Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir

by Nick Triplow

The story of Ted Lewis carries historical and cultural resonances for our own troubled times

Ted Lewis is one of the most important writers you've never heard of. Born in Manchester in 1940, he grew up in the tough environs of post-war Humberside, attending Hull College of Arts and Crafts before heading for London. His life described a cycle of obscurity to glamour and back to obscurity, followed by death at only 42. He sampled the bright temptations of sixties London while working in advertising, TV and films and he encountered excitement and danger in Soho drinking dens, rubbing shoulders with the 'East End boys' in gangland haunts. He wrote for Z Cars and had some nine books published. Alas, unable to repeat the commercial success of Get Carter, Lewis's life fell apart, his marriage ended and he returned to Humberside and an all too early demise.

Getting Carter is a meticulously researched and riveting account of the career of a doomed genius. Long-time admirer Nick Triplow has fashioned a thorough, sympathetic and unsparing narrative. Required reading for noirists, this book will enthral and move anyone who finds irresistible the old cocktail of rags to riches to rags.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Noir, Media Tie In, Crime

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 25, 2017

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review of “Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir” by Nick Triplow is a biography of the life and death of British writer Ted Lewis (1940 – 1982). Lewis only wrote seven or eight books, about the same number as Raymond Chandler to whom he has been compared. Yet many think his contribution to the noir genre is greatly under appreciated. This is not a book report.

The first hundred pages of this book are concerned with the early life of Mr. Lewis, from birth to his entry into the world of media. Although this background material is necessary to paint a more complete picture of the man and how he acquired his skills, his formative portion of life in rural England in the 50’s and 60’s is rather unremarkable.

In the next 200 pages author Frank Triplow earns his dinner by laying out not only Ted Lewis’s voyage up and down the ladder of the art world (background work on the Beatles “Yellow Submarine”), movies (Get Carter – 2 versions 1971 & 1972) and television (Lewis wrote a number of unproduced Dr. Who scripts). This is a competent and well told story of Lewis’s work life, his ethics, his drinking and philandering through the years leading to the end of his life. Mr. Triplow also summarizes the plots of all of Ted Lewis writings, in all genres. Lewis like many other writers (and this is not a spoiler) literally drank himself to death.

The book certainly is worth reading.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jack's Return Home, more popularly known as Get Carter by Ted Lewis is a classic noir commonly referred to as the book which birthed British noir. Getting Carter by Nick Triplow provides insight into the troubled authors life, from his early struggles at school to his rise in working on studio animation and, his eventual claim to fame - the film adaption of his debut novel starring the famous actor Michael Caine.

Getting Carter explores and exposes Ted Lewis' inner demons; the same ones which contributed to his eventual death are the same ones, one could argue, which contributed to his success (though short lived it was).

It's a shame to see the work of Lewis years after his death get the recognition and appreciation it deserves. Genre peers are quoted throughout the book as referencing both Jack's Return Home and GBH as critical works in the crime sub genre. I, for one, really enjoyed the bleak and raw nature of Get Carter and have added both GBH and the prequel to Jack's Return Home, Jack Carter's Law to my read-list.

This non-fiction look at the life of Ted Lewis, his rise and fall, and other pieces of work, of which he's less renowned for, is a must read for fans not only of Get Carter but for fans of noir in general.

Review also appears on my blog: http://justaguywholikes2read.blogspot...

[Andrew Nette · Rating 5 out of 5]

The time is past when one could accurately describe Ted Lewis as a lost or under appreciated author. His best books have recently been re-released, Mike Hodge’s 1971 film, Get Carter, based on Lewis second novel, Jack’s Return Home, continues to be seen as a crime cinema classic, and Lewis’s profound, albeit posthumous, influence on the origins on Brit Noir is regularly reiterated by many of the leading lights of crime fiction.

But we little we know about Lewis as a person and the influences on his work. Nick Triplow’s Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir is obviously the product of considerable time, energy and shoe leather spent hunting down the facts of Lewis’s life. That Triplow doesn’t completely succeed in unravelling all the mysteries surrounding Lewis’s spectacular rise and fall is not for want of trying and, it must be stressed, the book is none the worse for it.

