Jack Carter Returns - Thoughts on Ted Lewis

A conversation with Paul Oliver of Syndicate Books

Here is another long out-of-print piece, polished and recalibrated for your enjoyment. Thanks are due to S.T. Karnick and Larry Kaufmann, who hosted the earlier version on their website The American Culture back in 2014.

Cover art for the 2014 Syndicate reissue of Get Carter (formerly Jack’s Return Home)

“The rain rained.” It takes chutzpah to begin a book with such a sentence, but that’s how Ted Lewis kicked off Get Carter (originally titled Jack’s Return Home), the hugely influential 1970 British crime novel that spawned an iconic movie adaptation starring Michael Caine. Both book and movie chart the downward trajectory of the titular Jack Carter, an underworld “fixer,” as he tears through his hometown on a quest to punish the parties responsible for his brother’s death.

All these years later, Carter remains a vivid and unsettling read—partly due to its ability to capture the idiosyncratic thought patterns of its protagonist. “Antihero” is perhaps too gentle a label for Jack; he is a brutal character who has no qualms about beating up women and murdering a man within shouting distance of the man’s children. In any other context he would be considered one of the bad guys, but in this story he gets by on one redeeming trait: He is willing to risk everything—his job, his freedom, the life of the woman he loves, and, ultimately, his own life—in order to bring justice to his brother’s memory: a brother, it should be added, who was not a criminal, who abhorred violence, and from whom Jack had been estranged for over a decade. All of Jack’s ruthlessness and ferocity are bent to the service of this one honorable goal, which burns like a white-hot ember in the depths of his dark, dead soul.

Get Carter is an electrifying and disorienting book. It’s easily the most misogynistic thing I’ve ever read, yet that aspect rings true to its character; we can’t reasonably expect Jack Carter—a ‘60s era mob enforcer with working class roots—to hold progressive views on gender equality. Modern novels that attempt such things—such as the plethora of popular Civil War books that feature sensitive Confederate soldiers who are surprisingly openminded about race relations—are the antithesis of Lewis’s brand of stark realism. Lewis wished to capture the true, oftentimes ugly, nature of the people around him, and make the reader care anyway.

Carter had an undeniable influence on much that came in its wake, from the novels of David Peace, James Sallis, and Dennis Lehane to the films of Guy Ritchie and Martin McDonagh. So it’s perplexing that this novel, along with the rest of Ted Lewis’s catalog, has been out of print in the U.S. for decades.

Or, rather, was out of print.

Enter Paul Oliver, an affable former bookseller who is now Director of Marketing and Publicity for New York City-based Soho Press. He has made it his mission to bring the works of Ted Lewis back into the public spotlight—or, more accurately, to introduce Ted Lewis to an American audience; for while the movie Get Carter may have developed a cult following and spawned a Sylvester Stallone-helmed remake, the source material has never been well known on these shores. In order to correct that oversight, Oliver has formed his own publishing imprint, Syndicate Books, and will be rolling out Lewis’s entire catalog over the next few years—starting with this month’s release of Get Carter and followed by Jack Carter’s Law in October. It’s too bad Lewis himself won’t be around to see the red-carpet treatment he has long been due; the writer died of alcohol-related causes in 1982 at the age of 42.

I got the opportunity to meet Paul in Las Vegas, where we both attended this year’s meeting of the American Library Association. Quickly recognizing each other as kindred spirits, we decamped to the hotel bar to talk about Lewis, British noir, and all manner of armchair criminality. In person, Paul Oliver is everything that Jack Carter is not: warm, easygoing, quick to smile and laugh. I picture Jack as tall, angular, and scowling—always immaculately tricked out in suit and cufflinks. Paul is more bohemian in appearance, fond of loose-fitting clothes and a slightly unkempt hairstyle. (Though I have since seen a photo of him in suit and fedora, channeling the 1930s Chicago mob, and he sells the look). He is handsome, but not in the hard, intense manner of my imagined Carter. His features are soft, as if Carter’s hard edges had been sanded down. So how could it be, I wondered aloud, that someone as friendly and obviously nonviolent as Paul would find himself drawn to a sociopathic killer like Carter. (My question had an ulterior motive, for I too get drawn in by incendiary characters like Carter, Dirty Harry, and the Punisher, despite my non-confrontational nature.)

