Get Carter (The Jack Carter Trilogy #1) Read online

  Praise for Get Carter

  “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

  “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

  “The finest British crime novel ever written.”

  —John Williams, author of The Cardiff Trilogy

  Books by Ted Lewis

  The Jack Carter Trilogy

  Get Carter

  Jack Carter’s Law

  Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

  Crime Novels

  Plender

  Billy Rags

  Boldt

  GBH

  Other Novels

  All the Way Home and All Through the Night

  The Rabbit

  First published in Great Britain as Get Carter in 1992 by Allison & Busby

  First published in Great Britain as Jack’s Return Home in 1970 by Michael Joseph Ltd.

  This edition published in 2014 by Syndicate Books

  www.syndicatebooks.com

  Distributed by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Copyright © 1970, 1992 The Estate of Ted Lewis

  ISBN 978-1-61695-503-8

  eISBN 978-1-61695-504-5

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by Mike Hodges

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  About the Author

  Foreword by Mike Hodges

  The rain rained.

  It hadn’t stopped since Euston.

  So began Ted Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home. That was its title when it first came to my attention in January 1970. It arrived in the post, out of the blue, along with an offer for me 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. But I once did.

  Let me slip back to the 1960s. Britain in the ’60s was, for some of us, a hopeful and exciting time when radical ideological dreams seemed realisable. We were fooling ourselves. The fault line of class and privilege fracturing British society—from the monarchy at the top (by divine right, no less) down to the unelected House of Lords (sustained by a skewed system of bestowing knighthoods and other dubious honours) to the nursery slopes of exclusive public schools (private schools demanding huge student fees while enjoying charitable status) and ending up with a gullible and trusting populace—proved impossible to breach. By the time Ted’s book was published those delusional dreams had all but evaporated.

  For me those rose-tinted glasses had come off a decade earlier during my National Service: a compulsory two years in the Royal Navy. After ten weeks’ basic training I was posted to a minesweeper, part of the UK’s Fishery Protection Squadron. Our duties took us to every fishing port around the coastline. One of them was Hull, where Lewis was at the same time attending art school. Odd to think our paths may have unknowingly crossed all those years earlier. Going ashore in my seaman’s uniform, bellbottoms and white cap, allowed me entry to places worthy of William Hogarth’s most desperate works. The poverty and depravation I witnessed in those hell holes blew the scales off my bourgeois eyes forever. From now on I would be no stranger to the sleazy milieu Ted’s novel occupied. But there was another reason why I immediately recognised the corruption, fiscal and moral, that lay hidden just below England’s veneer and which Lewis brought so brilliantly to the surface.

  After my two years at sea, much of it spent in or close to the Arctic, I returned to civilian life and somehow got a minor job in television. Here, under cozy, warm studio lights, I was able to observe first-hand the other end of the social spectrum; the potbelly as opposed to the underbelly. Television was mostly live in those days and, as a teleprompter operator, I encountered an endless parade of politicians and civil servants, corporate bosses, industrialists and scientists, journalists and actors; indeed anyone who thought themselves worthy enough to be seen and heard. If my first revelatory experience in the Navy brought Hogarth to mind, the second brought with it the satirists Swift and Juvenal. This emerging view of England’s true condition was compounded in the mid-sixties when I was a producer/director on a tough and ground-breaking investigative television series. If I’d had any doubts about the state of the nation they were dispelled during those two years on World in Action. Of course, at the time I was being exposed to these experiences, I had no idea they would become grist for my very first movie. That only dawned on me as I read Ted’s book.

  The transition from novel to film, from Jack’s Return Home to Get Carter, happened very quickly. I still find it hard to believe I began filming a mere five months after receiving the book. As I had never before adapted a novel, it’s not surprising the first draft of the screenplay remained faithful to the original text. In a way it was a gesture of respect for Ted’s talent; but it was the wrong gesture. It was his novel; but now it had to be my film. Although the novel unfolds in a steel town in middle England, I was desperate to reset it on the coast by the grim and unforgiving North Sea. I wanted to fuse the film’s narrative with those incredible locations I’d seen some fifteen years earlier. Images locked in my memory bank were screaming to get out. By way of appeasing what I felt was my creeping disloyalty I latched onto this passage about ten paragraphs into Ted’s story:

  Doncaster Station. Gloomy wide windy areas of rails and platforms overhung with concrete and faint neon. Rain noiselessly emphasising the emptiness.

