Sorts (1973, James Moffatt)

 

Sorts does pretty much everything, but what it’s meant to on the tin.  Canadian writer James ‘Jim’ Moffatt hit pay dirt in 1970 with the novel ‘Skinhead’ written under the name Richard Allen.  The huge success of which caused publisher New English Library to immediately commission the hard working writer to pen sequels and further ‘Richard Allen’ books documenting similar youth cults.  Moffatt had already covered skinhead culture from a female angle in 1972’s Skinhead Girls, and by the time of Sorts in 1973 was drifting off topic, reducing the heroine’s association with skinheads to mere back-story.  Moffatt straying from the skinhead path could produce hit and miss results.  1975’s Dragon Skins, which has a similarly tentative connection to skinhead culture, manages to be dull and lifeless, despite a plot which pits ex-skinheads against a crooked kung-fu master.  Fortunately Sorts finds Gentleman Jim Moffatt firing on all cylinders.  If you can forgive Sorts the sin of having very little to do with skinhead culture, this is a Pandora’s box in which Gentleman Jim unleashes all manner of 1970s unpleasantness, from hard drug use to police brutality, hippies being kicked in the balls, children being kicked in the balls, murder, blackmail, a leery look at the ‘problem’ of teenage hitchhikers, as well as Devon’s answer to the Manson Family.  Sorts is actually a rare example of New English Library underplaying the contents of a book.  NEL’s cover, featuring a dour faced skinhead girl loitering about a doorway, suggesting a miserablist working class drama to slit your wrists to.  This, in no way prepares you for the wild ride you’re about to be taken on, one powered by Moffatt’s alcoholism, tabloid like sensationalism and bigotry.  Step right up, Folks...but be forewarned.  Moffatt being Moffatt, there’s more racism in Sorts than you can shake a burning cross at. 

Sorts centres around troubled youth Terry Hurdy, who has recently gotten knocked up by randy local lad Wilf Thompson.  Forced to give up their baby for adoption, Terry finds herself tormented by reminders of Wilf and their child, the dirty looks of her neighbours and the guilt of being a source of embarrassment to her decent parents.  “What did they know about fads and the need of a young girl to express herself under a man’s driving loins”.  The fact that Terry is just 17 doesn’t cause Gentleman Jim to reign in his dirty old man tendencies.  We’re not even out of chapter one before he has her admiring her naked body in a mirror, a tactic he also used to ogle a female character in 1977’s Knuckle Girls.  Having honed her seductive skills during a bus ride “she smiled, teased him by letting her duffle coat fully open. The tightness of her sweater showed her pouting breasts to advantage”, Terry decides to take to the road and hitchhike around the country.  Moffatt’s writing brings to life a rarely complementary, but believably on the money, landscape of greasy motorway cafes and monotonously samey stretches of roads, populated by vulnerable runaways, horny truckers, and unhappily married motorists “how many of the men would have stopped if it wasn’t for the risk of venereal disease or blackmail”.  Terry acquires a scam-sister in Rose Clague, a fellow runaway who has taken to selling herself on the road like a duck to water.  Rose is introduced coming on to a potential trick “she was getting bored shaking her leg. It wasn’t enough for the bloke to see her knickers under her short skirt”.  Expecting a sexually inexperienced guy, Rose is put out by his extensive sexual demands, and ends up lashing out at pornography for giving menfolk too many ideas “he must have read every dirty book aimed at a pervert market”. 

Moffatt might be willing to perv over Terry, but Rose appears to have been more of his ‘type’, Gentleman Jim’s books displaying a preference for the flesher, curvier woman...but having big hands evidentially ruins the job for Moffatt.  “I’ve got big tits, big arse and big hands. That’s what’s wrong with me...those big hands” frets Rose.  Big hands might be a turn off for Gentleman Jim, but presumably come in handy when thumbing a lift on the road.  At Rose’s insistence, the two hitchhike their way to the ‘Siddlecombe Folk Festival’ in Devon, a land of...if not milk and honey...then “guys galore and a chance of a social security handout” as Rose puts it.

"hey girls, fancy a ride to the Siddlecombe Folk Festival?"

