Jonathan Craig
(1919–1984)
Jonathan Craig (Frank E. Smith) was a staple of Manhunt during its best and most influential years, the mid-1950s. He was variously described in the magazine’s editorial column, “Mugged and Printed,” as a “former night-club pianist,” an “ex-trombonist,” an “erstwhile bartender,” a “carnival man,” and a “sailor.” The third edition of Lesley Henderson’s Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1991) presents a quite different and rather less rackety curriculum vitae, one that sits somewhat uneasily with his alleged Bohemian and freewheeling lifestyle. There Craig is said to have been “head research analyst for the U.S. navy, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II,” a startlingly mature role for a man who was barely twenty-five years old at the time of the Normandy landings in 1944. Later he is reported to have been “adviser to President Truman at the Potsdam Conference, 1945.”
Given that the editor of Manhunt was keen to have his authors be seen as leading colorful, even mildly gamey lives, it is difficult to ascertain the truth about Craig’s history. But without a doubt, Craig clearly had more than enough experience of the hard end of life to become one of the leading chroniclers of the “JD” (juvenile delinquent), or “juvie,” genre, which was so popular with editors and readers in the “rebel without a cause” era of the mid-1950s. He combined a gritty realism with a sardonic outlook and mastered a style that was spare while at times hinting at lushness and moral decay. In his early novels, especially So Young, So Wicked (1957), young women are depicted as sly and knowing, concupiscently old for their years, and all too aware of their own sexual power. Yet in their greed lies the seed of their inevitable downfall. A palpable undercurrent of misogyny can be found in many of Craig’s stories, “The Bobby-Soxer” in particular. The theme was always power without responsibility, a hoary plot line that Craig hauled into the 1950s again and again, freshening it up each time.
Craig began his Sixth Precinct police-procedural series set in Manhattan with The Dead Darling in 1955, beating the first of Ed McBain’s famous Eighty-seventh Precinct books, Cop Hater, by a year. But whereas McBain began his long-running saga in paperbacks before graduating to prestigious hardcover houses, Craig worked on an altogether less epic scale, beginning and ending in paperback.
J. A.
The Bobby-Soxer
(1953)
It was almost ten o’clock on a sultry August night when Donna Taylor turned the corner at Howard Street and started walking west toward Center Avenue. She was seventeen, but without make-up and dressed as she was now, in white blouse and plaid skirt and saddle shoes, she could have passed for a year or so younger than that.
She was a remarkably pretty girl, with slim tapering legs that were tanned to almost the same dark-gold color of the hair caught at the nape of her neck in a pony tail, but she seemed completely unaware of the appreciative glances following her.
She was humming to herself as she walked. Just before she reached the avenue, she paused to look at the display in a store window. A tall, middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit was looking at the display, too. When he saw Donna, he kept his face toward the window, but his eyes stayed on her. They were funny eyes, shifty and sort of wild.
She hesitated a moment, then moved around him, walking in the direction of the avenue again.
Just as she reached the mouth of the alley beside the store building, she heard a quick step behind her. A hand went over her mouth, and a man’s arm whipped around her body in such a way that her arms were pinioned to her sides. She felt herself being lifted off her feet, and then she was being dragged into the blackness of the alley.
She struggled against him, but it was useless. The man carried her as easily as if she had been a doll.
When he had taken her a dozen yards into the alley, he stopped and forced her down to the pavement.
Terror sickened through her. And then she felt the man’s sweaty palm across her mouth slip a half inch to one side, and she jerked her head violently in the other direction. For just an instant her mouth was uncovered, and she screamed. She knew, instinctively, that the man would be afraid after it was over and would try to kill her, and she screamed so loudly that her ears rang.
The man cursed and jumped to his feet, and his heels echoed hollowly on the pavement as he ran toward the mouth of the alley.
Then, out in the street, she heard the pounding of other feet, and men yelling, and she got up and steadied herself against the wall. Then she began to walk toward the mouth of the alley, very slowly, trying to catch her breath.
She came out on the street just as two shirt-sleeved men started into the alley.
“You all right?” one of the men asked.
She nodded. Across the street she caught sight of the man in the pinstriped suit. He was being held by three other men, one of whom had grabbed his hair and jerked his head back. He was trying to fight his way loose, but a man had hold of each of his arms, and they were standing slightly in back of him so that he couldn’t kick at them.
One of the men in shirt-sleeves put his arm around Donna and led her over to the man who had attacked her. She looked at him, and then looked down at the sidewalk.
The other shirt-sleeved man said, “Exactly what happened, Miss — not that I can’t guess.”
Donna didn’t look up. “He pulled me into the alley,” she said. “He... tried to...” Her voice trailed off.
“For God’s sake, Ed!” one of the men said. “Aren’t you bright enough to know what happened, without making her talk about it?” He stepped close to the man in the pin-striped suit and hit him flush in the mouth. “You son of a bitch,” he said softly.
Donna glanced about her. A crowd was forming now. She didn’t know any of the men and women who were pressing in close. The man in shirt-sleeves still had his arm around her, gently and protectively, the way her father sometimes held her. She heard the newcomers asking questions, and the indignant, angry replies they made when they learned what had happened.
She looked at the man in the pin-striped suit again. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and his eyes were sick with fear.
A woman stepped up to him and shook her fist in his face. “You ought to hang!” she said. “A little girl like that! Why, she’s hardly more than a baby!” She spat in the man’s face.
“Anybody call the cops?” someone asked.
“Joe’s just run back to his candy store to call,” someone else said.
The man in the pin-striped suit made a sudden, violent lunge and broke free from the men who had been holding him. He stumbled and went to one knee, then righted himself and started to run. A foot went out to trip him, and he sprawled headlong on the cement. Before he could get up again, a man in a flowered sport shirt leaped upon him and pulled his arm up behind his back in a hammerlock.
Another man drew back his foot and kicked the fallen man in the ribs. The attacker screamed, but the foot sank into his ribs again and again.
The woman who had spit at him said, “That’s the way, George! Kick him in the face!”
Donna turned away. She felt as if she might be sick at her stomach.
The man who had his arm around her said, “You poor little kid...” Then the man on the ground screamed again, and Donna heard the meaty impact of a shoe-toe meeting his face.