He's a saucy lad that Peter Cave, a man who once put into print what few men today would dare to even privately think to themselves. In 'Skinhead Farewell' the 1996 BBC documentary about James Moffatt and other New English Library writers, the interview with Cave is announced by the fanfare of the 'Robin’s Nest' TV sitcom theme tune. An apt soundtrack choice, since Cave himself does tend to come across like Richard O'Sullivan's Robin Tripp character, had R. Tripp opted for a career in paperback writing rather than cookery.
The image of Cave as the archetypal, fun loving,
freewheeling 1970s bloke is embraced and played up in The Dirtiest Picture
Postcard, a teasingly, possibly autobiographical look into the life of a
debauched hack writer in the 1970s. The focus of The Dirtiest Picture Postcard
is John Sheffield, a successful author who decides to leave his awful wife and
hightail it to a place referred to in the book as Chelston-On-Sea, but which is
clearly a thinly veiled version of Cave's old stomping ground Torquay. There Sheffield
plans to drink heavily, smoke lots of pot and screw lots of birds...and
possibly write a bestselling book about the whole affair. On his tail is Murray
Charles, a private detective hired by Sheffield's wife Martia to get dirt on
Sheffield, in order for her to take him to the cleaners in the divorce courts.
The book getting its name from Murray's promise to Martia that the info he'll
bring back on Sheffield will be 'the Dirtiest Picture Postcard on the Pier'.
Trouble is that Murray is a bumbling virgin, therefore ill-prepared for
sexually decadent Torquay.
The Dirtiest Picture Postcard plays a constant
guessing game over whether it belongs in the fiction or non-fiction section.
Cave is extremely generous when it comes to sharing real-life characteristics
with John Sheffield, who like Cave worked a series of dead end jobs before
drifting into writing, first by the backdoor of pornography, before hitting it
big by penning trashy paperbacks. At least one of Sheffield's lousy jobs on his
way to the top is ripped straight out of Cave's own life. Sheffield at one
point recalls being employed in a holiday camp as what amounts to a glorified
killjoy "hired to stop sex in a place expressly designed to hold nine
hundred people dedicated to screwing themselves silly for a fortnight".
Only to get fired when his employers catch Sheffield in his underpants and
presiding over a drunken orgy. All rather similar to an incident recalled in
the 'about the author' bio piece in Cave's book 'The Crime Commandos', where Cave
cops to having 'spent a year in Jersey working as a security guard in a holiday
camp until the general manager found him at a drunken party in his underpants'.
According to legend Cave hated that particular gig so much that the holiday
camp which the Hells Angels trash in Chopper (1971) was specifically based on
his former place of employment.
This in mind, you do have to wonder how much else
of The Dirtiest Picture Postcard is true. The villainess of the piece, Martia,
is a shrieking, money grabbing, nasty piece of work, which the book gleefully
spills the beans on. Martia being a glamour model who got into porn thanks to
her husband's contacts in the erotic lit world, and has seemingly graduated to
acting in British sex films. Assuming Martia just wasn't a product of Cave's
imagination, and there was such a corresponding woman in Cave's life who worked
the glamour and British sex film scenes, is the former Mrs. Cave someone whose oeuvre
I'm familiar with? Answers on a dirty postcard please.
Saying that The Dirtiest Picture Postcard is
fundamentally a good natured romp, less a bad divorce novel, and more a
celebration of excess and male bonding. Pot smoking, naked orgies on the beach,
pissing contests, drink driving and partner swapping, it all goes on in swinging
Torquay as Sheffield takes Murray under his wing , getting him drunk, getting
him stoned and getting him laid.
Cave always seems like a writer who never placed
great value on his work, and appears to have viewed writing as a lark, just
another adventure in life. An attitude he shares with Sheffield who responds to
Murray paying his books a compliment with "bollocks!... they're
rubbish", but eventually concedes to them being "entertaining
rubbish". For a man who'd likely respond to praise with a cynical guffaw,
Cave did have the ability to turn his hand to just about whatever the
publishers ordered. While his biker novels are what he is likely to be
remembered for, his 1971 stab at erotic lit 'Hitch-hiker' is a forgotten
classic of trash fiction, and evidence that Cave could knock out a one handed
read as efficiently as two fisted material like The Crime Commandos. It's proof
of his versatility that he could also write a relentlessly nasty book like
Rogue Angels, then turn his hand to a filthy, but laugh out loud comedy here. I
dare say that if the Carry On people had put Cave on the payroll in the early
1970s, he might well have saved that series.