In Moffatt books its common to find him lose interest in the young tearaways he was meant to be writing about, and instead switch his allegiance to characters which he would have found more relatable and agreeable.  Inevitably these tend to be older, male characters, always seen dressed in suits, who adhere to old fashioned values, and lash out in anger at a changing world that is leaving them behind and flashing them the ‘V’ sign in the process.  The opportunity for Moffatt to jump ship presents itself in the form of Kevin Lilly, a 52 year old ex-major, who runs an elite, gourmet food store catering to the upper classes.  Lilly is a sworn enemy of the Siddlecombe Folk Festival, and the longhairs it attracts to Devon “his entire being was geared to destroying this ‘scum’ that blighted his Colonel Blimpish Britain”.  On the surface, Lilly appears to be the perfect Moffatt protagonist, yet Moffatt resists the temptation to transform Sorts from the Terry Hurdy story to the Kevin Lilly one.  The likely reason for author putting distance between himself and this character being that behind his fist shaking, respectability, Lilly is also a sex beast with a taste for young hitchhikers and a history of sexually harassing female employees.  One that leaves this pillar of the community frequently open to blackmail.  Still, the similarities between Lilly and Moffatt are difficult to ignore. Both are roughly the same age, residents of Devon, publically criticise hippie culture, and like his creator Kevin Lilly likes big butts and he cannot lie “his eyes fastened like headlights on a cat’s eye stud on a fog bound road as the girl’s buttocks shifted sensually under her store uniform”.  Did Moffatt see elements of himself in Kevin Lilly?  The two men both had their sexual secrets to keep.  Moffatt being primarily known in Devon as a writer for local newspaper ‘The Sidmouth Herald’ yet had this secondary career as ‘Richard Allen’, his Mr. Hyde, whose books regularly required Moffatt to dream up youthful hooliganism and letch after young girls in print.

Lilly might shake his head at the parade of hippie blokes he sees hitchhiking along the motorway- vindictively showering one of them with gravel as he drives by- but is more receptive to Rose and Terry.  Offering the duo a lift, in spite of the fact that Rose has big hands!!  The mood quickly turns sexual with Terry barely in the car before Lilly is pawing her thighs, causing Rose to get the scent of a rich, sexually desperate, mark.  Sexual bartering takes place, with Lilly managing to talk the girls into a lay-by threesome in return for a ride to Siddlecombe.  Only to seal his fate by letting slip that he has a successful business in the town, causing the ears of conniving Rose to stand on end.

Fellow writers in the trash fiction field, such as Guy N. Smith, may have adopted a celebratory attitude to sex. Jumping on the freedoms afforded by the age of permissiveness, and writing about intercourse in lengthy and often ridiculous detail.  Moffatt though comes across as far more uptight and Victorian about S-E-X.  Sorts is a book that constantly sets up sordid sexual encounters, but is a case of all sizzle, no steak, with Moffatt sparing the blushes of his female characters by gentlemanly refusing to go into the finer details.  There is much build up to the lay-by bacchanal, with Lilly getting hot under the collar while trying to find a suitably discrete spot for the bunk-up, and in need of reassurance from the girls that yes...they are going to get naked for him, yes...both of them.  Only for Moffatt to write around the incident itself, allowing only hints at the unprintable depravity that takes place in Devon lay-bys.  What with even the promiscuous Rose admitting she’s not used to getting naked with another girl, and mentions of Lilly committing “deeds not in keeping with his wartime decorations”. 

Sorts offers a rare opportunity to see Moffatt write about a place he loved, his adopted home of Devon, as opposed to the usual council estates, high rise flats and football terraces which were the usual settings of his youthsploitation novels.  When it comes to Devon, Moffatt’s writing rises above the hack level, as affectionate descriptions of “miniature stately homes in landscaped grounds protecting their privacy” and “the number of classy outlets, the attachment to ‘times past’” flow off the pages.  Setting Sorts so close to home however, only makes Moffatt see red...blood red...when it comes to the folk crowd blighting his own, personal landscape. 

