Turning Pages: The literary joys of juvenile delinquents
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Rita is 15. She knows how to fight with her knees, her elbows, her teeth, how to hold a blackjack, how to spot a cop, how to roll marijuana, how to lure a man into a dark hallway.
That’s the way they sold Gang Girl, a 1954 piece of pulp fiction from Wenzell Brown, author of Jailbait Jungle, Teenage Terror, Cry Kill and Teen-Age Mafia. The covers of these cheap paperbacks are graced with lurid portraits of young punks brandishing knives and sneering at the reader, and vicious young women displaying large breasts in an aggressive manner.
And nobody worries about blaming the victim: Jay de Bekker’s Gutter Gang proclaims “They came from filthy slums – where even their dreams were dirty!”
Juvenile delinquents, they called them. In the conservative 1950s, the tabloids fulminated, shocked adults tut-tutted, and couldn’t get enough of their stories. The arty end of this prurient fascination produced James Dean, West Side Story, Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, William Burrough’s Junkie; the commercial end produced… well, pulp.
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