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Boot Boys
18 cm. 108 p. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial ilustrada. Idioma inglés .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario.
- GenresFiction
112 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
36 people want to read
About the author
Richard Allen
58 books37 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
'Richard Allen' is the name on the front cover of the million-selling Skinhead books. The name was thought of by the editors at the London publishing firm New English Library and given by them to Jim Moffatt, one of a number of hack writers who churned out their books to order.
Born of Irish extraction, Jim Moffatt went to Britain and learnt his trade writing up to six stories a week (thrillers, spies, Westerns) for pulp fiction magazines. He moved on to writing books, and by the mid-seventies reckoned he had produced 250 in the previous 20 years, at a rate of 10,000 words a day when deadlines were approaching. Meanwhile, the managing director of the ailing New English Library imprint was desperate to make inroads into a new audience of younger readers; his editorial board came up with the idea of commissioning a novel set in the emerging skinhead subculture. In six days Moffatt wrote Skinhead. The book was an immediate hit, and many of its youthful readers were convinced that the author was a real hooligan, not a 55-year-old Canadian who always wore a jacket and tie and whose lurid tales of sex and street violence were written from the same seafront cottage in Sidmouth in which he also penned a column for the local paper. Soon after Skinhead Farewell Moffatt's real-life relationship with NEL came to an end.
Moffatt died of cancer in the early nineties, just at the time when the skinhead style was coming back into fashion.
'Richard Allen' is the name on the front cover of the million-selling Skinhead books. The name was thought of by the editors at the London publishing firm New English Library and given by them to Jim Moffatt, one of a number of hack writers who churned out their books to order.
Born of Irish extraction, Jim Moffatt went to Britain and learnt his trade writing up to six stories a week (thrillers, spies, Westerns) for pulp fiction magazines. He moved on to writing books, and by the mid-seventies reckoned he had produced 250 in the previous 20 years, at a rate of 10,000 words a day when deadlines were approaching. Meanwhile, the managing director of the ailing New English Library imprint was desperate to make inroads into a new audience of younger readers; his editorial board came up with the idea of commissioning a novel set in the emerging skinhead subculture. In six days Moffatt wrote Skinhead. The book was an immediate hit, and many of its youthful readers were convinced that the author was a real hooligan, not a 55-year-old Canadian who always wore a jacket and tie and whose lurid tales of sex and street violence were written from the same seafront cottage in Sidmouth in which he also penned a column for the local paper. Soon after Skinhead Farewell Moffatt's real-life relationship with NEL came to an end.
Moffatt died of cancer in the early nineties, just at the time when the skinhead style was coming back into fashion.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 21, 2023
Boot Boys is –for better or ill- full blooded James Moffat, almost every page of this book spits at you in the face. By 1973, Moffat aka Richard Allen was encountering the problem that the first generation of skinheads he’d been writing about were fading from view, but the public’s appetite for sensationalistic tales of youth at its worst was still strong. His solution was to turn his attention to the Boot Boys- an emerging youth cult that in terms of style and fashion harkened back to the mods of the 1960s, while also being the heir apparent to the skins’ penchant towards football hooliganism and racially motivated violence.
Moffat centres Boot Boys around Tom, poster boy for Boot Boys culture and head of the gang ‘The Crackers’. Moffat provides Tom, the mother of all introductions with “even his father had to admit that Tom Walsh was a rotten bastard”. A claim that Tom spends the rest of the book living up to. After indulging in some football grounds thuggery, Tom quickly graduates to attacking a couple while they are having sex in a park. Bashing the man over the head with a pole, raping his girlfriend, and taking misogynistic satisfaction in the knowledge that once the guy wakes up he’ll not want anything more to do with her “the rotten little bitch would get her ass kicked and be sent packing”. Tom then turns his gang loose on the house of a crooked black businessman, smashing his windows with rocks under the justification that “the law being a bloody ass would not prosecute to the extent of getting the suckers’ money back. Well, The Crackers would show them how to hurt guys like him”.