Paul grinned. “I think in this day and age,” he said, “we’re impressed by anyone who is competent. And let’s face it, Jack is very good at what he does. In his particular milieu, he is the consummate professional. We like to watch people like that work.”

Fair enough. For my part, I also like to watch bad guys get the crap beat out of them, even if it’s by other bad guys. Which may be a widespread impulse—many of my friends are football fans.

Okay, then. Jack is a competent badass. But there are a lot of antiheroes out there, and a lot of tough-guy writers. What was it, I asked, that drew Paul specifically to Ted Lewis and his Jack Carter novels?

“The way I stumbled on Lewis is a really neat story. I was promoting the recent book by Derek Raymond. He was an enforcer at some level, an employee of the Kray brothers (the real-life models for Jack Carter's bosses) in the mid-70s. I was grasping at who might be interested in Raymond and his return. I reached out to the crime writer Max Allan Collins and said, 'I'm not sure if you ever heard of Derek Raymond, but I'm sensing this might be up your alley. Raymond is the godfather of British noir.'

“Max wrote back immediately: 'I have no idea who Derek Raymond is, but if you want to publish the godfather of Brish noir, you have to publish Ted Lewis.' We had a great exchange about it. I saw him at the BoucherCon (thriller writing) conference and we talked further. I kind of just filed this away. I kept the project to myself and kept working on it. Something else that drew me to Lewis particularly was the fact that I had to go to great lengths just to get ahold of his books. As a former antiquarian dealer I realized immediately that there was a high demand for these books. We're talking about mass market paperbacks that are going for 80 bucks because they're so scarce. I realized that in some cases, some of these had never been published in the US. That changed the narrative of this project really quickly. It was no longer just the reprint of something that had fallen out of print; it's something that was lost to the American reading vernacular. No one knew who this guy was.”

Further fueling Paul's passion was the fact that the man behind these books was an enigma. Very little information about Ted Lewis was available online. Like his most famous creation, Carter, he grew up in northern England—specifically, the town of Barton-upon-Humber (though he spent a considerable amount of time in the nearby industrial town Scunthorpe, which influenced the content and tone of his work). Photos of the writer at the peak of his success show a dapper young man who clearly modeled Carter on himself, though Lewis was a more sensitive, dreamy type than his tough guy alter-ego. Seemingly ill-equipped for fame and unable to replicate his early success, Lewis fled his failing marriage in the mid 1970s and returned to Barton, descending into a twilight world of booze-filled aimlessness even as he continued to write novels of quality.

A fair amount of my Lewis knowledge comes from a North Carolina writer named Brian Greene, who traveled to England a few years back for the purpose of researching Lewis's life. In the process of that research, he got to know one of the writer's hometown friends who, as Greene relates in a recent piece, revealed that Lewis, a formerly outspoken atheist, “tried to change and 'find God' or something to believe in during those last months. He began seeking help from a priest in Scunthorpe and helped the priest in practical ways around the church, by cleaning inside the church and clearing up detritus—sweeping leaves and tidying graves.” The friend goes on to speculate, “I guess it was his way of seeking what had been missing in his life for so long. He must have been full of regrets and sadness.”

At the end of the day, Lewis is probably an accidental enigma. He didn't set out to make himself mysterious, but the subsequent dearth of information on him plays into the mystique. He was a tormented artist of the purest type, suffering in obscurity. It's not a pleasant memory for his scattered friends and his children, but it gives incentive to a close reading of the work. Just going on what little is known, one begins to see shadowy reflections of the author and his life on virtually every page. The Lewis aficionado barrels down this rabbit hole searching for one key scene or phrase that might unlock the mystery; surely there's a “Rosebud” buried in there somewhere! The reader digs and digs—never quite finding the goods, which fuels the search even more.

