LAST Christmas, me and the family made our semi-annual pilgrimage to the dry, dusty mid-north of South Australia to visit Peterborough – a once-majestic railway town, now slowly dying in this post-railways era. Frankly, if my elderly parents didn’t live there we would have had no reason to come.
There’s not much in Peterborough. Hasn’t been for decades, since the days I first lived in the town in the late 70s and early 80s.
But we made a welcome discovery during our visit when we stumbled across a hidden gem: 229 On Main Cafe (housed in the old Capitol Theatre).
The kids loved exploring the spacious, renovated movie theatre: looking at the quirky bric-a-brac, old movie posters and rows of lollies in glass jars. Or playing on the vintage jeep and 1940s taxi while staring at the life-sized fibreglass statues of Marilyn Monroe and the Blues Brothers.
I contented myself to drink good coffee, wondering how I’d missed this place on previous visits (it had been open for several years) and trying to not think about my parents and their increasingly frail state.
The cinema was once a junk shop/second-hand store owned by Mrs White (as I knew her) – I remember as a 10-year-old buying “old” Marvel comics (c. late 60s) from there.
Now, it was cleaned up and converted into a hip cafe by her son and his wife. Despite Peterborough’s economic woes and the general oddness of such a cool joint existing in the town, it survives and seemingly thrives from the passing tourist trade going to and coming from the Flinders Ranges.
As for the junk once housed in the theatre, it had moved into a vacant shop next door. Me and the family took the opportunity to peruse it after a long, relaxed stay in the cafe.
The kids found a few games and toys and I was happy to find four interesting-looking books, which the owner wanted to sell to me for the grand total of two bux. I managed to beat him up to $5, but it was still a sweet deal...and an interesting experiment. Would they all be duds or would there be a few gems among the lot?
Skinhead Escapesby Richard Allen (New English Library, 1972)
I’VE heard much about this notorious series chronicling the misadventures of sociopathic East End criminal Joe Hawkins, but this – the third entry in the series – is the first one I’ve actually read. I certainly won’t be seeking out any more of them.
When the book opens, Joe is doing hard time in jail, but within the first four pages he’s made his escape and hatches a plan to make some quick cash. Along the way, he rapes a girl, steals a gun to aid him in a big robbery, shoots two cops, betrays numerous accomplices, avoids the incompetent police and a vengeful underworld who are chasing him, before finally being captured with pathetic ease. Which is a helluva lot of plot to pack into 125 pages.
In the foreword, Allen – in reality, a Canadian-born hack writer called James Moffat, who churned out a ton of pulp novels in the 70s – admits he only brought back Hawkins for a third instalment due to public demand. Which probably explains the rushed, perfunctory, “let’s get this shit on the bookshelves ASAP” writing style. It probably took Moffat a weekend to knock it together on his typewriter.
I read elsewhere that Moffat was a right-wing cunt and it’s obvious in Skinhead Escapes. He buries unions, working-class people, the Irish, Catholics, young people and youth culture in general. He has particular disdain for women, who are either whores or sluts who deserve to be raped. The most jaw-dropping moment comes when Joe’s victim finds out she’s pregnant and Moffat offers this little-known scientific “fact”:
“She thought hard about her torment. Pregnancy resulted not from the man’s ejaculation but a mutually responsive female orgasm. Had she actually spasmed when he reached his climax? She didn’t think so but...”
WHAT THE FUCK???
Throughout the book, Moffat has Joe espouse various fascist views and I think the reader is supposed to laugh at the scumbag’s ignorance. But as they’re actually Moffat’s views, then I’m not sure what we’re supposed to think.
For an idiot, Joe has almost mythical qualities that make him virtually untouchable while on the lam – until his final arrest during an anti-climactic ending, which seems to come from left field for no other reason than Moffat didn’t want to miss Monday’s last mail to post his manuscript to the NEL editors.
No character comes out of this book looking good. The author clearly despises Joe, but he has no respect for anyone else...except a couple of senior cop figures who are painted in a reasonable light.
Moffat’s writing style also leaves a lot to be desired. Everything is rushed, particularly the ending. Worse still, there are several supporting characters who are featured –seemingly to play a bigger part later in the book – only to vanish, never to be heard from again.
The most notable is fellow prison escapee and hardened gangster McVey, who seeks revenge on Joe. Several chapters are devoted to McVey chatting to his wife about his plans, yet nothing eventuates. Why did Moffat even bother writing about the guy if he wasn’t going to figure in the climax? To up the word count, I suspect.