Contemporary literary culture, with its focus on the writer’s journey, literature as personal confession and the book scribe as media celebrity, is a relatively new phenomena. It is now possible to know a lot about the life of an author without ever picking up their books. Lewis went to his grave without leaving a detailed archive of papers or journals and having only done a handful of newspaper interviews. He had neither the time nor, one suspects, inclination to record his inner most thoughts. And staring into the bottom of his pint glass in some dingy pub on a cold, grey afternoon, would’ve thought no one would have given a toss anyway. His legacy, as Triplow puts it, was ‘his published work and the memories of those who knew him’. And the latter have been severely damaged by the passage of time and the effects of one of the main features of creative lifestyle in the 1960s and 1970s, excessive alcohol consumption.

Indeed, reading Getting Carter it some times feels as though Triplow was left with little to work with other than intuition and an acute feel for the zeitgeist of the times. This is one of the things that makes the book so fascinating. As Triplow puts it: ‘Ted Lewis’s story is as much about these unfashionable, unheralded places and how they fed into his work as it is about the zeitgeist-riding moments: 50s trad jazz, the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine, the dark corners of 1960s Soho, the creation of Brit Noir, Z Cars and Doctor Who.’

Zeitgeist is something Triplow evokes superbly, starting with Lewis’s birth in 1940 in a small town, through the author’s childhood and adolescence in grim post war Britain, onto art school and then during his time in London where he worked as a commercial illustrator and television writer. Growing up in the late fifties and sixties, Lewis’s cultural touchstones were a mixture of imported US culture, gangster films, EC comics, pulp novels, American noir and Westerns, mixed with local influences, British new wave literature and local noir cinema, films such as Cy Endfield’s Hell Drivers (1957), Val Guest’s Hell is a City and Jospeh Losey’s The Criminal (the latter two of which appeared in 1960). These three films in particular moved British screen crime away London and the manor house mysteries of the Golden Age, and took it north to grittier locales. They also helped spearhead the evolution of the film criminal from gentlemen thief to more ruthless figures, often working-class and capable of great brutality.

Another crucial influence on Lewis, Triplow asserts, would’ve been the real life criminal goings on in Britain in the 1960s. This includes the highly profile trial of various gangsters, as well as Lewis’s real life contact with criminals in the Soho drinking establishments he frequented and in the television industry, the fringes of which often brushed up against organised crime.

These influences were all present in Jack’s Return Home. Triplow is right to assert the ground breaking nature of the novel, and not just in terms of its violence and the way it featured an unsympathetic criminal as the main character. The setting, a grim northern England industrial town was different from a lot of British crime fiction that had gone before. Lewis infused the story with biting social observation and shrewd analysis of the shifting political economy of organised crime in the UK at the turn of the 1960s. As I wrote in a Los Angeles Review of Books piece to mark the 2014 Syndicate Books re-release of the novel and its two sequels, Lewis was also successfully in transplanting a central trope of American noir fiction and film to England: the corrupt, crime-infested urban space and the alienated stranger whose motives lead him to inhabit it and to get into direct conflict with those who control it.

Reading Triplow’s book I couldn’t help but catch the whiff of another, earlier crime writer, who didn’t fulfil his potential, David Goodis. Starting out in the pulp magazines, by 1947 Goodis had a screenwriting contract with Warner Bros and a hit movie, Dark Passage, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, based on his 1946 novel of the same name. But within a couple of years he had tossed it all away, returned to his hometown of Philadelphia, moved back in with his parents and mentally ill brother and spent the next two decades churning out pulp novels. When Goodis died in 1967, he had been almost completely forgotten in his home country and none of his 18 novels were in print in the US.

But while the factors that motivated Goodis’s deliberate embrace of life as a anonymous pulp hack remain a mystery, obscurity was not something Lewis embraced willingly, even if his lifestyle set him on a collision course with it. Nor are the factors that led to his career slide hard to trace. Lewis peaked hugely and early with Jack’s Return Home and spent the rest of his life trying to replicate that achievement, ultimately without success. He was hampered by changes in the publishing industry, which by the end of the 1970s ushered in the death of the mid-list paperback author. But his most serious problem was his drinking. Triplow states Lewis was a full blown alcoholic by the mid seventies. Drink destroyed his relationships, hampered his writing and led to significant money problems which eventually forced him to move back to the regional town he had come from, to live with his parents. He ended his days a bitter and self-destructive drunk, in poor health, isolated and unknown.