  Jack Carter changed trains at Doncaster. It was here that I psychologically decoupled myself from the novel. I decided not to have him change trains for a town with no name, as Ted did; I’d have him change trains for a town with a name. Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I had Jack move north into my territory, territory I knew. That way I felt less guilty changing the direction of the novel’s thrust and even its very texture. I was discovering that when the novelist is a good one, adapting their novel to a screenplay can be a curiously painful process.

  With the first draft completed I took off for Newcastle and began poking my nose into its every dark and sleazy corner. Despite Ted’s brillia
ntly terse descriptive powers I needed to relocate scenes he’d written into places I found. The great iron bridges that spanned the Tyne; the race track; the fish jetty; the betting shop; the bingo hall. Ted set the big shootout between Carter, Con McCarty and Peter the Dutchman (the boys sent to bring Carter back to London) on some waste ground outside Albert Swift’s hovel of a house. That worked fine in the novel but I found a more visually exciting location: the passenger ferry that crisscrossed the river Tyne. It does no longer. Also gone is the Trinity Square high-rise car park I used in the film: demolished only a few years ago. Newcastle has been gentrified and is now hailed as a city of culture with sleek art galleries, museums, and concert halls. Ted’s novel captured the decay that used to be, as did the film. Back then the more I explored the city the more I began to sense the sickly smell of corruption. It was a smell I recognised from my days as an investigative journalist. Decay and corruption. However far the film parted company with the novel these threads ran firmly in parallel.

  On the surface it was a dead town. The kind of place not to be on a Sunday afternoon. But it had its levels. Choose a level, present the right credentials and the town was just as good as anywhere else. Or as bad. And then there was the money.

  My sense of smell proved to be correct. The leader of the city council at the time, one T. Dan Smith, was responsible for a massive programme of slum clearance and regeneration. This was captured in the film. I had got there just in time while the city, like Great Britain itself, was on the cusp between the deprivation of the war years and the tsunami of materialism and greed that was about to sweep over it. A mere two years after Get Carter hit the cinema screens, T. Dan “Mr. Newcastle” Smith (or as his enemies liked to call him, “The Mouth of Tyne”) was spending time in Her Majesty’s prison: six years’ detention for taking massive bribes and other misdemeanours. Another thread the book and film have in common is the total absence of the law or its officers. Both works are as raw and personal as any Elizabethan or Jacobean revenge tragedy. Both are in a direct line to that long British theatrical tradition.

  The one thing I regret most about the whole experience was not getting to know Ted Lewis—not properly. The intensity of the preparation and shooting of the film allowed me little time to socialise. We met, of course, but often only briefly and always with others around. Sad that. I know he was happy with the film and trust he forgave me the liberties I took with his book. Writing a Foreword like this is tricky. Those readers who haven’t seen the film are in for a treat which I’ve tried not to spoil; those who have seen the film will experience something recognisable but also very different. In Steve Chibnall’s definitive book about the film he quotes a somewhat over-exercised commentator: “If Shakespeare could have written a gangster film, Get Carter would be the one.” If that’s the case just remember that Ted Lewis wrote it; I only adapted it.

  Thursday

  THE RAIN RAINED.

  It hadn’t stopped since Euston. Inside the train it was close, the kind of closeness that makes your fingernails dirty even when all you’re doing is sitting there looking out of the blurring windows. Watching the dirty backs of houses scudding along under the half-light clouds. Just sitting and looking and not even fidgeting.

  I was the only one in the compartment. My slip-ons were off. My feet were up. Penthouse was dead. I’d killed the Standard twice. I had three nails left. Doncaster was forty minutes off.

  I looked along the black mohair to my socks. I flexed a toe. The toenail made a sharp ridge in the wool. I’d have to cut them when I got in. I might be doing a lot of footwork over the weekend.

  I wondered if I’d have time to get some fags from the buffet at Doncaster before my connection left.

  If it was open at five to five on a Thursday afternoon in mid-October.

  I lit up anyway.

  It was funny that Frank never smoked. Most barmen do. In between doing things. Even one drag to make it seem as if they’re having a break. But Frank never touched them. Not even a Woody just to see what it was like when we were kids down Jackson Street. He’d never wanted to know.

  He didn’t drink scotch either.

  I picked up the flask from off the Standard and unscrewed the cap and took a pull. The train rocked and a bit of scotch went on my shirt, a biggish spot, just below the collar.

