Canadian born pulp-fiction writer extraordinaire Richard Allen (real name James Moffat) wasn’t really ever controversial. Despite selling enormous quantities of books, and at one point even been made obligatory reading to Aussie students, the very fact that Allen wrote about skinheads has made him simply too hated and blanked out to even be controversial!

Allen did not just write about skinheads though, and one could argue that he is as much a father to Guy Ritchie as a late 60’s reggae-listening boy about town skinhead could be the father of the drum’n'bass-listening geezers of “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock…”. But as usual, it is allowed for a drugged-out hippie to fire a Bren Gun inside a building or an Irish tinker to batter someone senseless, wheras the heavy (but usually) non-lethal violence of a skinhead firm is best written about on tabloid frontpages in world war-size headlines, but never ever as fiction, ok!?! Positively the only one to have taken as much stick for standing by us lot in public is Garry Bushell, and it’s the same stick doing the whacking too. “Nazi entertainment, blah, blah, blah…”.

Now, obviosly, there are many things, bad (and good!) to read into Allens work for those intent on doing so. I won’t. There’s plenty of honest and dishonest from-positive-angle obituaries and reviews as it is. Allen was neither glorifying skinheads nor writing a “skinhead for dummies”, he was in fact writing fiction, and as Joe Hawkins would indeed be a very unusual skinhead, it ain’t even half enough to say that Allen was advocating paki-bashing as much as Ritchie is advocating gang war! There are too many ways too read his books, far more ways to read them than to read in to them, but at the end of the day, I think we have to put the boot into them dodgy sociologists, and take the books for what they were - and still are: Books about young skinheads for young skinheads! They are not aimed at defending, villifying or explaining skinheads. They were written to cash in on the then new subculture eager to leave it’s mark and create it’s own icons. (Slade tried to do with music what Allen had done in litterature, but didn’t quite make it as a skinhead-band, as reggae reigned supreme at the time. That said, I love my Slade and I love my Richard Allen).

Did it work? The sales numbers speak for themselves. All young skinheads love the Allen books, it’s an undeniable fact. I don’t think anyone read them as an “how-to”, though. Sure, there are some Joe Hawkinsian born-again-hamsters who fancy themselves the ICF, and there are undoubtely some that go paki-bashing, but copkillers? Sadly, very few. Nor has stock car-racing hooliganism taken off, and anyone to boast rape on his record would be very unsafe among skinheads indeed…

Though the books are indeed written about a firm of Plaistow skinheads, much of the charm of the books is in the fact that it’s a Plaistow very different from the real-deal Plaistow and the characters being uncompromisingly odd, come to that. And naturally so, cos not many 15-16 year old working class hooligans are to be found among fans of social realism and skinheads was off course no exception.

In that age it doesn’t amuse you half as much to read about the things you actually do, as the things you could do if you had the guts. Look! Here’s Joe Hawkins, he’s your age, he goes to work instead of school, he’s had fall-outs with his parents and he’s a skinhead. Now, however, unlike most of you, he has no qualms what so ever about landing steelie after steelie in someone’s bollocks, and he’s not afraid of getting nicked and when he does get nicked it is after he’s killed a copper! More important however, is that Joe has no problem persuading the barmaids to serve his mob of underage drinkers, and that the barmaids were well horny too, dropping their knickers as often and easy you’d wish they would as a 16 year old.

In that aspect they are priceless and well unique too, not just as skinhead litterature, but for youth litteratrure as a whole. No well-to-do-Hardy-brothers-detective-bollocks nor any boring, moralistic learn-it-the-hard-way-crap. Just action and loads of it!

- Jon Mean Streets
courtesy of our friends at www.skinhead.no