Lewis returned to the character of Jack Carter in two further novels, the middling Jack Carter’s Law (1974) and the particular poor, written for quick buck, Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977). The only other novel that replicated the dark, malevolent intent and energy of Jack’s Return Home was his last, GBH, published in 1980, two years before his death at the age of just 42.

GHB is the story of George Fowler, the former head of a powerful London based criminal organisation and porn distributor, biding his time in a small English beach town, until he can regain what is left of his empire, or so he thinks. What is fascinating about the book is the way Lewis simply refuses to compromise on just how repellent Fowler is. He is a vicious, brutal, calculating criminal who made his fortune through terrible means (Triplow hints intriguingly that Lewis may have had first hand knowledge of some of these means), whose only regret is that he lost it through hubris and poor business decisions and now badly wants it back. After reading Getting Carter it clear just how much of his own life and inner demons Lewis poured into the book. As Triplow puts it, GBH was Lewis’s coda and ‘a savage valediction for the breed of smart suited working class gangster who had all but disappeared by the late 1970s; and, by association, had consigned the writer of novels about them to relative obscurity.’ While Jack’s Return Home was his most successful novel, it is GBH that establishing Lewis as one of Britain’s eminent noir writers.

Getting Carter is a fascinating and perceptive examination of alcoholism, lowbrow culture in the post war era, the changing nature of publishing, and how all these factors intersected with the maelstrom of one talented but very flawed crime writer’s life. It is an essential read not only for fans of British crime fiction but scholars of noir culture more generally.

[Pete Trewin · Rating 5 out of 5]

TED LEWIS’S LIFE: A CENTRAL MYSTERY
I first saw the film, Get Carter, in the late Seventies and loved it. From the initial train journey back up north to the Newcastle pub with its old gadjies in caps and white mufflers, ‘Top Hat’ beer glasses and the final confrontation on a wind-swept north eastern beach, it all seemed so real to me, a ‘smoggie’ brought up near Middlesbrough’s docks. Michael Caine was about as geordie as Chas n’ Dave but no matter. I even sought out the original novel by Ted Lewis which was almost out of print. I found it in an obscure Liverpool book shop (book shops, remember them?) along with an equally dusty paperback copy of GBH. Get Carter, originally called Jack’s Return Home was set in Doncaster but the film was pretty much true to the book.
The film was a success, and stimulated interest in the book - lauded as creating the noir school of British crime writing – but interest seemed to drift away with only aficionados of the genre retaining any great interest in Ted Lewis. And then this cracker of a book comes along.
I immediately identified with Lewis, in particular, with his struggles at grammar school. The story of the martinet teacher who struck him across the face causing him to wet his pants in front of his school-mates resonates. I remember a teacher at my school who bullied kids via sarcasm rather than violence – he even looked like Heinrich Himmler. There were kind teachers too, of course, and Lewis was lucky enough to be taken under the wing of Henry Treece, a charismatic character who encouraged him in his writing.
Lewis’s story ends in tragedy. He drank himself to a harrowing early death at 42. And this is the central mystery of Lewis’s life. He was talented, good-looking, a success with the ladies, yet in effect he took his own life at an early age. A mystery to match any explored in his fiction.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Getting Carter; Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir

It must be said that if Ted Lewis were American he would be one of the most revered writers of all time. But because he is British he is forgotten, not even registering on most people’s conscience. It is easy to argue that the British readership is rather conservative in their crime reading tastes, but he is also ignored by the literary set amongst others.

Anyone who has seen the film Get Carter, will know it is a British classic and was based on a book called Jack’s Return Home. Many critics and commentators all agree that it was this book that helped rewrite the British crime novel.

What comes through is a brilliantly researched, nuanced and well written biography of a man, whose star may not have burnt brightly for too long, and is now long forgotten. Ted Lewis was a deeply complex person, who loved to see his books in print and on the shelves, but because of the lazy British reader and their love of formulaic thrillers, his work has slid into obscurity.

Triplow, describes how Lewis’ life was a cycle of obscurity with a brief touch of glamour until his early death at the age of 42. Even though he did write nine books his life seemed to fall apart, along with his marriage. When the glamour came to end he headed home to Humberside where he headed for his early death.

