Sweet Money Girl / Life and Death of a Tough Guy [Paperback]

Two novels from the mean streets of 1940's New York City.Sweet Money Girl was originally published by Gold Medal Books in 1954 and tells the story of three lives that collide one December in New York City-Hortense, the dance instructor who knows how to look out for number one; Maxie, the mamma's boy who just wants his shot at happiness; and Hugh, who wrecks it for all of them.Life and Death of a Tough Guy was originally published in 1955 by Avon Books. Joey Kasow is a skinny Jewish kid growing up in the 1920's in Hell's Kitchen. Tormented by the Irish thugs in the neighborhood, he eventually gains their begrudging respect and is allowed to join their gang, the Badgers. Joey grows up tough. He knows he's got to take whatever is dished out to him to stay in the gang. He learns how to inflict pain--he learns how to kill. And gradually he works his way up the ladder to become the Spotter's enforcer. He is now Joey Case. But Joey can't escape his past, falling in love with innocent young Sadie Madofsky, his refuge from the brutal world around him. All Joey wants is to get ahead--but the Spotter has other plans for him.Sweet Money GirlThe truth? Who knows what the truth is? I used to think Maxie was crazy wanting to marry a girl like Hortense. But now I'm not so sure. Hortense was the kind of girl who only came alive in the night, when all the neons are shining, and all the pretty moths are fluttering. She had the big eyes, the passionate mouth, the dream-girl shape with which the advertising-agency guys tease the subway riders. As for Maxie, he was Joe Subway himself. Those two looked as if they didn't belong in the same room with each other.But when I thin of them now, I get an image of one of those lovers' hearts scratched with a stick into the West Side sidewalks when the concrete's wet, and long since hardened. Nothing can rub them out-lovers' hearts scratched in haste, with their enclosed pairs of initials. Sidewalk poems, they endure. So it was with Maxie. The endlch