Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats

Description

Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats is the first comprehensive account of how the rise of postwar youth culture was depicted in mass-market pulp fiction. As the young created new styles in music, fashion, and culture, pulp fiction shadowed their every move, hyping and exploiting their behaviour, dress, and language for mass consumption and cheap thrills. From the juvenile delinquent gangs of the early 1950s through the beats and hippies, on to bikers, skinheads, and punks, pulp fiction left no trend untouched. With their lurid covers and wild, action-packed plots, these books reveal as much about society’s deepest desires and fears as they do about the subcultures themselves.

Girl Gangs features approximately 400 full-color covers, many of them never reprinted before. With 70 in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, and previously unpublished articles from more than 20 popular culture critics and scholars from the US, UK, and Australia, the book goes behind the scenes to look at the authors and publishers, how they worked, where they drew their inspiration and—often overlooked—the actual words they wrote. Books by well-known authors such as Harlan Ellison and Lawrence Block are discussed alongside neglected obscurities and former bestsellers ripe for rediscovery. It is a must read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, lost literary history, retro and subcultural style, and the history of postwar youth culture.

Contributors include Nicolas Tredell, Alwyn W. Turner, Mike Stax, Clinton Walker, Bill Osgerby, David Rife, J.F. Norris, Stewart Home, James Cockington, Joe Blevins, Brian Coffey, James Doig, David James Foster, Matthew Asprey Gear, Molly Grattan, Brian Greene, John Harrison, David Kiersh, Austin Matthews, and Robert Baker.

Sujets

• Book cover
• Artist's book
• Subculture
• Rebels
• Rétro
• Pulp Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629634586
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

