Peter Cave

I've forgotten to write about Peter Cave, whose one novel I tried to read some months back - he'll be included in my forthcoming book Pulpografia Britannica (if I ever get it done and find a publisher for it - well, if not, I'll put it out myself, with a limited edition). The book, originally called The Crime Commandos and published by Everest as a paperback in 1976, is about a commando force that the British police puts up to really get the criminals published, no matter how.

The book is however slow and boring and it doesn't live up to its expectations about an ultraviolent action novel. I say "sadly", even though I'm very much against the vigilancy the book supports.

Cave isn't a very interesting author either: he started writing some short stories for the Tit-Bits fictionmag in the late sixties and then switched to paperbacks, writing some porn and novelizations, including books on the Avengers and Taggart TV series. He knew Christopher Priest in the sixties and Priest is said to have commented that the quality of Tit-Bits began to decline when Cave started writing for them.

The Finnish translation was published in 1980 by Vaasa in their Manhattan paperback series. The cover is presumably Spanish in origin.