The actions of Tom’s gang might have been pulled from the headlines of the day, but Moffat also appears to have turned to vintage Hollywood gangster movies for inspiration here. Paying tribute to them by making Tom a junkie for late night TV repeats of movies starring “Cagney, or Raft, or Bogart, or Ladd, or Bendix, or Edward G.” The focus on ‘the rise and fall of a small time hood’ and the power struggles within Tom’s gang, also allows Moffat’s anti-Semitism to run riot in Boot Boys, making this an especially noxious piece of writing, even by Moffat’s standards. Tom faces dissension in the ranks, when Benjy, a Jewish member of his gang, apposes Tom’s plan to daub swastikas on the doors of Jewish families. An action that triggers a war between Tom and Benjy, Gentile against Jew, over leadership of the gang. The other significant Jewish character in the book, Lenny, is in contrast, meek and pathetically subservient to Tom, despite Tom’s hostility towards him and overt anti-Semitism. Lenny acts as Moffat’s whipping boy throughout the book, with Moffat stressing Lenny’s physical shortcoming to the point of numbing repetition. Take a drink every time Moffat refers to Lenny as being ‘pint sized’ in this book, and you’ll end up as shit-faced as Moffat was when he wrote this thing.
Moffat’s blustering, tabloidish approach to the material allows the author to have his cake and eat it. Rubbing the gang’s vilest deeds in the reader’s face, whilst lashing out at do-gooders for creating a system that offers little by way of a deterrent or punishment. All of which results in Moffat getting misty eyed for the days of Dick Turpin, when “the punishment for rape had been drastic. Do-gooders had not been popular with the rough and tumble serfs and their effeminate masters. Not like today”. While in 1977’s Knuckle Girls, Moffat pointed to poverty and parental neglect as the reasons for its heroine’s anti-social behavior, he appears to have been of an entirely different mindset when he wrote this in 1973. Boot Boys angrily rejecting such excuses, by deliberately making Tom the product of a loving father and an affluent household “he had a wardrobe many a Mayfair socialite would have been proud to show off to some skinny dolly bird”….and in spite of all that he still turned out to be a rotten bastard!!
Acting as a breather from Tom’s antics is the parallel story of Wilf Tomlinson, a local newspaper hack who is determined to see the gang face justice, especially after he meets Debra Wilkinson, a young widow who has been gang raped by The Crackers. Wilf follows a familiar pattern of Moffat’s heroes, by becoming hopelessly infatuated with the lead female character, even though his old fashioned values means he struggles to consummate the relationship. Wilf also gives Moffat himself a run for his money when it comes to insensitivity. Asking Debra questions like “Did you ever dream about your father once you reached adolescence” and secretly admitting that he “fought to control an urge that would have placed him in the same category as those who had, two nights previously, seen fit to make her the target for their disgusting lusts”.
Midway into Boot Boys the mood turns highly sexual. What with passions between Wilf and Debra boiling over, and the confrontation between Tom and Benjy taking the form of a battle of the studs, as they compete over which of them can satisfy the most women in succession. Along the way there is the kind of written word laughability that only 1970s trash fiction can reach, with Wilf pining “she was the reincarnation of Eve- a being with all the mysteries wrapped between her fleshy, yet so firm, thighs” whilst Debra daydreams “she knew that Wilf respected her even though he wanted to make her perform like a common slut”. While fellow trash fiction author Guy N. Smith preferred his female characters to be slender, and had little time for big boobs, Moffat was of a different school. Boot Boys having a downer on the ‘skinny dolly bird’ look, and instead lusting after the more mature, curvier woman. Debra Wilkinson being the type defined by The Kinks song ‘Don’t Forget to Dance’ as “a nice bit of old”.
However its rape and anti-Semitism that are the twin obsessions of Boot Boys, and Moffat can’t keep away from either for long. Tom’s gang might be depicted as irredeemably beyond-the-pale but you get the creeping suspicion that Moffat secretly approved of, and may even have gotten a charge out of their racism and sexual assaults. Moffat does have a contradictory attitude towards the gang throughout Boot Boys, who occasionally switch from being the scourge of decent society to the defenders of it. Like when they are vandalizing the house of the crooked black businessman. Where Moffat clearly sees them as modern day Robin Hood characters, stepping in where the law won’t, and getting justice on behalf of hard working, law abiding citizens….y’know the sort of people the gang are otherwise committed to raping and terrorizing. A product of its time, Boot Boys take on rape is predictably pornographically minded, and where the victims -natch- end up enjoying the experience “at first I was so frightened I could have died. Then, the pleasure became intolerable”. Even in that climate however, Moffat does push this a little further than most. It all builds up to Debra’s outrageous admission that she’s actually grateful to her rapists. “They opened my eyes. They made me see myself for what I am- a sensualist”. All of which makes a mockery of Wilf’s desire for revenge. It would be like Death Wish ending with the daughter emerging from a catatonic state and telling Paul Kersey that he’d wasted his time shooting all those muggers and rapists, because, thanks to men like that, she’s gonna go off and become a sensualist.