If you take nothing else away from The Dirtiest Picture Postcard it's that Peter Cave sure knew how to party, a night on the tiles with Cave’s alter-ego leaving Murray with a hangover described as there being two drunken leprechauns dancing in Murray's skull and throwing whisky bottles at the backs of his eyeballs. The Dirtiest Picture Postcard also puts Cave in the frame for being obsessed with big tits. One of his side characters, Don, is a boorish barman with an ability to turn any conversion back to the subject of large knockers "the bigger the better I always say...something to bury your ears in on a winter's night" but Cave sure can give the likes of Don a run for their money, whilst playing to their favourite fetish. "John Sheffield awoke in the serpent-like clutches of a slightly cross eyed Danish nymphomaniac with an impossible breast measurement of 50 inches and the incredible ability to use them as masturbatory objects". Nearly every female character in this book is big boobed and a raging alcoholic, read into that what you will.
By making Murray the protagonist, rather than Sheffield himself, we are forced to see things through the rented eyes of someone who isn't quite sure if he's got the measure of Sheffield, and suspects that a deeper person lies beneath the hedonistic exterior. There are moments in The Dirtiest Picture Postcard where you feel Cave's own mask slipping, and a sense of an author putting himself on the psychiatrist's couch "life has shown me most of what it has to offer and there’s nothing new anymore... no excitement, no interest. I write books based on my own life and give the characters the excitement I should be feeling personally" muses a glum Sheffield.
At the same time, because of the book's outsider point of view, neither Murray nor the reader can be totally sure if we're getting the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or merely being lead a merry dance by this joker. At one point Murray diagnoses Sheffield as "living up to the truist tradition of the artist. The sad man behind the clown's mask, the deep thinker hidden inside the extrovert, the poet hiding under the hack writer". Which causes Sheffield to break down "it's all games you see, a constant and boring game of charades". Sheffield then starts laughing, tells Murray he wasn't being serious and was in fact channeling the disillusioned, jaded character he is currently trying to write a book about "I always tend to get really hung up with my characters when I’m halfway through a book". So, let's get this straight The Dirtiest Picture Postcard is a book in which Peter Cave writes about a character called John Sheffield, in which Sheffield is writing about a character who may or may not be based on John Sheffield, who in turn may or may not be based on Peter Cave. For a quickie, sex comedy paperback, The Dirtiest Picture Postcard sure gets complex, not to mention incredibly meta, at times.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the one moment in The Dirtiest Picture Postcard were Cave loses his mind and writes something so tonally at odds with the good time vibes of this book. Still, you have to hand it to the man, when Cave does inappropriate, tonally misjudged material, he really goes to town. The point in the book in question being when Murray gets a dinner date with Jenny Shaw, the token 'good girl' of the book, who is a full time sociology student and part time feminist "I only believe in women's lib when it suits me". Their romantic conversation turns, as they often do, to sexual assault, where Jenny shocks Murray with her claim that as a sociologist and feminist she believes "rape is a physical impossibility...in this day and age anyway". Murray responds to this by grabbing her by the throat, attempting to choke her unconscious, while using his other hand to grope up her skirt "gripping the thin material of her panties between finger and thumb, he pulled it back and let go, hearing the vicious snap of tight elastic against her skin with sadistic pleasure". Murray then tells her that if they weren't in a public place, he would have been able to go on and rape her, and therefore that is why she needs to be taking the threat of sexual assault more seriously "you couldn't scream and you'd stand no chance against my superior strength. So rape is a physical impossibility, huh?" After this incident, we're meant to believe that romance could still blossom between these two, in spite of Murray wigging out and having his little Frank Booth/Blue Velvet moment there.
Negatives to The Dirtiest Picture Postcard are that the love story between Murray and Jenny is pretty boring and threatens to get in the way of the fun. Despite the ever present threat of Martia, the book doesn't have much of a dramatic backbone either. It's all very laid back...about people letting their hair down, partying hard and having no idea what to do with the rest of their lives. The uncharacteristically open ending of The Dirtiest Picture Postcard likely due to Cave setting up a sex comedy series here, the adventures of John Sheffield continuing in White Line Fever (1975), West Coast Wildcatting (1975) and concluding with High Flying Birds (1976).
I'm in little doubt that Peter Cave had lots of fun writing this book, and also possibly living it. The overall impression you get from The Dirtiest Picture Postcard is that Peter Cave either lead a wild life back then, or just had a dirty mind, but one thing we can all agree on in that the man wrote some rubbish...but it’s entertaining rubbish.
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