Terry might be smitten by cosy, old fashioned Devon, but all this long hair, pot smoking and multiculturalism rubs our headstrong young bigot up the wrong way.  Sending Terry scurrying back to cherished childhood memories of hanging around with racist, football hooligans.  “Crissakes, you lot are nothing compared to the skins. At least they bloody work for a living” hollers Terry at the two main representatives of hippie culture in the book, Englishman Jack White and Scotsman Jock Macauley.  This being a Moffatt book, Jack and Jock turn out to be drug addicted layabouts who live off social security handouts, like scaring old ladies and gleefully anticipate an eventual communist takeover of Britain.  Communal living is cynically depicted as a scam, with the two hippies insisting on Terry and Rose handing over all their cash to them.  Claiming it will all go on commune living expenses, Jack and Jock instead blow it on a pot and heroin binge.  Despite Terry having trouble written over her, Jack decides to take her under his wing, reasoning that skirt is skirt and “being stuck up there on the windy hill with Jock didn’t satisfy his lusty nature.  Some things he did not experiment with and one was men”.  Moffatt’s unnecessary insistence that the two men aren’t gay, does lead you to wonder why he felt the need to point that out in the first place.  The disclaimer in itself conjuring up a mental image of Jack and Jock getting up to gay fella business.  A similar, potentially revealing moment occurs in Mod Rule (1980) where Moffatt’s main character contemplates a homophobic attack “Joe wanted to bash the bastard.  He hated queers with a virile youth’s fear of turning into one”.  Did Gentleman Jim have a closet in need of liberating?  Was the homophobia in his books motivated by a deep rooted, self-hatred?  It’s a theory worthy of consideration, however momentarily, even if evidence to the contrary is strong.  Moffatt had been married at one point, and his books come on forcefully, nay predatorily, heterosexual.  Still, Sorts is another Moffatt book whose sexual content, and writing from a female perspective, sees the author having to erotise the male body in print.  “Sweaty, broad shouldered, strong armed.  The type with muscles on top of muscles.  A he-lion who would brook no refusal when he started getting down to the nitty-gritties”.

Terry aside, there’s nothing in Sorts that flatters the female of the species.  Big handed Rose is “a little bitch! A road-screwing whore” according to Kevin Lilly.  While a female employee of his, who Lilly has been sexually harassing, decides that the blackmailing rewards of giving in to his sexual demands outweighs the indignities, vowing she’ll “have the bastard over a barrel for keeps”.  Mrs. Lilly herself turns out to be an all fur coat and no knickers social climber, who secretly wishes her husband dead so she can get her hands on his money and live the life of luxury. 

Moffatt’s sexual disgust at women goes off the scale in Sorts.  “One of the girls laughed, lifted up her skirt, lowered her knickers and pee-ed” writes Moffatt of an unnamed hippie.  Elsewhere the author feels compelled to inform us that Rose prefers multi-hued knickers to white ones “She seldom wore white these days.  Too much trouble keeping them clean between trips”.  However, the King-of-too-much-information’s  piece de resistance when it comes to crudity in Sorts is the use of the term ‘flushing the loo’ as a euphemism for the female orgasm.  After Jack and Jock have had their wicked way with Terry and Rose respectively, Rose insists on comparing notes.  Boasting that Jock flushed her loo five times during the night.  A clear victory for Scotland over England, as Terry concedes that Jack was only capable of flushing her loo twice. 

The young folk being pitted against older establishment figures was a key theme in early 1970s British culture, you’ll find it in Horror Hospital, House of Whipcord, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (the Arthur Kennedy character in that film could have easily written a book like this).  Sorts isn’t one to buck a popular trend, but Moffatt treads a less well travelled path when it comes to also pitting young people against young people.  Terry being ideologically at odds with just about everything Jack and Jock stand for.  Sorts is a reminder that not every youngster in 1970s Britain was swept along by flower power, with Terry endlessly getting in the faces of Jack and Jock accusing them of being Longhairs!!! Scroungers!!! Communists!!!  The girl can’t help it.  Secretly Terry longs to be a housewife and mother, as well as marrying a decent man who enjoys kicking hippies in the bollocks as much as she does.  It is on matters of race that Terry feels most at odds with the hippies, inflammatory opinions that Moffatt is only to keen to put into print.  “Recently, she’d almost forgotten what it was like to be the butt of every do-gooder’s loathing for trying to keep Britain white... if only Enoch was Prime Minister, she thought”.  That’s James Moffatt books for you, all subtlety and understatement.   

