Boot Boys (1973, James Moffat)

Boot Boys is –for better or ill- full blooded James Moffat, almost every page of this book spits at you in the face.  By 1973, Moffat aka Richard Allen was encountering the problem that the first generation of skinheads he’d been writing about were fading from view, but the public’s appetite for sensationalistic tales of youth at its worst was still strong.  His solution was to turn his attention to the Boot Boys- an emerging youth cult that in terms of style and fashion harkened back to the mods of the 1960s, while also being the heir apparent to the skins’ penchant towards football hooliganism and racially motivated violence.

 

Moffat centres Boot Boys around Tom, poster boy for Boot Boys culture and head of the gang ‘The Crackers’.  Moffat provides Tom, the mother of all introductions with “even his father had to admit that Tom Walsh was a rotten bastard”.  A claim that Tom spends the rest of the book living up to.  After indulging in some football grounds thuggery, Tom quickly graduates to attacking a couple while they are having sex in a park.  Bashing the man over the head with a pole, raping his girlfriend, and taking misogynistic satisfaction in the knowledge that once the guy wakes up he’ll not want anything more to do with her “the rotten little bitch would get her ass kicked and be sent packing”.  Tom then turns his gang loose on the house of a crooked black businessman, smashing his windows with rocks under the justification that “the law being a bloody ass would not prosecute to the extent of getting the suckers’ money back.  Well, The Crackers would show them how to hurt guys like him”.

 

The actions of Tom’s gang might have been pulled from the headlines of the day, but Moffat also appears to have turned to vintage Hollywood gangster movies for inspiration here.  Paying tribute to them by making Tom a junkie for late night TV repeats of movies starring “Cagney, or Raft, or Bogart, or Ladd, or Bendix, or Edward G.”  The focus on ‘the rise and fall of a small time hood’ and the power struggles within Tom’s gang, also allows Moffat’s anti-Semitism to run riot in Boot Boys, making this an especially noxious piece of writing, even by Moffat’s standards.  Tom faces dissension in the ranks, when Benjy, a Jewish member of his gang, apposes Tom’s plan to daub swastikas on the doors of Jewish families.  An action that triggers a war between Tom and Benjy, Gentile against Jew, over leadership of the gang.  The other significant Jewish character in the book, Lenny, is in contrast, meek and pathetically subservient to Tom, despite Tom’s hostility towards him and overt anti-Semitism.  Lenny acts as Moffat’s whipping boy throughout the book, with Moffat stressing Lenny’s physical shortcoming to the point of numbing repetition.  Take a drink every time Moffat refers to Lenny as being ‘pint sized’ in this book, and you’ll end up as shit-faced as Moffat was when he wrote this thing.

 

Moffat’s blustering, tabloidish approach to the material allows the author to have his cake and eat it.  Rubbing the gang’s vilest deeds in the reader’s face, whilst lashing out at do-gooders for creating a system that offers little by way of a deterrent or punishment.  All of which results in Moffat getting misty eyed for the days of Dick Turpin, when “the punishment for rape had been drastic.  Do-gooders had not been popular with the rough and tumble serfs and their effeminate masters.  Not like today”.  While in 1977’s Knuckle Girls, Moffat pointed to poverty and parental neglect as the reasons for its heroine’s anti-social behavior, he appears to have been of an entirely different mindset when he wrote this in 1973.  Boot Boys angrily rejecting such excuses, by deliberately making Tom the product of a loving father and an affluent household “he had a wardrobe many a Mayfair socialite would have been proud to show off to some skinny dolly bird”….and in spite of all that he still turned out to be a rotten bastard!!

 

Acting as a breather from Tom’s antics is the parallel story of Wilf Tomlinson, a local newspaper hack who is determined to see the gang face justice, especially after he meets Debra Wilkinson, a young widow who has been gang raped by The Crackers.  Wilf follows a familiar pattern of Moffat’s heroes, by becoming hopelessly infatuated with the lead female character, even though his old fashioned values means he struggles to consummate the relationship.  Wilf also gives Moffat himself a run for his money when it comes to insensitivity.  Asking Debra questions like “Did you ever dream about your father once you reached adolescence” and secretly admitting that he “fought to control an urge that would have placed him in the same category as those who had, two nights previously, seen fit to make her the target for their disgusting lusts”. 