Speaking of fathers and daughters, there is also an underlining fixation for incest in Moffat’s work, even if he can’t quite bring himself to break that taboo. There’s the daughter and stepfather/lodger subplot in Knuckle Girls, while here we have Wilf touching a nerve by asking Debra questions about her father. As well as Vanessa, Tom’s girlfriend, bringing up the fact that her father visits her bedroom. “He isn’t interested in sex, thank God” she cryptically adds “I’ve heard mum pleading with him”.
Fueled by boundless energy, all of it unhealthy, Boot Boys flits from maniacal set piece to maniacal set piece like a headless chicken. The book all but exhausting its juvenile delinquent theme before the end, forcing it to search out other genres for the grand finale. Moffat initially flirting with the crime genre, as Tom’s gang get mixed up with professional criminality, before wigging out and going all satanic panic on us. “There had been certain things he wished he could have experienced as a child, not least of them being an association with Aleister Crowley”, Moffat writes of Tom, who has the gang desecrate a church and perform an orgy in the graveyard in an attempt to do Wicked Al proud. Boot Boys is one mad, rollercoaster ride to the dark heart of the 1970s, but with Moffat’s omnipresent anti-Semitism in the back seat, the ‘guilt’ part does often outweigh the ‘pleasure’ here. If we were to do movie compassions, I’d say that Guy N. Smith’s books were the equivalent of The Evil Dead or The Deadly Spawn, they’re ultra-gory but also lots of fun and unlikely to leave any troubling aftertaste. Whereas Moffat’s work is like Cannibal Holocaust or Goodbye Uncle Tom, they’re grueling and emotionally draining experiences to get through.
Toxic as this book is now, I would say there is a valuable history lesson to be learnt from it. Inadvertently Boot Boys does bring it home how tone deaf society once was towards sexual assault, as well as the amount of prejudice Jewish people faced back then. These days you’d have to search dark, obscure areas of the internet to find vitriol like Moffat’s, but back in 1973 it was all out in the open, selling like hot cakes in bookshops and being passed around every schoolyard in the land. Still, if you take on Boot Boys, you can come out the other side boasting at having conquered 1970s fiction at its most crass, hateful, and savage. Be warned though, in the case of Boot Boys the past punches hard.
Moffat centres Boot Boys around Tom, poster boy for Boot Boys culture and head of the gang ‘The Crackers’. Moffat provides Tom, the mother of all introductions with “even his father had to admit that Tom Walsh was a rotten bastard”. A claim that Tom spends the rest of the book living up to. After indulging in some football grounds thuggery, Tom quickly graduates to attacking a couple while they are having sex in a park. Bashing the man over the head with a pole, raping his girlfriend, and taking misogynistic satisfaction in the knowledge that once the guy wakes up he’ll not want anything more to do with her “the rotten little bitch would get her ass kicked and be sent packing”. Tom then turns his gang loose on the house of a crooked black businessman, smashing his windows with rocks under the justification that “the law being a bloody ass would not prosecute to the extent of getting the suckers’ money back. Well, The Crackers would show them how to hurt guys like him”.
The actions of Tom’s gang might have been pulled from the headlines of the day, but Moffat also appears to have turned to vintage Hollywood gangster movies for inspiration here. Paying tribute to them by making Tom a junkie for late night TV repeats of movies starring “Cagney, or Raft, or Bogart, or Ladd, or Bendix, or Edward G.” The focus on ‘the rise and fall of a small time hood’ and the power struggles within Tom’s gang, also allows Moffat’s anti-Semitism to run riot in Boot Boys, making this an especially noxious piece of writing, even by Moffat’s standards. Tom faces dissension in the ranks, when Benjy, a Jewish member of his gang, apposes Tom’s plan to daub swastikas on the doors of Jewish families. An action that triggers a war between Tom and Benjy, Gentile against Jew, over leadership of the gang. The other significant Jewish character in the book, Lenny, is in contrast, meek and pathetically subservient to Tom, despite Tom’s hostility towards him and overt anti-Semitism. Lenny acts as Moffat’s whipping boy throughout the book, with Moffat stressing Lenny’s physical shortcoming to the point of numbing repetition. Take a drink every time Moffat refers to Lenny as being ‘pint sized’ in this book, and you’ll end up as shit-faced as Moffat was when he wrote this thing.
