Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (34 page)

Ted Lewis: Making It Real by Nick Triplow

W
HEN
T
ED
L
EWIS WAS
interviewed prior to the UK release of the film
Get Carter
in February, 1971, the film’s publicist, Brian Doyle, described him as “a classic example of the iron twist in the velvet mug.” He was, Doyle wrote, “a nice guy who writes graphically about nasty guys. And dolls. And thoroughly enjoys doing it.” The writer of
Jack’s Return Home
, that punchy crime novel written in the twilight of the 1960s, adapted and directed by Mike Hodges as
Get Carter
, had a predilection for “nasty guys.” He wrote them well, revealing a cast of flawed, sadistic, guilt-ridden, deviant and violent characters in seven crime/noir novels and two equally uncompromising semi-autobiographical novels, beginning with
All the Way Home and All the Night Through
(1965) and concluding with
GBH
(1980).

While Lewis might have gone along with Doyle’s description and its nod to the hard boiled school, his skill was in the creation of a downbeat union between those writers and his own distinct brand of taut, lyrical, British social-realist storytelling. When it worked (
Jack’s Return Home/Get Carter, Plender, Billy Rags, The Rabbit, Jack Carter’s Law, GBH
),
Lewis was a master; a pioneer who explored new territories for genre fiction.

Why, then, isn’t he more widely appreciated? Partly because his early death at the age of 42 in 1982 denied him the second act and critical re-reading his work demanded. He left little other than his published work and the memories of those who knew him. No formal archive or collections of correspondence exists, only a few pieces written about him for magazines, most in the 1990s, when a laddish cultural resurgence rediscovered Carter and, to a lesser extent, Lewis, as some kind of Brit-bloke icon. His books, with the exception of
Get Carter
, have been out of print for years.

In researching for my book about Lewis’s life and work, I have spoken to friends, schoolmates and neighbours, made contact and met with his literary agent, Toby Eady, his family and former colleagues. I have collected scraps of reviews and interviews. By all accounts, Ted Lewis’s was an extraordinary life.

Lewis was born in the Manchester suburb of Stretford in January, 1940; one of a generation whose consciousness was formed in wartime, defined by absent fathers and an uncertain future. In 1946, the family moved to Barton upon Humber, a small town of some 6,000 inhabitants on the banks of the river Humber, north Lincolnshire. In his first novel,
All the Way Home and All the Night Through
, Lewis described his home:

“The plan of the town hasn’t changed much since feudal times. The way of life is easy. Everybody has their problems, people there worry as much as people everywhere else, but the surface effect is one of easiness. The youth of the town protests its dissatisfaction with the confining effect of small town life, but hardly anyone leaves the place.”

As a child, Lewis contracted rheumatic fever, a debilitating illness whose treatment in a pre-antibiotic age
demanded complete bed rest. He spent almost a year away from school, reading books and comics, and drawing constantly. Some days his friends visited and he held court, sitting up in bed. On one occasion, his dad set up a projector and the boys watched cartoons projected against the bedroom wall.

Lewis had a lifelong love of film. In the darkened auditorium of The Oxford or The Star, he was captivated by Western epics, B-movies and gangster pictures—the more hard-hitting the better. He revelled in the ruthless unpredictability of Lee Marvin’s Vince Stone (
The Big Heat
) or Ernest Borgnine as Fatso Judson (
From Here to Eternity
). He liked how they sadistically crushed weak characters without a second thought.

Lee Marvin had been Lewis’s favourite actor since a B-movie noir,
Shack Out on 101
, showed at The Star. He watched it several times, fixating on Marvin’s violent wisecracking short-order cook, Slob, who flipped burgers in a rundown roadhouse on the eponymous Route 101. Resolutely an anti-hero, revealed to be spying for a foreign power, Slob delivers a series of brusque one-liners: “It’s a good job I’m not wired, you could push me around like a vacuum cleaner.” Lewis learned every word of dialogue. He stayed in his seat as the credits rolled, memorising the names of cast and crew. Over the years, an encyclopaedic knowledge of film became part of his everyday patter. He also found it useful for chatting up girls.