 

Midway into Boot Boys the mood turns highly sexual.  What with passions between Wilf and Debra boiling over, and the confrontation between Tom and Benjy taking the form of a battle of the studs, as they compete over which of them can satisfy the most women in succession.  Along the way there is the kind of written word laughability that only 1970s trash fiction can reach, with Wilf pining “she was the reincarnation of Eve- a being with all the mysteries wrapped between her fleshy, yet so firm, thighs” whilst Debra daydreams “she knew that Wilf respected her even though he wanted to make her perform like a common slut”.  While fellow trash fiction author Guy N. Smith preferred his female characters to be slender, and had little time for big boobs, Moffat was of a different school.  Boot Boys having a downer on the ‘skinny dolly bird’ look, and instead lusting after the more mature, curvier woman.  Debra Wilkinson being the type defined by The Kinks song ‘Don’t Forget to Dance’ as “a nice bit of old”.  

 

However its rape and anti-Semitism that are the twin obsessions of Boot Boys, and Moffat can’t keep away from either for long.  Tom’s gang might be depicted as irredeemably beyond-the-pale but you get the creeping suspicion that Moffat secretly approved of, and may even have gotten a charge out of their racism and sexual assaults.  Moffat does have a contradictory attitude towards the gang throughout Boot Boys, who occasionally switch from being the scourge of decent society to the defenders of it.  Like when they are vandalizing the house of the crooked black businessman.  Where Moffat clearly sees them as modern day Robin Hood characters, stepping in where the law won’t, and getting justice on behalf of hard working, law abiding citizens….y’know the sort of people the gang are otherwise committed to raping and terrorizing.  A product of its time, Boot Boys take on rape is predictably pornographically minded, and where the victims -natch- end up enjoying the experience “at first I was so frightened I could have died. Then, the pleasure became intolerable”.  Even in that climate however, Moffat does push this a little further than most.  It all builds up to Debra’s outrageous admission that she’s actually grateful to her rapists. “They opened my eyes.  They made me see myself for what I am- a sensualist”.  All of which makes a mockery of Wilf’s desire for revenge.  It would be like Death Wish ending with the daughter emerging from a catatonic state and telling Paul Kersey that he’d wasted his time shooting all those muggers and rapists, because, thanks to men like that, she’s gonna go off and become a sensualist. 

Speaking of fathers and daughters, there is also an underlining fixation for incest in Moffat’s work, even if he can’t quite bring himself to break that taboo.  There’s the daughter and stepfather/lodger subplot in Knuckle Girls, while here we have Wilf touching a nerve by asking Debra questions about her father.  As well as Vanessa, Tom’s girlfriend, bringing up the fact that her father visits her bedroom.  “He isn’t interested in sex, thank God” she cryptically adds “I’ve heard mum pleading with him”.

 

Fueled by boundless energy, all of it unhealthy, Boot Boys flits from maniacal set piece to maniacal set piece like a headless chicken.  The book all but exhausting its juvenile delinquent theme before the end, forcing it to search out other genres for the grand finale.  Moffat initially flirting with the crime genre, as Tom’s gang get mixed up with professional criminality, before wigging out and going all satanic panic on us.  “There had been certain things he wished he could have experienced as a child, not least of them being an association with Aleister Crowley”, Moffat writes of Tom, who has the gang desecrate a church and perform an orgy in the graveyard in an attempt to do Wicked Al proud.  Boot Boys is one mad, rollercoaster ride to the dark heart of the 1970s, but with Moffat’s omnipresent anti-Semitism in the back seat, the ‘guilt’ part does often outweigh the ‘pleasure’ here.  If we were to do movie compassions, I’d say that Guy N. Smith’s books were the equivalent of The Evil Dead or The Deadly Spawn, they’re ultra-gory but also lots of fun and unlikely to leave any troubling aftertaste.  Whereas Moffat’s work is like Cannibal Holocaust or Goodbye Uncle Tom, they’re grueling and emotionally draining experiences to get through. 

 

Toxic as this book is now, I would say there is a valuable history lesson to be learnt from it.  Inadvertently Boot Boys does bring it home how tone deaf society once was towards sexual assault, as well as the amount of prejudice Jewish people faced back then.  These days you’d have to search dark, obscure areas of the internet to find vitriol like Moffat’s, but back in 1973 it was all out in the open, selling like hot cakes in bookshops and being passed around every schoolyard in the land.  Still, if you take on Boot Boys, you can come out the other side boasting at having conquered 1970s fiction at its most crass, hateful, and savage.  Be warned though, in the case of Boot Boys the past punches hard.    

 

A Thirst for Bamboo Guerillas

Clive, Nick and Me take a look at Bamboo Guerillas and Thirst by Guy N. Smith

Bamboo Guerillas (1977, Guy N. Smith)

 

Bamboo Guerillas is notorious.  Guy N. Smith was riding high on the success of Night of the Crabs- which had been a big hit during the sweltering hot summer of 1976- but for a change of pace swaps crustaceans for castrations with Bamboo Guerillas, a book which captures all the fun and frivolity of a Japanese prisoner of war camp. 

