From Silverberg's introduction to the Stark House edition: "Street gangs have been with us at least since the early nineteenth century, but the genre of street-gang fiction reached its acme in the middle 1950s, with the advent of MANHUNT magazine, which featured kid-gang stories in nearly every issue, and of Evan Hunter's THE BLACKBOARD JUBGLE of 1954 (movie version, 19550, which brought street gangs into the main stream of American popular fiction. It became a stylized art form with its own lingo, its own narrative tropes, its typical characters...I was a prolific contributor to several of [MANHUNT's] competitors, magazines like TRAPPED, GUILTY, SUSPECT, and WEB, filling their pages with grim tales of the brutal lives of young inner-city hoodlums. When I began writing paperback novels of crime and erotic action later in the 1960s, I used many of my kid gang stories as the nucleus for longer work."
Even before The Blackboard Jungle, there was 1949's The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman, which helped foster the literary appetite for kid-gang/juvenile delinquent novels. (Shulman was also the author of Good Deeds Must Be Punished, the source novel for the film Rebel Without a Cause.) Other authors who found literary gold in street gangs included Wenzell Brown, Hal Ellson, Sam Kohlmn, Jim Thompson, Alan Bennett, and Harlan Ellison (not to be conflated with Hall Ellson), among many others. Ellison went so far as to run with a New York City street gang to gather material for some of his early work.
When it came to combining juvenile delinquency with softcore erotic novels, there were few who could beat Robert Silverberg.. While maintaining a solid career as a science fiction writer, non-fiction author, magazine author in numerous genres, and ghost writer, Silverberg still found time to write several hundred novels, many of the for Greenleaf Publishing's various imprints -- 133 as by "Don Elliott" alone! These books were written to a formula: a sex scene every X amount of pages; this was back in the day when graphic sex was hidden and a variety of euphemisms were employed instead -- these softcore books were mild compared to many of today's romantic novels.
With all that in mind, on to the story.
Eighteen-year-old Marty Capuano had been a big deal in New York, the head of the Shining Barons Street gang. Marty was a vicious punk, street-smart, confident, and perhaps better with a knife than anyone else in New York. Marty had no conscience and lived only for kicks, both from fighting and from sex. He had personally killed ten people while in New York. But now his family moved to Nowheresville -- technical name: Jenkinsville, Ohio, population 85,000. Marty needed to get with a new gang in his new location, no matter that the gang members out here were hicks; Marty had plans to change all of that: once he joined a gang, he would take it over and become their president, and then the kicks -- and the blood and the sex -- would really begin.
He finds a local candy shop where a local gang, the Jenkinsville Barons, hangs out. He starts an argument with the club's president and forces him to take out into the back parking lot. There's a knife fight and Marty easily kills his opponent in front of a group of club members. Using threats, he forces them to vote him as the new club president. He also takes over the dead president's deb, the voluptuous Jojo.
The none thing Marty is sensitive about is is his height: he's only five-foot three. (He's also not great to look at, with his pock-marked face, large nose, and receding chin, but he has a lean, muscular body and is well-endowed, so that makes up for a lot with his fellow gang members.
Marty has only three goals at first -- to get back at Jill Webster, a nice girl from a good family who spurned Marty's very crude advances on the first day he was in two; to get back at the bartender of Thompson's Bar, who refused to serve him on his first day in town because he was not twenty-one; and to have a bloody rumble with rival gang the Dragons, to show the entire town who was in charge now.
First, he and three of his gang members kidnap Jill, take her to the woods and gang-rape her. leaving her stunned and unconscious. After they leave, Jill somehow ends up in the river and drowns -- whether by accident or from guilt of what she had just undergone is not known. Then he and the gang break into
Thompson's after hours and completely destroy the bar, wrecking furniture, smashing inventory, and destroying whatever they could touch, with damages that totaled over $10,000. Now it was time for a rumble. Marty spent weeks training his gang how to fight, using only knives; Marty disdained typical gang rumble weapons such as chains, tire irons, baseball bats, and zip guns -- knives were more effective and tended to cower the opponent. Fourteen Barons entered Dragon territory, meeting twenty Dragons. The Dragons did not stand a chance. Five were killed (mainly by Marty) and two were seriously injured; no one on the Barons was seriously injured.
The things about Marty was that he was never satisfied. there always had be something new, a new kick. This was also true about his women (actually, girls, most ranged from 15 to 17 years old). Afgter the rumble he decided he was tired of JoJo and honed in on Mary Anne, who was the deb who belonged to Brewster, a popular member of the gang. When Brewster objected, Marty beat him to a pulp, nearly killing him, and took Mary Anne. Then Jim Cartwright came to Marty's house. Cartwright was the oy who had been dating Jill Webster and they had planned to get married. Cartwright told Marty that he knew he was the one who had raped and possibly killed Jill; he gave Marty three days to give himself up tot he police. Marty doesn't scare easily. He got the three who had also raped Jill and made plans to kidnap Cartwright and kill him.
The one thing that can be relied on in this type of novel is the evil deeds will eventually be punished. So, yeah, Marty ends up getting his. It's the how and the why that brings this book to a satisfying conclusion.
There's a lot of eroticism -- these books were mainly sold as "one-handed reading," after all -- but Silverberg adds a character-driven plot that does not give up. From his earliest days he was the consummate professional, as this novel clearly proves. For those who go for this sort of thing, Running with the Barons is a pretty good read.
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