This is an informative book, one that any lover of crime fiction should read, and now I am going hunting for Lewis’s books to find what I have missed and learn from them. Triplow’s writing is an engaging style what makes this book a pleasure and an education to read this book.

[Robert Lurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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.

[Robin Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Triplow takes a look at the short life and long legacy of Ted Lewis. Ted, with his Northern roots and working class background, has never been afforded the respect he deserves as one of the best and most innovative British crime writers. With his introduction of gritty social realism he reshaped the crime fiction genre and established British noir. His novels deserve to be awarded classic status but instead are now quite hard to find.
Fans of 'Z Cars' acknowledge his scripts for the TV series were usually the high point of each season's episodes. Nick Triplow traces the development of his scripts for 'Doctor Who' and has letters from the BBC vindicating Ted of any fault when his four episodes failed to go into production.
This book goes behind the scenes of 'Get Carter' and follows Ted's journey from blitz damaged Manchester, through a childhood marred by parental intolerance and bullying from his headmaster; to the sleazy glitter of swinging sixties Soho; to loneliness and despair on the Lincolnshire coast, and finally to ill-health, alcoholic dependency and tragic early death back home near the south bank of the Humber river.
Ted's novels portray characters drawn from real life, demonstrating insecurities, weaknesses and a calculated ruthlessness set in real places: read them!

[David Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of the movie Get Carter (1971) and the book upon which it is based (Jack's Return Home).
Ted Lewis wrote the book and this is a good biography of his life. It's obvious from the outset that the author has little to go on, at times, when piecing Ted Lewis's life together: there are many assumptions and the book relies on what little press coverage Ted got throughout his career and the memories of those that knew him at various points in his life.
What does shine through is Ted's self-destructive character. It's clear that he was talented, whether that be writing, art or jazz. But, it is also clear that Ted was not comfortable in his own skin and he would turn to drink to make him feel normal (a common trait in those with alcohol problems).
For what the author had available to him, this is a great insight into Ted Lewis's life and the book made me feel a little sad because whilst I certainly wouldn't say Ted wasted his talent, there is so much more potential that was left unfulfilled.

[David Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm also a big fan of Get Carter; I must have seen it late night on BBC2 in the seventies the feel and atmosphere of the film has stayed with me for years. The book "Jack's Return Home" is different from the film (which is screenwritten by Mike Hodges) and is located elsewhere.

This biography of Ted Lewis is an excellent book. Initially, I thought it spent too much time on Lewis' childhood and school days but in retrospect it seems that was just laying down some background to the biographical elements in the novels and also maybe providing some rationale as to why Lewis was like he was.

Nick Triplow has researched his subject thoroughly and the book is choc full of anecdotes and character testimony.

It's a shame Lewis didn't produce more work but there again he was a flawed character and maybe without this flaw his work would be different.

The great thing about the book is that it makes me want to read Lewis' work.

[Peter Fleming · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent biography of a lost genius of the Noir genre. Steers the course between hero worship and hatchet job expertly. Lewis had much to be admired for as a writer, artist and pianist but his personal life was chaotic and marred by alcoholism.

There is careful consideration of his works and how they factored into his life and experiences.

A must read for fans of British crime fiction and Noir style in particular.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A competent biography of the forgotten father of Brit Noir.

If you are interested in Brit Noir, Noir, European Noir, Hard-Boiled/Crime Fiction this is the book for you.

While the biography is not deep, it does explore the broken psyche of Lewis along with his alcoholism.

Worth a read.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A niche book

Very interesting look at a major contributor to British Noir and the writing of the book Jack's Return Home then help to write the screenplay to one of the most incredible earthy films on crime, Get Carter.

[Joseph McCann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read the comments about this book I thought I should add my own. Yes it is a long book and its opening is not what you would call dynamic but it builds nicely and it got my vote the moment they referenced playing "Venus in Furs" at a high school prom.
But seriously though I think the main problem with the Nix is that none of the characters are exactly likeable, they're not horrible as such but you often find yourself wanting to shake some sense into them and tell them to "get a life" but that is essentially what this story is about a group of people desperately trying to get a life but not knowing what that life is or what it looks like!

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great info and background on a massively underrated author