 

Around the same time, Smith had been writing a series of relatively respectable action books centered around the trucking industry- ‘The Black Knights’ and ‘Hijack’- which were published by Mews, an arm of New English Library.  The company policy appears to a been that Mews was the imprint they'd use for sci-fi, action and war titles, while New English Library was the home of the nasty material. 

Seemingly on account of the truckers books they gave him a crack at penning a WW2 novel without any restrictions on what he could write about… and Bamboo Guerillas is what you get when you turn Guy N. Smith loose on the subject of World War 2 atrocities without restrictions.  The company were reportedly a little taken aback with what he delivered, asked Smith to tone it down for it to go as a Mews title, then when he refused released it as a N.E.L, which in fairness was exactly where Bamboo Guerillas belonged. 

 

Bamboo Guerillas takes us back to the war torn Malaysia of 1941 as Colonel Hugh Carter aka ‘Jungle Carter’ leads his men deep into the jungle in order to team up with Chinese bandit Li Chu.  Once Jungle Carter and his men meet Li Chu and his ragbag of Chinese and Malaysian mercenaries -the ‘bamboo guerillas’ of the title- they go about the business of liberating twenty nurses from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.  One that is lorded over by the dreaded Colonel Siki, a depraved despot, who is “more dangerous than any tiger that roamed the Malaysian jungles”.  On the outset Bamboo Guerillas resembles your standard World War 2 novel as Jungle Carter and fellow Brits Captain Cole and Sanders perilously hack their way through the jungle whilst smarting over the fall of Kuala Lumpur.  Looks can be deceptive though and only a few chapters in sees Bamboo Guerillas transform into something you definitely wouldn’t want your grandparents reading over your shoulder.  In 1977, when Bamboo Guerillas was released, I'm not sure Smith's name was as synonymous with extreme horror as it would become.  So, I suppose it was still possible that people who bypassed The Sucking Pit and Night of the Crabs wouldn't have been aware of what they signed up for here.  I'm curious at what point the penny would have dropped for them that with Bamboo Guerillas they were being sent up sleaze creek without a paddle.  Would it have been when Carter and Cole are woken up by the sound of Sanders grunting and shaking about in his ground sheets, then fearing he has the fever instead discover that Sanders is merely beating himself off.  Apparently a valuable way of keeping yourself warm in the outdoors “I learned it when I used to go mountaineering” Sanders tells the other two “and was forced to sleep out in the open, do me a favor though don't interrupt me again”.  Would the penny drop moment have been when they are discussing forming an allegiance with Li Chu, despite his reputation for cannibalizing his Japanese adversaries?  At which point Carter attempts to reassure the other two that “as long as he confines his liking for human flesh to the Japs, I'm not going to worry”.  Or is it when we meet the gregariously sadistic Li Chu, who brags about how he and his men tortured a Japanese soldier in order to see if a Japanese penis could be stretched to the same size as other nationalities. “They will not, gentlemen, take it from me”. 

 

Up to this point we've had masturbation, anecdotal cannibalism and anecdotal genital abuse, all before we have even met the villain of the piece.  World War 2 sex maniac to end all World War 2 sex maniacs, that is Colonel Sika, who prior to his introduction in the book has been masturbating for “virtually two whole days and nights”.  Sika immediately earns his reputation as a stone cold pervert by having male prisoners stripped, tied to a barbed wire fence, then forces them to get aroused in the company of one of the nurses, who has been similarly stripped bare for the occasion.  “This is the woman you are going to mate with… so get yourself erect” yells one of Sika’s flunkies.  Once the prisoners manage to get hard though, its curtains for them, as Japanese soldiers step in and cruelly bayonet them to death instead.  Erections, or ‘protrusions’ as Smith sometimes euphemistically refers to them as, was a recurring theme in his writing and something that has also opened his books up to sniggering and ridicule over the years.  Bamboo Guerillas captures him at arguably the height of his protrusion obsession.  Bamboo Guerrillas might well be the most priapic book of the 1970s, you're never far away from someone’s erection in this book.  It’s a characteristic that practically defines Sika who is introduced to us nursing a hard-on, caused by thinking about all the Chinese virgins he has deflowered.  Sika then turns his lustful gaze and protrusion in the direction of Sonia Barnes, a dark-haired nurse that Sika insist become his sex slave and “submit to almost every technique of sex known in the Japanese nation”.  A role Sonia reluctantly agrees to in the hope that it will keep herself and the other nurses alive.

