Rumble Fish
Rusty-James is the younger brother, always in the shadow of a brother everyone calls the Motorcycle Boy, a beautiful, half-deaf, color-blind former gang leader who returned from California changed in a way Rusty-James cannot read. In a small city where the old gangs have already broken up and the heroin is starting to arrive, Rusty-James goes on fighting as if the old rules still held, trying to be his brother and failing at every step. S. E. Hinton's 1975 novel, published five years after The Outsiders and written in a stripped, almost affectless voice, is short, bleak, and quietly elegiac, tracking a generation of working-class boys whose myths have stopped meaning anything in time to save them.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Rumble Fish
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Rusty-James idolizes his older brother, the Motorcycle Boy, a quiet, handsome ex-gang leader who has just come back to town. Rusty-James wants to be him, but his brother is steadily slipping somewhere else.
Yes. Francis Ford Coppola directed a 1983 film adaptation starring Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, and Diane Lane. The film is shot in stylized black and white and is sometimes screened with The Outsiders, which Coppola also directed that year.
Both novels were written by S.E. Hinton, set in similar small-city working-class settings, with crossover atmosphere. They are independent stories with no shared characters, though their themes overlap.
Rumble Fish was written by S. E. Hinton, published in 1975 by Laurel Leaf.
Rumble Fish is 124 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Rumble Fish takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
Rumble Fish is a standalone novel by S. E. Hinton, not part of a series.
Rumble Fish is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.