquiry added energy and gravitas. Indeed, impressions of a quantum leap in the scale of delinquency seemed borne out by a relentless rise in the official indices of juvenile crime. But the figures were deceptive. In reality the 'juvenile crime wave' was largely a statistical phenomenon generated through new strategies of policing and changes in the collation of crime data. Rather than being a response to a genuine eruption of adolescent vice, the postwar panic surrounding juvenile delinquency is better seen as a controversy that became a symbolic focus for much broader anxieties in a period of rapid and disorienting change.
Popular perceptions of 1950s America as a land of confidence and cohesion obscure the way US society was actually shot through with conflict and contradiction. The global tensions of the Cold War and the explosion of consumer culture, together with the emergence of civil rights activism and profound shifts in gender roles and relationships, bred apprehension and suspicion. This atmosphere brought stern pressures to conform. In the political arena Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts ruthlessly gunned for "reds under the bed", but America's cultural agenda was also broadly infused with a shrill conservatism set on shutting down dissent and securing conformity.
At the heart of this cultural backlash stood archetypal images of straitlaced domesticity. Representations of traditional family life were ubiquitous in American culture throughout the 1950s, while academics, politicians and the mass media championed the nuclear family as the cornerstone of American liberty. As a consequence, any deviation from these norms risked charges of abnormality and deviance. In this context the burgeoning teenage culture was viewed with concern. Growing levels of disposable income, it seemed, had afforded American youngsters unprecedented independence from the traditional constraints of family life, and the rise of an autonomous peer culture at the edge of adult society seemed to threaten the fundamental anchors of social stability. For many critics, therefore, teenage culture and delinquency were virtually synonymous, and the perception of a new, dangerous divide between adults and adolescents galvanised the panic about juvenile crime.
Politicians and moral crusaders were not the only ones to be gripped by the spectre of delinquency. The world of entertainment quickly seized upon the topicality of juvenile crime. In Hollywood, for example, City Across the River (1949) was followed by a spate of JD pictures — The Wild One (1953), Teenage Crime Wave (1955), Untamed Youth (1957) and a host of others. And, in the world of publishing, The Amboy Dukes laid the way for a profusion of pulp delinquents.
Alongside Irving Shulman, other authors stand out as meisters of pulp delinquency. Hal Ellson was one of the foremost. Working as a recreational therapist at New York's Bellevue Hospital, Ellson was familiar with some of the city's most troubled youngsters. His experiences informed a succession of hard-hitting gang novels that kicked off with Duke in 1949. A portrait of the lawless lifestyle of a black 15-year-old in Harlem, Duke has little in the way of plot but proceeds through a series of stark episodes — reckless gang fights, seedy sex and dope sessions — that characterise the protagonist's grim reality and intersperse his descent into schizophrenia. In contrast to Shulman's measured, third-person narration, Duke (like many of Ellson's books) is written in the first person, its raw edge accentuated by clipped, hardboiled prose and street slang:
When we got back to the neighborhood everybody is high as hell. There's big news. Soon as we drew up to the curb boys who didn't come with us crowded around. The Skibos came through, they said. They raided and stomped hell out of a couple of our boys and ran.
That got me wild. I told my cats to get their artillery ... I went for my pistol ... when I got back to the corner my boys are waiting for me. There was a real mob.
"The mighty Counts is ready," Chink said. "Do we rumble tonight or don't we?"
"Yeah, man!" I said. "Tonight we rumble!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette.
Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Peter Doyle,
Introduction by Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre: Savage Streets and Secret Swingers: The Longed-for World of Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture,
TEENAGE JUNGLE: Pulp Fiction's Juvenile Delinquents,
BEAT GIRLS AND REAL COOL CATS: 1960s Beats and Bohemians,
LOVE TRIBES: Hippies and the Pulp Fiction of the Late-60s and Early-70s Counterculture,
GROUPIES AND IMMORTALS: Pulp Fiction Music Novels,
WHEELS OF DEATH: Pulp Biker and Motorcycle Gangs,
CULTS OF VIOLENCE: 1960s British Youthsploitation Novels,
OUTSIDERS: Late-60s and Early-70s American Pulp and the Rise of the Teen Novel,
Contributors,
Acknowledgments,