Considering the publishing phenomenon that Moffatt’s skinhead and related youthsploitation novels had been, it comes as a surprise that their popularity didn’t spill over into the cinema.  British exploitation filmmakers were always quick to capitalise on a headline making subject, be it suburban swinging (The Wife Swappers), wife beating (The Brute), artificial insemination (Who’s Child Am I), the occult (Secret Rites) even a real life killer (The Black Panther).  Youth gangs and race relations though were hot topic subjects that UK exploitation filmmakers generally preferred to side-step.  Maybe the threat of a backlash from the censors, the public and the youth gangs depicted, lead the likes of Pete Walker, Stanley Long and Lindsay Shonteff to the conclusion that the fucking they’d get, wasn’t worth the fucking they’d get.  There were a few rare exceptions, the support feature ‘The Contract’ (1975) offers the surreal sight of Coronation Street actor Ken Farrington as a coke snorting, white supremacist biker, playing Russian roulette and hurling racial expletives around.  However, the only significant British exploitation filmmaker to tackle race-relations in his movies was volatile maverick Donovan Winter, whose treatment of the subject in Some Like It Sexy (1969) and Escort Girls (1974) would lead you to believe that Winter was anti-racist.  An image you’ll have shattered for you, if you ever have the dubious honour of reading his autobiography ‘The Winter of My Discontent’, which revealed the filmmaker to be very much Moffatt-minded.

Bad vibes abound at this point in Sorts, when will Terry’s confrontations and bickering with the hippie guys result in violent or sexual retaliation.  Moffatt ups the tension by playing the Manson card.  “Had she inadvertently walked in on a pair of Manson-painted blokes” asks Moffatt of the reader.  It is a testament to just how widely felt the shock waves were from the Manson case that they even registered in Devon.  Charles Manson was a godsend for Moffatt, both validating his worst fears about hippies, and spurring him on to portray them as drug-crazed psychopaths.  Still you suspect that when it came to matters of race, Gentleman Jim and Charlie would have gotten along just fine.  Moffatt sure got his money’s worth out of Manson and his family, they provided inspiration for Moffatt’s non-fiction expose of satanic sex cults ‘Satan’s Slaves’ (1970) published under the name James Taylor.  As well as his 1970 horror novel ‘The Naked Light’ (tagline ‘black magic slayings in the Hollywood Hills’).          

The Manson influence makes its presence felt in Sorts when Jock shoots up “that’s the big ‘D’ man, Satan’s flames and that shit” becoming a drug crazed madman who embarks on a killing spree.  Tripping out, Jock believes he is actually slaying sea creatures “that’s what he’d speared a bloody mermaid, look at those tits, god they shifted so easily, but where was her tail”.  For all of the hippie hating to emerge from Moffatt’s poisoned pen, it comes as a surprise that when the Manson family type characters show up in Sorts, they are ‘kind of’ the good guys.  Jock’s murderous antics being spied upon by a hippie commune, lead by an American draft dodger, who decides his ‘family’ should hunt Jock down and kill him.  The type of behaviour that technically should win Moffatt’s approval (elsewhere in the book he is very supportive of police brutality) but hippies were never going to get an even break in a Moffatt novel.  The ‘Family’ might be doing society a favour by taking the law into their own hands, especially as Moffatt has Jock cackling to himself that liberal ‘do-gooders’ will come to his defence if he is ever caught, but Moffatt is always on hand to remind us that hippies are in fact evil and disgusting.  The revolting highlights of the book all belong to the family.  At one point the Manson figure name drops Jesus into the conversation, prompting a female follower to squat and urinate on the ground, urging him to “walk on my water”.  This leads to all the commune urinating, creating a pool of piss for the Manson figure to prove his messianic qualities by walking on.  Who’d be a hippie cult leader, eh?  A common form of abuse in Moffatt’s books is for characters to wish others to be shit upon “shit on her”, “shit on you”, “shit on this place”, but Sorts is the only book of his I’ve read where this insult is put into practice. “Shitting on him” remarks one horrified policeman of the Family’s handwork “that’s bottom of degeneracy”.  It’s one of many moments in Moffatt’s books which cause you to step back and ask yourself ‘how did we end up here’.  A book which begins in the territory of a kitchen sink drama, with its teenage pregnancy plot taking place under a grey slated working class rooftop, ends up trespassing into the land of ‘I Drink Your Blood’ with all these drug crazed hippies running around the countryside.  