Moffat’s blustering, tabloidish approach to the material allows the author to have his cake and eat it. Rubbing the gang’s vilest deeds in the reader’s face, whilst lashing out at do-gooders for creating a system that offers little by way of a deterrent or punishment. All of which results in Moffat getting misty eyed for the days of Dick Turpin, when “the punishment for rape had been drastic. Do-gooders had not been popular with the rough and tumble serfs and their effeminate masters. Not like today”. While in 1977’s Knuckle Girls, Moffat pointed to poverty and parental neglect as the reasons for its heroine’s anti-social behavior, he appears to have been of an entirely different mindset when he wrote this in 1973. Boot Boys angrily rejecting such excuses, by deliberately making Tom the product of a loving father and an affluent household “he had a wardrobe many a Mayfair socialite would have been proud to show off to some skinny dolly bird”….and in spite of all that he still turned out to be a rotten bastard!!
Acting as a breather from Tom’s antics is the parallel story of Wilf Tomlinson, a local newspaper hack who is determined to see the gang face justice, especially after he meets Debra Wilkinson, a young widow who has been gang raped by The Crackers. Wilf follows a familiar pattern of Moffat’s heroes, by becoming hopelessly infatuated with the lead female character, even though his old fashioned values means he struggles to consummate the relationship. Wilf also gives Moffat himself a run for his money when it comes to insensitivity. Asking Debra questions like “Did you ever dream about your father once you reached adolescence” and secretly admitting that he “fought to control an urge that would have placed him in the same category as those who had, two nights previously, seen fit to make her the target for their disgusting lusts”.
Midway into Boot Boys the mood turns highly sexual. What with passions between Wilf and Debra boiling over, and the confrontation between Tom and Benjy taking the form of a battle of the studs, as they compete over which of them can satisfy the most women in succession. Along the way there is the kind of written word laughability that only 1970s trash fiction can reach, with Wilf pining “she was the reincarnation of Eve- a being with all the mysteries wrapped between her fleshy, yet so firm, thighs” whilst Debra daydreams “she knew that Wilf respected her even though he wanted to make her perform like a common slut”. While fellow trash fiction author Guy N. Smith preferred his female characters to be slender, and had little time for big boobs, Moffat was of a different school. Boot Boys having a downer on the ‘skinny dolly bird’ look, and instead lusting after the more mature, curvier woman. Debra Wilkinson being the type defined by The Kinks song ‘Don’t Forget to Dance’ as “a nice bit of old”.
However its rape and anti-Semitism that are the twin obsessions of Boot Boys, and Moffat can’t keep away from either for long. Tom’s gang might be depicted as irredeemably beyond-the-pale but you get the creeping suspicion that Moffat secretly approved of, and may even have gotten a charge out of their racism and sexual assaults. Moffat does have a contradictory attitude towards the gang throughout Boot Boys, who occasionally switch from being the scourge of decent society to the defenders of it. Like when they are vandalizing the house of the crooked black businessman. Where Moffat clearly sees them as modern day Robin Hood characters, stepping in where the law won’t, and getting justice on behalf of hard working, law abiding citizens….y’know the sort of people the gang are otherwise committed to raping and terrorizing. A product of its time, Boot Boys take on rape is predictably pornographically minded, and where the victims -natch- end up enjoying the experience “at first I was so frightened I could have died. Then, the pleasure became intolerable”. Even in that climate however, Moffat does push this a little further than most. It all builds up to Debra’s outrageous admission that she’s actually grateful to her rapists. “They opened my eyes. They made me see myself for what I am- a sensualist”. All of which makes a mockery of Wilf’s desire for revenge. It would be like Death Wish ending with the daughter emerging from a catatonic state and telling Paul Kersey that he’d wasted his time shooting all those muggers and rapists, because, thanks to men like that, she’s gonna go off and become a sensualist.
Speaking of fathers and daughters, there is also an underlining fixation for incest in Moffat’s work, even if he can’t quite bring himself to break that taboo. There’s the daughter and stepfather/lodger subplot in Knuckle Girls, while here we have Wilf touching a nerve by asking Debra questions about her father. As well as Vanessa, Tom’s girlfriend, bringing up the fact that her father visits her bedroom. “He isn’t interested in sex, thank God” she cryptically adds “I’ve heard mum pleading with him”.