 

Bamboo Guerrillas is riddled with below the belt insults aimed at Japanese men.  What with Li Chu’s claim that not even torture can extend the Japanese manhood to the size of other nationalities, as well as Sonia’s observation that Colonel Sika’s physique was “little more than that of the average European boy in his early teens”.  At times it feels like Smith was pushing the idea that Japan's involvement in World War 2 may have been motivated by penis size envy and feelings of sexual inadequacy.  A theory that Smith only contradicts due to his obsession with Colonel Sika’s apparently impressive erection, which “threatened to burst its way out his trousers”.  Elsewhere in the book, Sika “knew that the bulge in the front of his trousers was visible to all his men but he did not mind. It enhanced his reputation”.  Based on that evidence it doesn't sound like Sika is lacking too much in that department, even if his torture techniques are suspiciously hung up on cutting other nationalities down to size.  There are moments in Bamboo Guerillas when you can feel your brain trying to fight against its natural inclination to visualize what you are reading.  Never more so when Chan- one of Li Chu’s men- is captured by the Japanese and ends up in Sika’s torture chamber.  There Sika quite literally breaks Chan’s balls, before spending the rest of the night alternating between using Sonia as a sexual receptacle and working out more ways to destroy Chan’s genitals.

 

I think one of the reasons Bamboo Guerrillas can take people off guard is that with a horror, skinhead or biker paperback from that era you half-expect there to be some sexual content.  Whereas a World War 2 novel set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp doesn’t exactly sound like it is going to be a non-stop orgy.  When people talk about Smith’s books they tend to claim that part of their popularity was due to soft porn elements, this I would not challenge, but I don't know if that description does Smith’s books justice.  On film and in photographic form it is easy to draw a line between softcore and hardcore.  In print it is a little more difficult to call, but I would say that the sex in Bamboo Guerillas is closer to hardcore than softcore.  Bamboo Guerillas is a very sex driven book, with the expected action part of the narrative often taking a backseat to Sika forcing male and female prisoners into performing live sex shows in front of the Japanese “you have three minutes in which to begin copulating.  Any man who hasn't made it in that time will be bayoneted”.  Whilst tender moments arrive when Jungle Carter deliberately allows himself and several of Li Chu’s men to be captured by the Japanese and immediately develops romantic and sexual feelings for Jenny, one of the captured nurses.  I suppose you have to admire the lustful stamina of Jenny and Jungle Carter, despite the fact that she has been repeatedly raped by the Japanese, despite the fact that they are in the company of others, and despite the fact that they've been flung into a place that smells of shit and piss, they are still all over each other like a rash.  “He felt her vagina it was warm and ready and there was no evidence of Japanese maltreatment”.  You can always rely on Smith to put the Guy in gynecology.  Jungle Carter’s only reservation about having sex with Jenny is that he has to do so in the company of non British people “he did not want to lose the respect that the guerillas had for him.  If it had been an all British company it wouldn't have mattered.  But these bandits were savages”.

 

Even though Chinese and Malaysian characters in Bamboo Guerillas are allies, the book does still peel a suspicious eye in their direction and they are consistently portrayed as more barbaric, disposable and cowardly than the British.  After gunning down Japanese soldiers in the jungle, the bamboo guerillas begin gutting the bodies and impaling the heads of dead Japanese on sticks.  Sickening the British, who nevertheless decide that it's better to let them have their fun, rather than play killjoy and risk a mutiny.  Later on in the book, Jungle Carter encounters a hut full of Japanese soldiers raping a Chinese woman.  However rather than rescue her, as he has done with the Western nurses, Carter instead ops to throw a grenade into the hut, killing all inside, on the reasoning that “she’ll probably be glad to die after what they had done to her”. 

 

The bulk of Bamboo Guerillas’ hate though is aimed at the Japanese.  Bamboo Guerillas makes ‘Men Behind the Sun’ and ‘Fist of Fury’ look like fair and even handed portrayals of Japanese people.  Whenever the word ‘Japanese’ is mentioned in this book it's usually in close proximity to the word ‘bastards’.  Japanese characters exist in this book purely to sexually assault women and emasculate and murder men.  So despicable are the Japanese in this book that they seem to succeed in making actual Orientals feel racist towards Orientals, with even the Chinese Li Chu hurling around anti-Oriental slurs “Carter declined to remind Li Chu of his own colour”.