Lewis had a stable home life and a solid group of friends. Girls liked him. He was a slight figure, a useful crosscountry runner; quietly-spoken, blond and good looking. He struggled with the oppressiveness of school and its stiff regime, losing himself in dark moods for days at a time. Interviewed for the
Manchester Evening News
in 1966, he said, “If you weren’t a machine storing up maths, French, and anything moving away from the arts, they’d frown on you.” Fortunately, he came under the influence of the head of English, Henry Treece—novelist, poet and sometime
drinking companion of Dylan Thomas. Treece would depart the traditional English syllabus to read Raymond Chandler in class. He encouraged Lewis to write short stories, which he published in the school magazine. As school came to an end and a “good job”
¹
beckoned, Treece visited Lewis’s parents, persuading them their son’s best chance of completing his education was at art school, across the river in the city of Kingston upon Hull.

At the Hull School of Arts and Crafts, Lewis proved himself a gifted artist and a capable musician. Liberation from home and school found its expression in girls, movies, beer, and trad jazz—a bohemian outlet for a cohort of late ’50s art school students. Hull’s vibrant jazz scene flourished around the art school, the university, and venues like the upstairs room at the Bluebell pub and the Windsor Hall. Fans included Neville Smith, author of
Gumshoe
, who remembers the Unity Jazz Band and their pianist:

“At the piano, with dark rings under drooping eyelids, blond hair falling over his face, sporting a pearl tie-pin, and with a permanent fag between his lips, sat a man I came to know as Lou. (In my mind, Lou is always how I have spelt the name.) To my envious eyes, he never looked anything other than utterly shagged out.”
²

Lewis’s restless desire for new horizons saw him hitching south to London at weekends to take in sessions at Ronnie Scott’s and Cy Laurie’s jazz club. Ronnie Scott’s was renowned as a real jazz club; there were no hassles to drink up or buy beers and the jazz included the best touring players—Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Lewis found the sense of adventure he craved in Soho with its sex shops, Maltese gangsters, and prostitutes. Here the usual rules didn’t apply.

When he moved to London in 1961, Lewis had a cheque for £70 in his pocket—payment for his first illustration commission, the Alan Delgado children’s book,
The Hot Water Bottle Mystery
. Aside from the day job in advertising, he kept himself busy with occasional commissions, a three-nights-a-week cinema habit, lunchtime and evening pub sessions, and a succession of girlfriends. In company he could be shy and unassuming until he’d had a few drinks; after one too many, he became unpredictable. Sometimes it seemed he was overawed by London. As one friend put it, “he was a pussycat, a kid from the north. All he wanted to do was go to the movies and meet girls in pubs.”
³

Lewis had also been writing. His first novel,
All the Way Home and All the Night Through
(1965), was a faithful re-telling of his final year at art school. It spared no one, especially the author, in its tale of love, sex, drink and jazz. Published as number 48 in Hutchinson’s New Authors series—a roster that included crime writer, Derek Raymond, then writing as Robin Cook—the story sees the narrator, Victor Graves, exploring the tensions and frustrations of love across the class divide. Victor is possessive, jealous and suffers from booze blackouts that destroy the relationship he is desperate not to lose. The paperback, published the following year, carried a more salacious cover image and was subtitled:
Ted Lewis—His bestselling story of an art school Casanova
.

All the Way Home and All the Night Through
was well-reviewed—
The Times
called it a “fresh and original book”—but it did not sell in great numbers or provide sufficient income to enable Lewis to leave his job at Butterfield’s ad agency. He would make the move a year later. In the meantime, he met and fell in love with Josephine Roome, who was then working as PA to one of his advertising clients. The couple married in September 1966 and moved into a flat above a cinema in Belsize Park.

In the spring of 1967, word spread through the Soho film community that Television Cartoons (TVC) were employing artists for a new animated Beatles movie. At the time, Lewis was one of a team of artists and designers creating backgrounds for the CBS TV
Lone Ranger
cartoon series—the work had been subcontracted to Halas and Bachelor in London. He was appointed as animation clean-up supervisor on
The Yellow Submarine
. With minimal budget and relentless deadlines, TVC had assembled two hundred animators, many straight from suburban art schools. The differences in the quality of their work was obvious and Lewis and his team of artists examined and corrected every frame—some 250,000—bringing each drawing close to Heinz Edelmann’s original designs.