According to Paul and some of the other Lewis aficionados I've come across online, Lewis's final novel, GBH, which was written at the very bottom of his downward spiral, is also his finest—perhaps a lost masterpiece. “It was published as a paperback original in the UK and never issued in the United States or in North America at all,” he said. “It's never been published outside of the UK. There were two or three paragraphs at the end that were unfinished. He died shortly after it was released. The book is stunningly plotted. It's two narratives. One character is George Fowler; he's the top of the crime environment in London. You have the narrative of 'The Smoke,' which is him running his empire. Someone is undermining him from within, and he's ruthlessly cutting, trimming away trying to find who this person is.

“The other narrative is told in alternating chapters. It's almost Calvino-esque. This second set of chapters is set in a small beach community and takes place sometime after the part in London. Fowler has this fortress, this great painted glass-paneled mansion. He's hiding from something. These two stories move in a linear way, until the moment you learn why he's in hiding, what undoes him in hiding—which is revealed in the same two chapters in a row. It's this amazing trick.

“Fowler is drinking more and more heavily in both narratives, and you're starting to doubt his abilities. There are little mistakes in perception, and to be honest, in the back of my head I thought, these are Lewis's mistakes. But they're not. Everything is in there intentionally. It's one of the best crime novels I have ever read. There is almost a metaphysical element to it.”

Happily, we will all get the chance to experience GBH for ourselves when Soho Press rolls it out in a hardcover edition next year—its first hardcover release anywhere, thanks to Paul's efforts.

I mentioned to Paul the fact that, for an author who seems to have vanished from history (at least in the US), Lewis has influenced an awful lot of writers and filmmakers. It reminds me of the band The Velvet Underground, who didn't sell a whole lot of records during their existence but who somehow managed to influence virtually every important rock band of the succeeding generation. Could Lewis be the crime fiction equivalent?

“David Peace is a wonderful writer who did this great experimental novel called Red or Dead,” Paul said. “The blurb I got from David about Lewis is: 'The finest British crime novel I've ever read.' It's that level of reaction—you're right, the Velvet Underground thing. No one did it better. It's interesting how for these writers, it's their blueprint. It's all about taking language and chopping it down to a very sensual level. Lewis was striving for realism. He knew these people (the bosses, the fixers), and he knew that the real characters were terrifying people. These are gangsters. But in the case of Carter, there is this inkling of a moral code. Just this bit of a code of honor. That mix of qualities is Lewis's legacy.”

Coda: Getting Carter

The following is my Goodreads review of Getting Carter, Nick Triplow’s wonderful biography of Lewis, which appeared in the UK a few years after my original piece was published and is due out in the US from Syndicate this December.

"Getting Carter" is both a stunning biography and an impressive feat of detective work. The late Ted Lewis, a semi-forgotten crime novelist with a paradoxically outsized influence (his book "Jack's Return Home," later filmed as "Get Carter," is credited with kicking off Brit noir), remains ultimately unknowable. But biographer Triplow breaks much new ground in documenting the deeply autobiographical threads of Lewis's work. It turns out that the crime element may have been the only invented aspect in Lewis's writing; the drinking, the abuse, the crippling guilt and depression, the places, and even in some cases the names in his novels all have their parallels in the writer's turbulent life. Thanks to Triplow we now have the through-line to a body of work that, on the surface, seems wildly haphazard.

What drove Lewis's demons is still a mystery, and Triplow largely avoids the temptation to play armchair psychologist. Lewis did share with many men of his generation a hard-drinking lifestyle that eventually gave way to alcoholism, and there are hints of childhood abuse at the hands of a malevolent headmaster and a conflicted sexuality. But none of this accounts for the gaping moral abyss that Ted Lewis stared into time and time again in his novels. He was, in the end, a genius eaten alive by some unnamed dark force.

In any case, we are fortunate that Nick Triplow, a brilliant writer in his own right, took on the task of bringing Lewis's tragic life to light. He gained access to Lewis's family, friends, lovers, and colleagues--no easy feat. All that there is to know is here in these pages. This is a landmark biography, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.