 

Indeed Smith seems to whipped himself up into such an anti Japanese state of mind whilst writing Bamboo Guerillas that it bled on over into his next book, Killer Crabs (1978).  The opening of that Crab sequel initially being focused on conflict between Australian and Japanese characters over fishing rights, with bullets and racial insults being exchanged between the two.  All of which bills up to a Bamboo Guerillas /Crabs crossover when the Japanese fishing ship comes under attack from the crabs.  Apparently Smith did write a sequel to Bamboo Guerillas that has never been published, and I do wonder if rather than completely scrap the sequel novel he instead he incorporated a few of its ideas into Killer Crabs.  Towards the end of Bamboo Guerillas the action is moving closer and closer to Australia, which is where Killer Crabs was set, so there are story connections there.  Due to the fact that the sequel has never seen the light of day, Bamboo Guerillas stands as Smith’s only published war novel.  Although a few of the Crabs books could, I suppose, be perceived as war novels.  This seems particularly true of ‘Crabs on the Rampage’ (1981) which comes across as Smith’s ‘imaginary Nazi invasion of Britain’ novel with the Crabs making strategic attacks on the shores of Britain, and the series’ hero Cliff Davenport mostly relegated to war room brainstorming of how to second guess the crabs’ plan of attack.  All of which I suppose makes King Crab, Hitler reincarnated in crustacean form. 

 

However, I don't think Bamboo Guerillas had the same legs, or pincers, as Smith’s horror material.  Two editions of Bamboo Guerillas were published, both in September 1977, and that was it.  Unlike Night of the Crabs, The Sucking Pit and The Slime Beast, this one never came back around in the 1980s.  As a child of the Eighties I vividly remember seeing those on bookshelves, especially at seaside resorts, but I don't ever recall seeing Bamboo Guerillas around.  Either it didn't sell well originally, or it was too extreme to be republished or maybe Smith had become so synonymous with horror by then that putting a non-horror title of his back out there would have confused the public.  Whatever the case Bamboo Guerillas has become one of his rarer books, these days second hand copies usually fetch in the region of £40 to £50.  I did ask around to see if his estate have plans to republish the book and apparently they do but getting the Crabs books back out there is their number one priority.  Towards the end of his life, Smith had actively embraced the internet, and through his website was selling second-hand copies of his books, putting out his older work in eBook form and writing new material.  Now I believe his family are in a process of building that business back up, although they’ve also had to cope with all the standard upheaval caused by a parent’s death as well as the unwanted distraction of a legal case against his former cleaner Nichola Whiffen.  From what I understand, Whiffen had been employed by him as a cleaner, then helped manage his internet affairs, but had been stealing from him on the sly.  A situation that caused much hurt, bad feelings and friction on account of her father having been a long time friend of Smith’s.  After Smith’s death, she was convicted of stealing £2,400 from him, and was ordered to do 130 hours of community service.  Which I get the impression his family consider an unsatisfactory, slap on the wrist, gesture.  It does sound like the last few years have been a very difficult period for the Smith family.

 

What I find astonishing about Bamboo Guerillas and its ilk is that they never triggered any censorious backlash, and I'm not been able to find any evidence of these books having been banned or having to be re-released in cut versions.  They were quite lucky in that respect, compared to what was happening in the British video industry around the same time.  It is mind-blowing to think that in a period where grown adults were having the right to watch films like The Evil Dead and I Spit on your Grave taken away from them, people of any age could still pick up a copy of Bamboo Guerillas or Night of the Crabs.  I can only speculate that what saved these books was that the censorious regarded the written word as a higher art form and were of a snob, elitist mindset that… ‘these sub-moron, working class grunts who watch video nasties all day probably don't know how to read, so we don't need to worry about banning books’.  While the late 1970s and early 80s gets remembered as a time when movies were pushing the envelope in terms of screen explicitness, that is nothing compared to what books were getting away with.  A good example of the divide between how far books could go then, in contrast to movies is the novelization of the Norman J. Warren film ‘Inseminoid’.  The book version contains all manner of ideas and scenes that Warren passed on bringing to the screen.  For example, in the book the Alien has not one, but two giant sized penises, which it uses to rape the main female character… something the film side steps around depicting with that ‘is it or isn't it a dream sequence’.  The book also includes lesbianism, necrophilia and a scene where the alien puts its fingers through someone's eye sockets, pulls their head off, then later uses the head as a kind of bowling ball.  While the Warren movie does have its fair share of unpleasant and gooey moments, I suspect you’d be a disappointed man if you saw it on the basis of having read the book, because the grossest aspects to the book did not survive the transition to film.  I’m in no doubt that had Bamboo Guerillas been done on film rather than in print, copies would have been seized in every video shop from Lands End to John O'Groats during the video nasties furore.  Even the most irresponsible and reckless of pre-cert video distributors usually attempted to cover their backs by putting phony  X or 18 certificates on video covers or disclaimers along the lines of ‘for adults only’ or ‘not for minors’ yet there is not even anything like that on the covers of either edition of Bamboo Guerillas.  Had a kid brought home a copy of Bamboo Guerillas, I'm sure that going off the cover, parents probably thought this was no stronger than your average copy of Eagle, Commando or G.I. Joe.  Little did they know that their offspring were reading things like “she was not willing to drop the subject even though he has got all four fingers of his right hand inside her” and “he breathed a deep sigh of relief that all his men had attained full erections, but he knew that this was only the start”.