Or maybe he popped up in a later book in this odious series.
I can see why people read Moffat’s books nowadays – hey, we all like a post-ironic guffaw, I suppose. But it’s hard to know who was the original audience for this nasty tripe. Joe repeatedly assaults, rapes or insults innocents – rarely confronting villains worse than him – making him a coward and utterly repugnant. The political views are abhorrent and the “social commentary” is appallingly inaccurate.
I assume it was marketed towards semi-literate skinheads who just liked reading about skinheads thumping people.
FUCKWITS, in other words.
Halloween III: Season Of The Witch by Jack Martin (Star, 1983)
THE book adaptation of the disastrous movie is kinda naff, but still a fun read with a delightfully nihilistic ending.
Dr Dan Challis is an overworked LA hospital medico with a vindictive ex-wife, two spoilt kids and a drinking problem. Around him, people gear up for Halloween, with the hottest item around being the garish masks made by the Silver Shamrock company.
Life changes for Challis when an hysterical old man clutching one of the masks is brought to the hospital. He keeps proclaiming that “They’re...going to...kill us! All of us!”
After he’s given a sedative to help him sleep, Challis staggers off to get some sleep himself but is awakened by screaming. He runs out to find the old man has been murdered – his face pulled from his skull – and the killer making a quick exit to the car park. Chasing after him, Challis sees the killer drench himself and the car with petrol, then set both alight.
Soon afterwards, Challis meets the old man’s daughter Ellie and learns he was a toy shop owner, who’d last been seen driving to Silver Shamrock’s factory in nearby Santa Mira.
The two join forces to investigate the factory and, suffice to say, things go from bad to worse. They’re soon knee-deep in a monstrous mystery involving a demented novelty toy maker, an ancient large gemstone imbued with demonic power, dozens of super-strong plastic robots and a monstrous plan to get 50 million unsuspecting children to don killer masks and plunge America into a nightmarish new world.
Challis and Ellie seemingly stop the mask-making madman and his minions, but there’s one final twist that undoes all of Challis’s heroic efforts.
As a tip of the hat to the first two Halloweenmovies, Martin throws in some red herrings early in the novel to give readers the impression that Michael Myers is lurking near the action. But he later makes it clear that they’re fictional in his world, with the first Halloween even being advertised as a part of a TV movie marathon.
Overall, I enjoyed this adaptation – I don’t know whether it makes me want to watch this much-maligned flick, but at least I now know it isn’t utter shit.
Disco by Chelsea Farrady (Horwitz, 1977)
CASHING in on the music fad at the peak of its popularity is this sexy potboiler published by my wife’s former employer, Horwitz, which went on to be fine porno publishers of AustralianPenthouse and Australian Women’s Forum.
Michelle is the queen of the New York disco scene, a middled-aged man-eater who runs the hottest club in town. But her past is humble – born and raised in poverty in New Orleans – and her love-life is scandalous, mainly involving her mother’s boyfriend, gangsters and deranged southern playboys. When an investigative journalist comes to interview her, will Michelle’s carefully created kingdom come crashing down around her ears.
Disco is topical, never dull and Michelle is a surprisingly sympathetic heroine (at least her younger incarnation is – she turns into quite the shallow bitch by book’s end). Still, a fun train read.
Creatures Of The Mistby Vern Hansen (Digit, 1963)
I PICKED up this oddball sci-fi book for the cover (a fanged chimpanzee leering ominously over a rocket leaving a planet’s orbit). I thought it was just artistic licence from a drunk cover artist, but it’s actually surprisingly accurate: the main villains in the book are a bunch of savage ape-like creatures.
This book is odd as the “hero”, Bruin, is actually an escaped convict, who’s kidnapped by a dying alien race (along with a stripper and a vacuous politician) to help repopulate the planet Sooloolia.
The three victims’ brains are placed in new alien bodies, but they quickly assume positions of power on Sooloolia due to their superior Earth cunning and strength.
But Bruin – now an emperor – soon his newfound power challenged by disaffected Sooloolians and the more savage Doonamian apes from the planet’s badlands.
There’s a climactic battle, which ends with Bruin taking on the Doonamian overlord one-on-one to decide the victors. There’s a surprisingly downbeat ending to Creatures Of The Mist, which shows that there was a time when sci-fi – no matter how lowbrow and hackneyed its origins – could afford to be weird and break stereotypes.
It was certainly a worthy novel to end this four-book experiment.
- Dann Lennard
COMING SOON: The Four-Book Sequel
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