In memory of Graeme Flanagan
Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980
Edited by Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette
All text copyright 2017 the individual authors
Further information may be found on the last page of this book
This edition PM Press 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
The editors and the publishers wish to thank all those who supplied images and gave permission to reproduce copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders, and the publishers welcome communication from any copyright owners from whom permission was inadvertently not obtained. In such cases, we will be pleased to obtain appropriate permission and provide suitable acknowledgment in future editions.
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Cover design by Steve Connell/Transgraphic Services and John Yates www.stealworks.com
Design and layout by Steve Connell/Transgraphic Services
Indexing by Simon Strong
ISBN: 978-1-62963-438-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942910
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
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
The Pulp Delinquents: The Teenage Crime Wave and 1950s Pulp Fiction
Evan Hunter s Jungle Kids
The Amboy Dukes , by Irving Shulman
Some Sketches of the Damned: The Early Pulp Fiction of Harlan Ellison
Playing Chicken: 1950s Hot Rod Pulps
Rumble at the Housing Project , by Edward DeRoo
Teddy Boy, by Ernest Ryman
The Feather Pluckers , by John Peter Jones
In Too Deep , by Bruce Nicholson
Bodgies, Widgies and Bent Cops: Gunther Bahnemann s Hoodlum
The Delinquents , by Criena Rohan
The Rebels , by Carl Ruhen
The Typewriter Was His Camera: Devil Girls and the Shadowy Literary Career of Edward D. Wood, Jr
The Warriors , by Sol Yurick
BEAT GIRLS AND REAL COOL CATS: 1960s Beats and Bohemians
Tomorrow Is a Drag: Beats and Bohemians in 1960s Pulp Fiction
Ann Bannon and the Beebo Brinker Chronicles
Beat in Fiction and Fact: The Books of John Trinian
Shake Him Till He Rattles , by Malcolm Braly
Marijuana Girl , by N.R. De Mexico
Laura Del-Rivo s The Furnished Room
Baron s Court, All Change , by Terry Taylor
Party Girls and Passion Pits: The Pulp Fiction of Sydney s Kings Cross
The Spungers , by Julian Spencer
LOVE TRIBES: Hippies and the Pulp Fiction of the Late-60s and Early-70s Counterculture
Turn On, Freak Out: Late-60s Hippie Pulp
Two Travel Through; or, The Skinny Shall Inherit the Earth , by Glen Gainsburgh Peter Whitehead
The Disappearance of Adam Diment
The Carnaby Street Spy
Whoever Was in Control Was the One to Watch : An Interview with Floyd Salas
What Now My Love , by Floyd Salas
Dress Her in Indigo , by John D. MacDonald
From Acid Temple Ball to Wimmen s Comix : Sharon Rudahl s Adventures in the Underground
144 Piccadilly , by Samuel Fuller
Satanic Slaves and Hippie Death Cults: Charles Manson-Inspired Paperbacks
Nothing to Lose: An Introduction to the Work of Jane Gallion
The Power of the Word : A Letter from Jane Gallion
Sappho in Absence, by John Crosby
Harris in Wonderland , by Philip Reid
The Hardboiled Hippie: The Detective Fiction of Brad Lang
GROUPIES AND IMMORTALS: Pulp Fiction Music Novels
Hot Lips , by Jack Hanley
Wild Beats: Australian Rock Pulps
A Sad Song Singing , by Thomas B. Dewey
Sir or Madam, Will You Read My Book? British Beat Group and Rock Fiction of the 1960s
Cold Iron , by Robert Stone Pryor
Drummer , by Richard Carlile
The Destroyer #13: Acid Rock , by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
The Drop Out , by Hugh Miller
WHEELS OF DEATH: Pulp Biker and Motorcycle Gangs
The Leather Boys , by Eliot George
A Rock-and-Roll Lord of the Flies : Davis Wallis s Only Lovers Left Alive
Bonnie , by Oscar Bessie
Black Leather Barbarians: The Biker Pulp of New English Library
Bike Boys, Skinheads and Drunken Hacks: Laurence James Interviewed
The High Side , by Max Ehrlich
Bikie Birds , by Stuart Hall
CULTS OF VIOLENCE: 1960s British Youthsploitation Novels
The Best of British Bovver : Richard Allen and New English Library
Gender, Sexuality and Control in New English Library Youthsploitation Novels of the 1970s
Soccer Thug , by Frank Clegg
Agro , by Michael Parry
The Punk, by Gideon Sams
Gang Girls , by Maisie Mosco
OUTSIDERS: Late-60s and Early-70s American Pulp and the Rise of the Teen Novel
Something in the Shadows : An Interview with Marijane Meaker
James Bond Never Surfed: The Surfer Spy Pulp of Patrick Morgan
Operation Hang Ten: An Interview with George Snyder
The Grass Pipe , by Robert Coles
The Outsiders , by S.E. Hinton
A Hero Ain t Nothin but a Sandwich, by Alice Childress
Frank Bonham s Dogtown
Go Ask Alice , by Anonymous
High School Pusher , by Jack W. Thomas
Kin Platt s Young Adult Novels
Contributors
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
Through Beatnik Eyes
Consider the masses of stuff, quickly and cheaply written, drawn, edited, laid out, run off in printing houses, shipped, unpacked and lined up in shops and newsstands, alongside masses of stuff almost exactly the same, all of it taking part in a vast Darwinian competition to catch some punter s eye, and remove a little spare change from said punter s pocket. Some of it will be sold, maybe even in large numbers, but more often in modest numbers (which isn t too much of a problem since production costs are low) and dog-eared copies will end up in lunchrooms or barracks or dormitories, or wedged behind downpipes in factory toilets, or stacked in back sheds. Some may go straight to the dump, unread. Maybe it was put together in an atmosphere of high-minded artistic ambition, or it may have been regarded even by its own makers as junk. Regardless, the huge bulk of low-culture product will drop out of sight almost immediately. Live fast, die young, as the saying goes.
But there are some good-looking corpses. Over the past half century, maybe since the ascent of rock and roll, people have come to particularly value certain items recovered from the bogs of culture. Low-down, dirty, utterly disposable jukebox music from half a century ago is in much greater circulation and held in infinitely higher esteem now than it ever was then. Mid-20th-century book and magazine art, in its day often regarded as slightly shameful, even crypto-pornographic, is highly prized and traded, and continues to inform both contemporary high art and everyday design. B-grade film and various forms of extreme kitsch from the past continue to come to the notice of the alert retro hawks and are carefully fed back into the cultural mainstreams.
Low paperback fiction has seen one of the most successful rehabilitation jobs. Some material which in its day received little notice from cultural gatekeepers and commentators has steadily worked its way up the prestige ladder. Crime fiction of the early to mid 20th century is the obvious case, and since Quentin Tarantino borrowed the term pulp fiction everyone, even your high school English teacher, pretty well gets the principle that gems may come from trash. There are no prizes to be won by declaring now that last century s pulp-crime, supernatural, science fiction, romance, cheesecake and fantasy-sometimes turns out to be amazingly awesome.
The pleasures of pulp are complex and contradictory. If you start digging you might find unexpected literary finesse-plenty of people who later graduated to high-or middle-brow respectability paid the bills back then by writing serviceable pulps. And there were plenty who never graduated, but whose work ranks high on modern literary criteria: balance, flow, economy, freshness of image and language. Natural writerly grace and all that stuff.
You might find earlier versions of the punk aesthetic-the textual equivalent of harder, faster, louder, badder and crazier. Pulp regularly managed to be way more out there, because no one was paying all that much attention. There wasn t time to sand down the sharp edges. And that was trash lit s natural default territory: out there.
Or you might find laid bare the mostly unspoken fears, desires, dreams and nightmares of the time. Doubly, trebly so when it comes to sex and sexuality. Pulp as cultural Freudian slip, loony bulletins from the collective id. Maybe not so loony.
Or you might say to hell with that and just go with the flow, enjoying pulp for its couldn t-give-that-much-of-a-shit attitude. There s deep dark perverse mad, and then there s fun, bracing, energizing mad. There s the sort of mad that the author or artist is complicit in, and there s the naive unselfconscious, weird, obsessive, maybe on-the-spectrum, medication-all-wrong mad, the kind the artist denies, disavows, or else seems to be entirely unaware of.
Anyway, let s agree, pulp is good. Or can be. And it seems so far to have proven inexhaustible. New titles and genres no one much knew about keep turning up.