 

What appears to have happened with the book equivalent of the Video Nasties is that that market just got flooded with cheap, gratuitous, badly written books and the British public eventually got tired of them and moved along.  I suspect that had the video market been left alone, a similar thing would have happened there, but because there was a censorious intervention there, it resulted in the Video Nasties attaining legendary status.  To this day we are still seeing even the lesser Video Nasties brought back in deluxe, bells and whistles editions.  Whereas with their book equivalents, because they were never taken away from us, because they didn't become the forbidden fruit, they don't attract the same amount of reverence.  The irony doesn't appear lost on Guy N. Smith that during his lifetime everyone of his other passions ended up becoming demonized or banned… be it indoor smoking, gun ownership or hunting… but his books were left alone.

I'm curious what mental image of the author you’d get from reading Bamboo Guerillas in 1977, possibly of some grizzled old World War 2 veteran using the book as a backwards gazing trip down memory lane to when he was fighting and fucking his way through the jungle.  Whereas is in reality Smith was born in 1939 and was of a generation that lived through World War 2 but didn’t see active service.  Overall though he does a decent job of feigning first-hand knowledge of a hellish, sweaty, leach infested jungle environment here.  He does also indulge in his regular trait of offloading some of his own DNA onto the lead character.  Jungle Carter, like Smith, having a background in the banking industry, and becomes Smith’s mouth piece on the subject.  “Civilian life is just one long monotonous existence… I worked in a bank up until 1939.  No chance to think for yourself or make decisions.”  While Smith’s grievances with banking aren’t as loudly amplified here as they are in ‘Thirst’ (1980), the message of Bamboo Guerillas in that respect seems to be “better to die like a man, than live as a bank manager”.  The extreme violence in Smith’s books, coupled with their perverse elements and mean spiritedness, do conjure up negative ideas about what Guy N. Smith must have been like in real life.  Which, by all accounts, was very divorced from reality.  Jonathan Sothcott was optioning a movie adaptation of one of Smith’s books at one point and on account of that had met and had lunch with Smith, and Sothcott told me that he was amazed that such a charming and gentle man came up with these endless splatter-fests.  In his autobiography- ‘Pipe Dreams’- Smith does portray his younger self as a bit of a practical joker.  He even gamely includes a famous joke about himself… that Guy N. Smith is such a good farmer because he spreads his own books on his land… and if you're prepared to include a joke comparing your work to manure in your own autobiography you must have a sense of humour.  People who make fun of ‘bad’ movies and books, like to cling to the idea that the creators of the material were oblivious to how absurd and ridiculous their output was.  In Smith's case though I do suspect he would have been chuckling to himself when he wrote things like “she would become a nun and enter a convent, a sanctuary from lusting erections and male selfishness”. 

Bamboo Guerillas is so excessive, so over-the-top that after a while the only way to relate to it is as a black comedy.  Either that or a practical joke akin to the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Cocksucker Blues’… where the Stones deliberately recorded a song so raunchy and indecent that their label was unable to put it out.  Only in Smith’s case, New English Library took the bait and actually published Bamboo Guerillas uncensored.  It’s as if Smith was suffering from the writing equivalent of tourette's syndrome but rather than blurt out the most offensive and anti-social things he could think of, managed to get it all down on paper.  A strong stomach is required for Bamboo Guerillas, this book could even be used to test how shock able you really are, but you do learn much about World War 2 from it.  Such as the fact that not even torture can extend the size of a Japanese penis to the length of other nationalities, that slitting someone's throat produces a sound that “could have been made by a wild animal urinating” and that masturbation will keep you warm in the jungle.  Every day is a school day when you're reading a Guy N. Smith book.

