Max Décharné

“As a crime novel, Jack's Return Home (1970, republished the following year as Carter, then finally as Get Carter) is simply one of the finest ever to have emerged from the UK. A classic revenge tragedy of a London-based hard-man visiting the small northern town of his youth in order to investigate the mysterious killing of his brother, it's sharply written, direct and pleasingly devoid of sympathetic characters. It's hard to think of anything quite like it among the British crime fiction which had come before - in fact, its closest spiritual predecessor is probably Paul Cain's US hardboiled masterpiece Fast One (1936); another nihilistic train-wreck of a book where virtually every character comes to a bad end.”
― Max Décharné, Hardboiled Hollywood