Moffatt is noticeably reluctant to give his Manson character a name, building up the man’s mystique by simply referring to him as ‘the American’ and heavy handily stressing the Manson comparisons “the Manson curse hovered upon him...the similarities were astonishing”.  Only towards the end of the book does Moffatt let slip the man’s surname ‘Golightly’ a name hardly likely to strike fear into the hearts of men.  ‘The Golightly Family’ sounding less like a bloodthirsty hippie cult, and more like a forgotten TV sitcom. 

The last act of Sorts is an absolute shambles, but at least it is an entertaining shambles.  Moffatt loses sight of Terry, reducing her to a side character, and instead introduces us to what appears to be the entire Siddlecombe police force.  Worse still, the fuzz here are a rather interchangeable bunch and it becomes difficult to keep track of who’s who.  Of the force, Constable Allen only stands out for offering Terry an olive branch back to straight society.  Sgt Tom Elford is another mouthpiece for Moffatt’s anti-drug rhetoric “he wanted to vomit, to curse aloud.  To horsewhip every bastard he caught pushing the filthy stuff” and racism “people here don’t realise what’s been happening in England.  Half the towns belong to Africa and India”.  For a change of pace, their chief Inspector hates famous people, losing his rag with “showbiz personalities sporting outlandish fashions in an effort to please their theatrical chain masters”.

Sorts’ ending shows signs of being equally padded and rushed.  As the police investigation takes precedence, Moffatt pointlessly serves up police interviews with Terry Hurdy and Jack White, presented in the manner of a transcribed Q&A session. Which only recaps the story we already know.  Moffatt sets up a courtroom battle finale, with a villainous do-gooder barrister attempting to discredit Terry by bringing up her skinhead past.  Only for Moffatt to realise that he’d either reached the required page count or that the pubs were opening soon, so skims through the trial, effectively telling the reader that it was a fairly boring affair and they didn’t miss anything “none of the excitement associated with stage, television, motion picture trials”.  Before he hits the bar though, Gentleman Jim at least sticks around long enough to write a heart-warming ‘reader, I married him’ ending, as well as an epilogue in which a contemptible female character gets her comeuppance in the form of rough, degrading sex with an uncouth lout.  Thus ensuring that both romantics and misogynists walk away happy from Sorts. 

In his intro to the book Moffatt describes and defends Sorts as ‘a source of reference for future students of our violent era’, and... well here I am writing about it in 2023, so Gentleman Jim called it right in that regards.  Sorts hasn’t just become a document of the era’s violence, but also its prejudices, on account of Moffatt practicing nearly all of them.  The man’s hate list was nothing if not astronomical...he had it in for Blacks, Gays, Jews, Trade Unionists, Hippies, religious do-gooders, the Irish, Americans, French, Germans, greyhound dogs, the National Front (yep, he even hated the people who hated the people who he himself hated).  Not to mention...women with big hands.  Taking into account stories of his alcoholism, his reputation for being increasingly unreliable, along with the colossal weight of bitterness, anger and bigotry he dragged around with him, and you have to ask whether James Moffatt could have lead a very happy life.  Even before the end of chapter one he has Terry inwardly scream “God, what a bloody rotten world it was”.

Still, to give the man credit, Sorts is an exploitation novel that truly delivers.  On that level Sorts is a classic (of Sorts) successfully playing to the most basest, violent and prejudicial instincts of a 1970s’ audience.  The passing of time generally robs cultural artefacts of their controversial status.  Once verboten movies like The Exorcist, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange play on TV these days, even the Video Nasties have become gentrified and socially acceptable now, but the Moffatt books still prowl around the cultural naughty step like demented banshees.  If anything their shock value has only snowballed over the years, particularly when it comes to Sorts’ attitude towards sexual harassment and race relations.  It is an overused expression that something or other will ‘make you want to take a shower afterwards’, but a James Moffatt book really will make you feel that unclean.  Make sure you flush the loo afterwards.  Moffatt’s voice is a shriek of the mutilated, one that echoes throughout the decades “God, what a bloody rotten world it was”.