Knuckle Girls (1977, James Moffat)

 

There's plenty of aggro and bovver going on in this female variation on James Moffat’s usual ‘rags to borstal’ tales. Writing under the name Richard Allen, Moffat became an unlikely poet laureate figure to many an aspiring teenage yobbo during the 1970s.  Moffat wrote fast, and drank faster, helping turn around the fortunes of publishing company New English Library, particularly with his series of skinhead books like Skinhead (1970), Skinhead Escapes (1972) and Dragon Skins (1975).   Moffat’s writing could be charitably described as ‘unpretentious’, or if you were inclined to be less charitable ‘artless’.  To give credit where it is due though, Moffat’s cheap, trashy, violent books engaged a young, working class audience in a way that more highly regarded literature did not.  Interviewed in ‘Skinhead Farewell’ a 1996 documentary about Moffat, teacher Barry Pateman remembered “here they were with ‘Skinhead’ reading it of their own volition, of their own interest, kids who didn't dress like skinheads, who weren't skinheads, still found it an enormously exciting and interesting book”.

Moffat's ability to write about working class gang life was such that his initial fan base even thought he must have been a skinhead himself, the reality couldn't have been more different.  Behind the Richard Allen alias was a 50-something man of Canadian-Irish heritage with little in common with the skinhead culture he documented, apart from a kinship with its more intolerant, right wing elements.  Read today it is difficult to see why anyone would buy into the idea of Moffat being a young violent thug who led the kind of lifestyle he wrote about.  The punk attitude that screams at you from this book’s cover, belies the fact that the only two popular singers to get a name check in Knuckle Girls are David Soul and Max Bygraves.  Moffat clearly regarded kids as the scum of the earth and the tone of his books is one of fist shaking disapproval.  At the same time Moffat's books reveled in hooliganism, sex and bad language, giving the fear to straight society and the older generation.  Moffat’s intention, no doubt, was to demonize the working class youth of the 1970s, yet in doing so he also gave them an intimidating, outlaw image.  Which, dare I suggest, is why that demographic took his books to their collective bosom. 

 

You’d certainly cross the street to avoid Moffat’s protagonist in Knuckle Girls, Ina Murray, a brawling, queen of aggro, born in the slums of Glasgow and brought up on the equally wrong side of the tracks in London.  By the time we're introduced to her in the book, Ina is already responsible for one woman crime wave.  All of which is anecdotally being related to Gladys Gardiner, the do-gooding social worker who is given the difficult moral dilemma of whether to recommend leniency or throw the book at Ina.  Given Moffat's politics there is little doubt which side of that debate Gladys will ultimately fall on.  Knuckle Girls is the last of three books Moffat wrote dealing with female tearaways.  The others being Skinhead Girls (1972) and Sorts (1973) presumably in an attempt to exploit the lucrative subject of youthful hooliganism from all angles and genders.  Moffat as a writer of female characters tends though to be an awkward fit as an iron fist in a velvet glove.  Ina is the Minnie the Minx to the Dennis the Menace characters Moffat wrote about in his skinhead books.  She looks the same as them, dresses the same as them, and thinks the same as them.  The only female characteristics Moffitt gives her, tends to be weaknesses that lead to her downfall.  Ina goes through a repeat pattern of dating guys who cheat on her with more sexually attractive women.  Leading the insecure, jealous Ina to take a razor to her love rivals “she nearly had a boob less when I finished, her face looked like it had gone through a meat grinder”. 

 

Moffat writing from the perspective of a left leaning social worker and career woman like Gladys, is even harder to swallow, and Knuckle Girls just doesn't convince at all in that respect.  We barely get to know Gladys before she's having doubts about rehabilitating the likes of Ina, and debating whether to throw her career aside, in favor of getting married and being kept by boyfriend Ray.  After a while Moffat doesn't seem to know what to do with Gladys other than having her listen to David Soul records at home, and admire her nakedness by the mirror “she knew what equipment she had and liked knowing that men enjoyed her breasts, thighs, buttocks, dark pubic hair, all of her”.  Even Ina is in awe of Gladys “what firm, handable tits! and a pair of buttocks that moved, shifted, switched, kind of bounced like a woman's buttocks should”.  After leching over her in print, Moffat largely retires Gladys in favour of a male character, probation officer Ken Gibson, who comes in after Gladys struggles with both her conscious and ability to finish her report on Ina.  Ken Gibson is a closest to a hero this book has and is a likely proxy for Moffat himself.  Ken being an old-fashioned, immaculately dressed, pipe smoker who pines for Gladys from afar. 