The contrast between life with Jo in their new cottage in rural Essex, the intense bustle of Soho, and the Technicolor psychedelic fantasy taking shape in the TVC offices couldn’t have been more clear-cut. Soho in the late ’60s was a piece of London nobody owned. Film people rubbed shoulders with protection racketeers, small-time burglars and Wardour Street pornographers. Lewis observed the London underworld in the streets and pubs. (He later claimed to have been introduced to several “criminal types” and accepted into their circle.) He gained an insight to the workings of criminal gangs, some of whom had avoided attention from the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad by moving business away from the capital.

Lewis needed to write something with a commercial appeal. With the birth of a daughter, Nancy, in 1968, he had a family to support. He began to work on a crime novel. A revenge story whose protagonist had the qualities of those people he’d encountered: hard, ruthless and single-mindedly committed to the job in hand. He created Jack Carter and put him on the train home to Scunthorpe to avenge the death of his brother.

Lewis’s agent, John Johnson, refused to handle
Jack’s Return Home
, considering it too violent. A new agent, Toby Eady,
successfully pitched the book to Peter Day, editor at Michael Joseph. In November 1969, film producer Michael Klinger, determined to produce a quality English crime thriller, acquired the film rights to
Jack’s Return Home
for £10,000. He sent a proof copy to the director Mike Hodges in January 1970.
Jack’s Return Home
was published on 9 March 1970. Graham Lord, writing in the
Sunday Express
, praised Lewis’s ear for dialogue and “remarkable” feel for atmosphere. It made, he said, for “compulsive reading.”
⁴

Originally entitled
Carter’s the Name
, Mike Hodges’s script made significant structural changes to Lewis’s novel, notably cutting the Carter brothers’ backstory and removing any trace of ambiguity from Jack Carter’s fate. It shifted the location from Scunthorpe (unnamed in the book) to Newcastle, but retained characters, pivotal scenes, and elements of dialogue. (Years later, Lewis would say that he had wanted to write the script, but was not asked.) When
Get Carter
was released in March 1971, reviewers acknowledged the power of Caine’s performance and the quality of Hodges’s script and direction, though many found the film’s amoral tone troubling. To coincide with the release,
Jack’s Return Home
was republished as
Carter
and later,
Get Carter
.

Lewis’s response to this high-profile success was
Plender
(1971), a seedy blackmail thriller which explored the consequences of murder and adultery. Plender, a professional blackmailer working for a shady right-wing movement, takes revenge for adolescent humiliations at the hands of Peter Knott, now a successful photographer. As Plender turns the screw, the disintegration of trust between Knott and his wife is supplanted by the dread realisation that some acts are beyond redemption and that our sins will find us out.

As if things weren’t sufficiently chaotic, Lewis had bought a remote rundown farm house near Framlingham, Suffolk. A second daughter, Sally, had been born in 1971. Under growing pressure, his life was becoming increasingly
disorganised. He based the prison escape drama
Billy Rags
(1973) on the true-life experiences of armed robber John McVicar. The 1974
Carter
prequel,
Jack Carter’s Law
(
Jack Carter and the Law
in the USA), was a claustrophobic London-set thriller that retained the hard edge and biting dialogue of
Jack’s Return Home
.

In his book,
Hardboiled Hollywood
, Max Decharné quotes novelist Richard Stark on his character Parker—renamed Walker in the movie
Point Blank
and arguably the closest antecedent to Jack Carter—he says, “I gave him none of the softness you’re supposed to give a series character, and no band of sidekicks to chat with, because he was going to pound through one book and goodbye.”

Stark was persuaded otherwise by his editor. It’s difficult not to speculate on the difference the same advice might have made to Ted Lewis. Lewis believed his novel’s contribution to the movie
Get Carter
had been overlooked. With the emergence of a new style of muscular TV crime drama, epitomised by
The Sweeney
and its Flying Squad hard men, Jack Regan and George Carter, he felt others were exploiting his ideas.