Raw Rumbles: The Hal Ellson Omnibus: Duke (1949), Tomboy (1950), The Knife (1961)

Although juvenile delinquent fiction is today largely the domain of collectors and scholars of popular culture, the first novel Ellson published, Duke, sold over 1.5 million copies. Unfortunately, the literary merit of his work has often been overshadowed by its exploitable aspects, as evidenced in the often lurid covers gracing their paperback editions (many of them admittedly classics of their type). In Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback, Lee Server noted that juvenile delinquent fiction was *a devastating indictment of American society, but this seemed to go over the heads of most fans of the stuff, captivated instead by the books damned exciting depictions of gang rumbles, sex orgies, dope smoking, hot-rodding, and hubcap-stealing.* While it s certainly true that Ellson wrote damned exciting novels, they were also damned good novels, concerned with the mental conditions of individual gang members as well as the external conditions that cause gangs to flourish while eschewing the easy answers and grossly simplified sociology of puerile, message novels. We at Rudos and Rubes feel that Ellson is overdue for the sort of critical reassessment that noir authors such as Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford have received in recent decades. We hope that this collection of three of his most famous novels will be the first step.

Hal Ellson (1910-1994) was a recreational therapist and best-selling author who drew on his experience with mentally troubled youth, many of them gang members, in his novels. As Lee Server wrote in The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, these were *novels of New York lowlife and delinquency, raw-nerved street sagas that made Ellson the incontrovertible king of juvenile delinquent fiction.*