 

Unlike many writers of so-called trash fiction from the era, who seemed to have given a damn about their craft, Moffat’s books leave you with the impression that he didn't really regard writing as anything more than a tedious, steady job…the sort that you dispassionately clock on to at 9:00 a.m. and clock off at 5:00 p.m.  Moffat’s language is basic, with little flair, and a fondness for meandering conversation designed to fill up pages.  Moffat's books only really come to life when they are they are showing their vicious side.  Aggro was his strength.  No one could write a description of a pub brawl, the trashing of a train, and violence on the terraces quite like Moffat.  These books really do put you at the dangerous centre the action, amidst the spilt beer, shattered bones and broken chairs.  If you want kicks, Ina Murray is your gal.  Throughout Knuckle Girls we follow her and an odyssey of anti-social behavior that includes a spell in an approved school, stabbing a man at a football match, engaging in underage sex, kicking a child up the ass then punching its mother in the face.  You have to hand it to Moffat, he really could write a character who gets under your skin, burns her way into the memory and leaves a few lasting scars along the way.  Moffat's worldview was cold and unfeeling for the most part, but there are flashes of sympathy and understanding along the way as Ina suffers under a parade of horrid characters.  A weak spineless mother, a drunk emotionless father soon replaced by a pervy lodger turned stepfather, and a boyfriend who beats her up after his she discovers him screwing another girl.  Moffat might not be Ina’s number one fan but he has a far greater grievance against her mother, who he has Ina metaphorically put the boot in for him “poor pathetic mother, it serves you bloody right, mother, makes you want to vomit, doesn't it, mother”.  Moffat also unleashes a few indignities of his own invention at Mum.  Initially partnering her up with a drunk, abusive husband, then throwing her in the direction of lodger Mike, whose ‘highly irregular acts’ she has to submit to, in order to keep him from her daughter's bedroom door.  One of the more satisfying elements of the book is Ina turning the tables on evil sleazeball Mike.  Going from a victim of his dubiously motivated spankings… to seeing him lose his power when confronted by the ‘Acton Swords’ a skinhead gang… to slashing him up with a razor when he finally makes sexual advances to her “she crouched, a she-tiger about to devour its victim”.  Unlike in real life, sexual predators get no preferential treatment in Knuckle Girls.  Had Ina ran into Jimmy Savile back then, you're in no doubt she would have cut his cock off. 

 

It is said that one of the least desirable jobs at New English Library was editing a James Moffat novel, because of the tons and tons of racism that would have to be exercised to make them fit for general consumption and presumably prevent N.E.L from possible prosecution.  Given that the versions of his books which made it into the public’s hands were pretty racist, you do have to wonder how extreme and incendiary Moffat’s original manuscripts must have been.  Knuckle Girls largely keeps the race hate elements at bay till towards the end, but when they do arrive they have the impact of a well-timed sucker punch delivered with the aid of a knuckle duster.  Surprisingly, given Moffat's own Irish ancestry, the bigotry initially flares up when Ina and the Acton Swords attempt to stir up aggro at an Irish pub by throwing around anti-Irish slurs “they should ship the bombers back to their soggy Island”.  Sentiments that Moffat surely couldn't have personally endorsed.  In that instance you’d be inclined to chalk up the prejudice there as disingenuous, and Moffat playing to a perceived, bigoted English readership.  Less easy to brush aside however are the anti-black aspects of Knuckle Girls which register as far more heartfelt, especially as they are so randomly crowbarred into the very end of the book.  Basically we learn that Jean Turner, an adversary and love rival of Ina, hates the Acton Swords, but then she gets to thinking about how she also hates the immigrants who have moved in next door to her parents.  A chain of thought that allows Moffat the excuse to rant about the indignity of living next door to “blacks, browns and other foreigners from the natives” as well as the “liberals and do-gooding left wingers” who create laws to protect such people.  It’s a hateful diversion the book takes, which serves only to remind everyone that James Moffat wasn't exactly overflowing with love for non-white people. 

 

Be they white or black, English or Irish though everyone is in this book is destined to be left a little more broken and damaged than they were at the start.  The only exception being Gladys, but even there Ina’s final thoughts in the book suggest that Gladys days of happiness, marriage, listening to David Soul and admiring her breasts, thighs, dark pubic hair and buttocks (that bounced like a woman’s buttocks should)…will be short-lived.  Aside from the racism, Moffat is such a poverty porn junkie, drawn to misery, urban squalor and the harsh realities of working class life that it becomes an uphill battle to fight off an overall feeling of depression and find entertainment value in his work.  Knuckle Girls offers no hope or solution to the social problems it comments on.  Politically Moffat might be as far removed from movies like Ken Loach's Kes (1969) as Churchill was from Castro, but just as Winston and Fidel shared a love of big cigars, so Knuckle Girls and Kes are united in their pessimistic belief that the working classes are basically fucked and any attempt to reach out and improve their lives is doomed to failure.  Although if Ina was the main character in Kes she’d have probably strangled the kestrel herself, then kicked her well-meaning teacher in the balls.