Fueled by boundless energy, all of it unhealthy, Boot Boys flits from maniacal set piece to maniacal set piece like a headless chicken. The book all but exhausting its juvenile delinquent theme before the end, forcing it to search out other genres for the grand finale. Moffat initially flirting with the crime genre, as Tom’s gang get mixed up with professional criminality, before wigging out and going all satanic panic on us. “There had been certain things he wished he could have experienced as a child, not least of them being an association with Aleister Crowley”, Moffat writes of Tom, who has the gang desecrate a church and perform an orgy in the graveyard in an attempt to do Wicked Al proud. Boot Boys is one mad, rollercoaster ride to the dark heart of the 1970s, but with Moffat’s omnipresent anti-Semitism in the back seat, the ‘guilt’ part does often outweigh the ‘pleasure’ here. If we were to do movie compassions, I’d say that Guy N. Smith’s books were the equivalent of The Evil Dead or The Deadly Spawn, they’re ultra-gory but also lots of fun and unlikely to leave any troubling aftertaste. Whereas Moffat’s work is like Cannibal Holocaust or Goodbye Uncle Tom, they’re grueling and emotionally draining experiences to get through.
Toxic as this book is now, I would say there is a valuable history lesson to be learnt from it. Inadvertently Boot Boys does bring it home how tone deaf society once was towards sexual assault, as well as the amount of prejudice Jewish people faced back then. These days you’d have to search dark, obscure areas of the internet to find vitriol like Moffat’s, but back in 1973 it was all out in the open, selling like hot cakes in bookshops and being passed around every schoolyard in the land. Still, if you take on Boot Boys, you can come out the other side boasting at having conquered 1970s fiction at its most crass, hateful, and savage. Be warned though, in the case of Boot Boys the past punches hard.
June 8, 2017
Apparently these were quite popular in 70s Britain. Trash fiction centring around various youth miscreants; skinheads, suedeheads, football hooligans, etc.
Richard Allen - a pseudonym - churned out a lot of these books, and not only is the writing drab, this book is filled with gratuitous violence, sex, and intense misogyny and antisemitism.
It concerns Tom, a former skinhead turned bootboy, and fan of Arsenal FC, and his delight in rape and ultra-violence, hold the Beethoven. He's not too different from the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, except Alex had the sort of self-awareness, moral complexity, and wit to make him a sympathetic antihero. Tom and his gang possess none of this.
Between Tom's attempts to goad the Jewish members of his gang, The Crackers, random sex, and assault, the other narrative involves a Jewish widow who was raped by the gang and found fulfillment in it, to the point of being rejected by a man because he was jealous of her desire for her rapists. This is not a joke.
It all culminates, for no good reason, with a black mass in a graveyard, leading to an attack on a synagogue.
Absolutely bizarre. Not recommended unless you are curious, and even then, this is a quick but pointless read. Probably better off re-reading Clockwork.
Richard Allen - a pseudonym - churned out a lot of these books, and not only is the writing drab, this book is filled with gratuitous violence, sex, and intense misogyny and antisemitism.
It concerns Tom, a former skinhead turned bootboy, and fan of Arsenal FC, and his delight in rape and ultra-violence, hold the Beethoven. He's not too different from the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, except Alex had the sort of self-awareness, moral complexity, and wit to make him a sympathetic antihero. Tom and his gang possess none of this.
Between Tom's attempts to goad the Jewish members of his gang, The Crackers, random sex, and assault, the other narrative involves a Jewish widow who was raped by the gang and found fulfillment in it, to the point of being rejected by a man because he was jealous of her desire for her rapists. This is not a joke.
It all culminates, for no good reason, with a black mass in a graveyard, leading to an attack on a synagogue.
Absolutely bizarre. Not recommended unless you are curious, and even then, this is a quick but pointless read. Probably better off re-reading Clockwork.
June 23, 2022
Even Tom's father thought he was a rotten bastard. Coming from a decent home, his passion was kicking heads, bashing the shit out of anybody and laying anybody. During his skinhead days he was geared up in Ben Sherman shirts, and his beloved Doctor Martin's boots. Now he moved on to boot boys, more individualistic, aggro to him was like a stable diet. With his buff coloured socks and white boots bringing brutality to a respectable locality. His craziness to stay the leader of his rough gang saw him hospitalised for two weeks after playing chicken on a moped. He smashes the ear of a Geordie fan with his cosh and a satisfying crunch. He smashes the cartilage of another spraying snot and blood through the air. He will make a deal to steal cars on a watch list, be cheated of money causing the unlucky criminal a lifetime of paralysis. Throw custard and pie in the face of a waitress and dig up a grave and have sex on the decayed bones while incarnating Satan. Tom is a complete rapist, sadistic piece of shit and the son of the local inspector. One of the weakest from Moffatt.
December 22, 2025
Over de top pulp prachtig
April 13, 2015
This was a real charmer. As with all Richard Allen's books, there's a real streak of misogyny running through. And yet. And yet. Reading this when I was about 14 made perfect sense. It has stayed with me decades on. It's still reprehensible on all levels. But I kinda liked it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews