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Of Skinheads, Suedeheads and Knuckle Girls: The gritty novels of Richard Allen
05.25.2017
04:02 pm
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In the 1960s the New English Library, a British subsidiary of the New American Library, had been plodding along churning out westerns and science fiction novels, but after approximately 1970 the imprint stumbled on a new audience that would make it lots of money. For young men who grew up in Britain during the era, the New English Library was an endless source of high-octane pulp fiction about the rough and tumble of the urban street.

The name applied to the genre eventually came to be “bovver,” as in “bovver boys” or “bovver boots”—it was a corruption of “bother”—but many also simply think of them as the Skinhead books. They were geared toward a working-class youth audience and saw opportunities in the mostly white subcultures that were coming into being at the time, skinheads, punks, bikers, and mods, with attention also paid to girl gangs. Using photographic covers for automatic authenticity, the books crammed as much telltale detail of “the life” as possible. Many readers were certain that the author must be “one of them”—which was not really true.

As Harry Sword wrote in his memorable VICE story about the publishing company from 2014 “The New English Library was the maniacal king of pulp publishing in 1970s Britain.” “Maniacal” was an apt descriptor: One of the hallmarks of this new type of fiction was that books were churned out at an incredibly fast rate. Sword quotes Mark Howell, employed by “the NEL” in the early 1970s:
 

That damn delivery schedule was the most driving force I’ve ever met in publishing. You just had to get it out there—it was breakneck, insane. I started a series called Deathlands, and the first writer I gave it to had done a wonderful first story and was given the green light—and spent his entire advance on heroin, which, back in those days, was not unknown. It was crippling for some, but most of our writers were addicts of the typewriter, and one of the glories of this was that it was a conveyer belt—we thoroughly addicted our readers. It was endless repetition stemming from unresolved anomaly.

 
The most successful books of the NEL were the Skinhead series, which focused on a “misanthropic 16-year-old thug” named Joe Hawkins. The Skinhead books were incredibly violent and trafficked heavily in racism, rape, robbery, and gang beatings. To read one of the Richard Allen books was to enter a world of “cold rain, futility, bad sex, spilt blood and stale beer” set in an indistinguishable series of East London tenements.

The books were credited to “Richard Allen” but the identity of the author was actually James Moffat, a Canadian-born author who cold generate 10,000 words a day and published roughly 300 books over his long career. He died in 1993 at the age of 71.

As Howell says, “We had a market who were always hungry for more. The James Moffat Skinhead books sold in their millions.” The first novel of the Joe Hawkins series, Skinhead, was published in 1970. A year later the book Suedehead came out. Those two books as well as Skinhead Escapes were reprinted in 2015 by Dean Street Press.
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.25.2017
04:02 pm
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Richard Allen’s Skinhead chronicles: Oi!
11.27.2010
03:18 am
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AGGRO - That’s what Joe Hawkins and his mates were looking for, with their shaven heads, big boots and braces. Football matches, pub brawls, open-air pop concerts, hippies and Hell’s Angels all gave them chances to vent their sadistic violence. SKINHEAD is a story straight from today’s headlines - portraying with horrifying vividness all the terror and brutality that has become the trademark of these vicious teenage malcontents.

Richard Allen was a Canadian-born writer who could churn out pulp novels as regular as drunks take beer shits. In the early 1970’s, he got a gig writing novels about skinheads for New English Library. He eventually spewed out 17 of em. His first novel ‘Skinhead’ struck a chord with British skinheads and his teenage gangster novels became hugely popular. His stories of the biker, mod, teddy boy and Oi! culture of 70’s Britain became an essential, yet darker and less fashionable, part of London’s punk culture. While The Sex Pistols and The Clash were ultimately a bunch of hippie idealists, the skinhead scene was working and non-working class anger tied to racial resentment and a sense of destiny lost. The Two-Tone bands entered the scene and built a bridge between the cerebral revolution of the punkers and the racial paranoia of the skins. The baldies racist inclinations were defused by their love of reggae, ska, and rock steady. Skinhead moonstomp.

Update: Paul Gallagher reports that “in the 60s and 70s skinheads were black and white - though the movement was hijacked by some members of the National Front (extreme right Nazi organization).  Trouble with Allen’s books was their painting skins in a sometimes negative light. Ska and Two Tone records reclaimed skinheads in the late 70s through The Specials and Madness, etc.”

Check out this solid documentary on Richard Allen and the legions of kids for whom he was the voice of their disenfranchisement and anger anguish. 
 

 
Parts 2 - 7 after the jump…

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Posted by Marc Campbell
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11.27.2010
03:18 am
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