A punk kid and his two clueless worshippers, planning on a big score with no real idea of who they’re robbing, already seems like a recipe for disaster. But Skip’s dumbest move is telling his uncle Willy—a fiftyish ex-con who immediately sees the heist as a way out of his dead-end caretaking job. Willy, in turn, enlists the aid of an old criminal pro who soon takes charge and makes Skip wish he’d never opened his mouth.

Suddenly—and this is the genius of Hitchens’s novel—you can see this going wrong in a million different ways. Hitchens so brilliantly establishes this hierarchy of crime that after a while, you start rooting for the knuckleheads. Skip, at worst, is guilty of trying to claw his way out of a life that seems predestined, inescapable. Sure, nineteen-year-olds can be fools. But grown-ups who take advantage of them? Man, they should know better.

In the late 1950s, drug store racks were full of juvenile delinquent pulp stories by writers like Vin Packer (the hardboiled pseudonym of novelist Marijane Meaker), Evan Hunter, and Hal Ellson. And at first, that’s what I thought Hitchens was writing—a story of luckless Pasadena street kids running afoul of the law. But with the introduction of Uncle Willy and his gang, Hitchens hits the accelerator and t-bones this juvie pulp tale into the side of a late-50s model hardboiled crime caper—the kind of rough stuff Peter Rabe and Lionel White were writing for Gold Medal Books. I don’t think such a hybrid existed before Fools’ Gold—heists were supposed to be serious adult business. Kids, meanwhile, were supposed to be getting into street rumbles, greasing their hair, and rolling cigarette packs up in their sleeves.

Today we see this fusion all over the YA bookshelves, with kids thrust into dire situations that would make those hardboiled writers of the 1950s blush. Hitchens’s 1958 novel, as it turns out, is both of its time and way ahead of it. If her originality hasn’t been acknowledged, it’s only because those coming after failed to see her skid marks on the road.

— Duane Swierczynski

FOOLS’ GOLD

CHAPTER ONE

The first time they drove by the house Eddie was so scared he ducked his head down. Skip laughed at him. Above the rattling of the motor, Skip jeered, “What’s the matter with you? Afraid the old woman’s got X-ray eyes or something? She’s a mind reader, maybe? She’s looking out now and spotting us? You nuts?” What he really meant, as Eddie knew, was that Eddie was chicken.

Now that they were past the house, headed downhill past empty lots, Eddie cast a glance back. “Hell, it’s such a doggone big place, that’s all. Important-looking.” And in this hour of near twilight, in his opinion, kind of spooky and ominous.