by Ted Lewis
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.
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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