Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (35 page)

By the end of 1974, Lewis’s erratic lifestyle led to the break-up of his marriage. Heavy drinking had become alcohol dependency. The farm had turned out to be a money pit. Effectively bankrupt, he moved home to Barton.

As Lewis struggled to find his voice,
The Rabbit
(1975) returned to the lyrical autobiographical writing of his first novel. While it sold well, it was dismissed by some as a throwback to the kitchen sink realism of the 1960s. Nevertheless, it stands up well as a candid evocation of 1950s small town life.

Lewis had never visited the United States. His next book, an American-set thriller,
Boldt
(1976), suggested he was running out of ideas—he admitted to having been inspired by watching TV cop shows. The writing process had become gruelling. A review in the
Times Literary Supplement
claimed he had “lost the individual note” of his earlier works.

A poorly-received second Carter prequel,
Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon
(1977), further signalled the decline. He had written three scripts for episodes of the BBC TV police drama
Z-Cars
. The stories revisited familiar themes: guilt, loss, and characters on the fringes of the underworld. The success of the
Z-Cars
scripts led to a commission to write for the 1978 season of
Doctor Who
, but Lewis’s scripts were rejected; they were too dark for the programme’s early evening slot and he was replaced by upcoming author Douglas Adams.

Lewis’s final novel, the bleak psychological thriller
GBH
(1980), delivers a tangible sense of “Just when you thought I was finished.” Dualities in time and place reflect the fragile psyche of George Fowler, a gangster on the run in an isolated bungalow on the Lincolnshire coast. Fowler’s alcohol-fuelled paranoia propels him towards a violent denouement. It was as final a statement of brutality as Lewis could create. If a single novel makes the case for Lewis as a great writer, it is
GBH
.

In spite of increasing ill health, he continued to work.
Other People’s Houses
was to have told the story of generations of iron and steel industry families of northern Lincolnshire. It was never finished. Ted Lewis died from an alcohol-related illness in Scunthorpe general hospital on 27 March 1982.

Mike Hodges maintains that, had Lewis been born in the United States or France, he’d occupy a similar status to Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler. His work continues to find new devotees. Novelist David Peace acknowledged Lewis’s influence on his the Red Riding crime novels set in the north of England and revolving around the “Yorkshire Ripper” murders of the 1970s. Peace takes Lewis’s innovations in language and style to extremes; fragments are repeated and twisted to create a hard world harder. Benjamin Myers, winner of last year’s inaugural Gordon Burn prize for his novel
Pig Iron
, has written of Lewis’s powerful evocation of time and place
and his ability to “transport readers back to a recent northern England of Wimpy bars and stiff whiskies, modernist furnishings and stoic, silent men.”
⁵

More broadly, the credence afforded non-metropolitan genre fiction in recent years can be traced directly to the aesthetic pioneered by Lewis in
Get Carter
,
Plender
and
GBH
. That unflinching mix of tawdry underworld violence combined with an unerring eye for detail and strong visual sense has helped define the concept of contemporary noir.

At the dawn of the 1970s, Ted Lewis consigned free love and happy endings to an age that had the freedom and luxury to embrace them. Interviewed on the publication of
Jack’s Return Home
, he said, “I’ve tried to make it real.”
⁶
It is this core of truth in his writing that separates him from the pack and ensures writers, film makers and television programme makers continue to draw from his blueprint. French director Eric Barbier filmed a largely faithful version of
Plender
as
Le Serpent
in 2007;
Jack Carter’s Law
was adapted for BBC Radio in 2010;
Jack’s Return Home
followed in 2012.

Whichever way you look at it, when it comes to the dark extremes of British crime fiction, Ted Lewis remains one of its truest and greatest exponents.

Nick Triplow

Barton upon Humber, February 2014

¹
Finding Ted Lewis: A Biography
, Nick Triplow [unpublished manuscript]

²
Ibid.

³
Finding Ted Lewis: A Biography
, Nick Triplow [unpublished manuscript]

⁴
“A Cracking Novel that Almost Died the Death,” Graham Lord,
Sunday Express
, 8 March 1970, quoted in
Finding Ted Lewis: A Biography
, Nick Triplow [unpublished manuscript]

⁵
Benjamin Myers, Shelf Space,
The Big Issue in the North
, December 3 2012

⁶
“A Cracking Novel that Almost Died the Death,” Graham Lord,
Sunday Express
, 8 March 1970, quoted in
Finding Ted Lewis: A Biography
, Nick Triplow [unpublished manuscript]

About the Author

Born in Manchester, England, Ted Lewis (1940–1982) spent most of his youth in Barton-upon-Humber. After graduating from Hull Art School, Lewis moved to London and first worked in advertising before becoming an animation specialist, working on the Beatles’
Yellow Submarine
. A pioneer of the British noir school, Lewis authored nine novels, the second of which was famously adapted in 1971 as the now iconic
Get Carter
, which stars Michael Caine.

THE JACK CARTER TRILOGY

Meet Jack Carter and the novels that redefined British crime fiction.

GET CARTER

Famously adapted into the iconic film starring Michael Caine
,
Get Carter
ranks among the most canonical of crime novels
.

It’s a rainy night in a northern English mill town, and a London fixer named Jack Carter is home for a funeral—his brother Frank’s. Frank was very drunk when he drove his car off a cliff and that doesn’t sit well with Jack. Mild-mannered Frank never touched the stuff.

Set in the late 1960s amidst the smokestacks and hardcases of the industrial north of England,
Get Carter
redefined British crime fiction and cinema alike. Along with the other two novels in the Jack Carter Trilogy, it is one of the most important crime novels of all time.

JACK CARTER’S LAW

London. The late 1960s. It’s Christmastime and a smooth-operating gangster named Jack Carter is about to burn a city down in order to silence an informant
.

Ted Lewis returns to the character that launched his career and once again delivers a hardboiled masterpiece. Jack Carter is the ideal tour guide to a bygone London underworld. In his quest to dismantle the opposition, he peels back the veneer of English society and gives us a hard look at a gritty world of pool halls, strip clubs and the red lights of Soho nightlife.

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