Born in Manchester, England, Ted Lewis (1940-1982) spent most of his youth in Barton-upon-Humber in the north of England. 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. His novels are the product of his lifelong fascination with the criminal lifestyle of London’s Soho district and the down-and-out lifestyle of the English factory town. Lewis' novels pioneered the British noir school. He authored nine novels, the second of which was famously adapted in 1971 as the now iconic Get Carter, which stars Michael Caine.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Get Carter
by Ted Lewis
eBook
-
ISBN-13:
9781616955045
- Publisher: Soho Press, Incorporated
- Publication date: 09/09/2014
- Series: The Jack Carter Trilogy , #1
- Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 240
- Sales rank: 366,149
- File size: 2 MB
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Famously adapted into the iconic film starring Michael Caine, Get Carter—originally published as Jack’s Return Home—ranks among the most canonical of crime novels.
With a special Foreword by Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter
It’s a rainy night in the mill town of Scunthorpe when a London fixer named Jack Carter steps off a northbound train. He’s left the neon lights and mod lifestyle of Soho behind to come north to his hometown 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.
Jack and Frank didn’t exactly like one another. They hadn’t spoken in years and Jack is far from the sentimental type. So it takes more than a few people by surprise when Jack starts plying his trade in order to get to the bottom of his brother’s death. Then again, Frank’s last name was Carter, and that’s Jack’s name too. Sometimes that’s enough.
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.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Originally published as Jack’s Return Home in 1970, this impressive novel, the first in a trilogy, inspired the classic 1971 Michael Caine movie. After eight years away from home, London fixer Jack Carter returns to Yorkshire to attend the funeral of his brother, Frank, who was killed in what was officially ruled an auto accident. Despite mixed feelings about Frank, Carter is resolved to learn the truth, and to get revenge if it turns out the death wasn’t accidental. Evocative prose, such as a description of the local steelworks “stretching to the rim of the semicircular bowl of hills, flames shooting upwards—soft reds pulsing on the insides of melting shops, white heat sparking in blast furnaces,” sets this above similarly themed crime stories. Lewis (1940–1982) also manages to inject humor into the mostly gritty proceedings. For example, one obese character is the “kind of man that fat men like to stand next to.” Ian Rankin fans who have not yet read Lewis will be pleased. (Sept.)
"Aristotle, when he defined tragedy, mandated that a tragic hero must fall from a great height, but Aristotle never imagined the kind of roadside motels James M. Cain could conjure up or saw the smokestacks rise in the Northern English industrial hell of Ted Lewis's Get Carter."
—Dennis Lehane, author of Live by Night
"Sums up the hard-boiled ethos as well as anything I’ve ever read... As far as classic hard-boiled fiction, Get Carter is sui generis, the place where British noir begins."
—David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
"Rereading all three books, I was struck by the influence Lewis' novels have had on so many current hard-boiled writers whose main characters are hard cases (certainly Lee Child's Jack Reacher is a literary son). Written in first person and present tense, Lewis' trilogy has an immediacy that belies its age."
—Carole Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
"Masterful... Lewis had a shrewd eye for the shifting class politics of late-’60s England, the point at which the austerity of the postwar years had melted away and prosperity was slowly creeping into the regions, creating a new middle class."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Among crime-novel aficionados, it's generally accepted that Ted Lewis established the noir school of writing in Britain, and one novel in particular got it going: Get Carter."
—Shelf Awareness
"One of the very best tough guy novels of all time."
—Acadiana Lifestyle
"Get Carter is one of the most influential works of crime fiction in existence. In the world of U.K. hardboiled literature it’s had the kind of impact that books by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler had on the genre in the U.S."
—Criminal Element
"It arrived in the post, out of the blue, along with an offer to write and direct it as my first cinema film. Its literary style was as enigmatic as the manner of its arrival. Whilst set in England and written by an Englishman it was (aside from the rain) atypically English. More importantly it ripped off the rose-tinted glasses through which most people saw our mutual homeland. I suspect Ted never shared that Panglossian take on England."
—Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter, from the Foreword to this edition
"Lewis was one of the first British writers in the sixties to take Chandler literally—"The crime story tips violence out of its vase on the shelf and pours it back into the street where it belongs"—and [Get Carter] is a book that I and plenty of other people at the time considered to be a classic on these grounds."
—Derek Raymond, author of the Factory Novels
"Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge — toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone."
—James Sallis, author of Drive
“The finest British crime novel I’ve ever read.”
—David Peace, author of Red or Dead
"Ted Lewis is one of the most influential crime novelists Britain has ever produced, and his shadow falls on all noir fiction, whether on page or screen, created on these isles since his passing. I wouldn’t be the writer I am without Ted Lewis. It’s time the world rediscovered him."
—Stuart Neville, author of The Ghosts of Belfast
“Lewis is major.”
—Max Alan Collins, author of Road to Perdition
"The finest British crime novel ever written."
—John Williams, author of The Cardiff Trilogy
"Despite a taste for hard-boiled on wry, Lewis has the soul of a serious novelist, capturing the brothers’ troubled relationship, the grimness of the surroundings, and, ultimately, the futility of being top dog."
—Booklist, STARRED Review
"[An] impressive novel... Evocative prose sets this above similarly themed crime stories... Ian Rankin fans who have not yet read Lewis will be pleased."
—Publishers Weekly
"Much like Hammett and Cain, Lewis used the hard boiled novel to make subtle social commentary on his country. Despite his many dark qualities, we follow Jack Carter because of his willingness to be his own man in both the criminal and British class system."
—Scott Montgomery, Mystery People Bookstore
"Too good to read slowly... Few crime writers could inject menace and desperation into small talk the way Lewis did."
—Detectives Beyond Borders