  But not as much as had been down the front of the shirt Frank had been wearing when they’d found him. Not nearly so much.

  They hadn’t even bothered to be careful; they hadn’t even bothered to be clever.

  I screwed the cap on and put the flask back on the seat. Beyond fast rain and dark low clouds thin light appeared for a second as the hurrying sun skirted the rim of a hill. The erratic beam caught the silver flask and illuminated the engraved inscription.

  It said: From Gerald and Les to Jack. With much affection on his thirty-eighth birthday.

  Gerald and Les were the blokes I worked for. They looked after me very well because that’s what I did for them. They were in the property business. Investment. Speculation. That kind of thing. You know.

  Pity it had to finish. But sooner or later Gerald’d find out about me and Audrey. And when that happened I’d rather be out of the way. Working for Stein. In the sun. With Audrey getting brown all over. And no rain.

  Doncaster Station. Gloomy wide windy areas of rails and platforms overhung with concrete and faint neon. Rain noiselessly emphasising the emptiness. The roller front of W. H. Smith’s pulled hard down.

  I walked along the enclosed overhead corridor that led to the platform where my connection was waiting. There was nobody else in the corridor. The echoes of my footsteps raced before me. I turned left at a sign that said PLATFORM FOUR and walked down the steps. The diesel was humming and ready for off. I got in, slammed the door and sat down in a three-seater. I put my hold-all down on the seat, stood up, took off my green suede overcoat and draped it over the hold-all.

  I looked down the carriage. There was about a dozen passengers all with their backs to me. I turned round and looked through into the guard’s van. The guard was reading the paper. I took my flask out and had a quick one. I put the flask back in the hold-all and felt for my fags. But I’d already smoked the last one.

  At first there’s just the blackness. The rocking of the train, the reflections against the raindrops and the blackness. But if you keep looking beyond the reflections you eventually notice the glow creeping into the sky.

  At first it’s slight and you think maybe a haystack or a petrol tanker or something is on fire somewhere over a hill and out of sight. But then you notice that the clouds themselves are reflecting the glow and you know that it must be something bigger. And a little later the train passes through a cutting and curves away towards the town, a small bright concentrated area of light and beyond and around the town you can see the causes of the glow, the half-dozen 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—the structures of the works black against the collective glow, all of it looking like a Disney version of the Dawn of Creation. Even when the train enters the short sprawl of backyards and behinds of petrol stations and rows of too-bright street lights, the reflected ribbon of flame still draws your attention up into the sky.

  I handed in my ticket and walked through the barrier to the front of the station where the car park was. A few of my fellow passengers got into cars, the rest made for the waiting double-decker bus. Rain drifted idly across the shiny concrete. I looked round for a taxi. Nothing. There was a phone box near the booking office so I got in it, found ‘Taxis’ in the directory and phoned one. They said five minutes. I put the phone down and decided I’d rather have the rain than the smell of old cigarette ends.

  Outside I stood and stared across the car park. The bus and the cars had gone. Directly opposite me was the entrance to the car park and beyond that was the road with its loveless lights and its c
ouncil houses. It all looked as it had looked eight years ago when I’d seen it last. A good place to say goodbye to.

  I remembered what Frank’d said to me at our dad’s funeral, the last time I’d seen the place.

  I’d been eating an egg sandwich and talking to Mrs. Gorton when Frank had limped over and asked me to pop upstairs with him for a minute.

  I’d followed him into our old bedroom and he’d taken a letter and he’d said to me, “Read it.” I’d said, “Who’s it from?” He’d said, “Read it.” Still eating the sandwich, I’d looked at the postmark. It had come from Sunderland. The date was four days earlier. I’d taken the letter out of the envelope and I’d flicked it over and looked at the signature.

  When I’d seen who it was from, I’d looked at Frank.

  “Read it,” he’d said.

  The cab swung into the car park. It was a modern car with a lit-up sign in the middle of its roof. It stopped in front of me and the driver got out and walked round and opened the passenger door.

  “Mr. Carter?”

  I walked towards the car and he took my hold-all and put it on the back seat.

  “Lovely weather,” he said.

  I got in and he got in.

  “Where was it?” he said. “The George?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  The car began to move. I felt in my pocket and pulled out my packet of fags but I forgot it was empty. The driver pulled a packet of Weights out of his pocket.

  “Here,” he said, “have one of these.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I lit us both up.

  “Staying long, are you?” he asked.

  “Depends.”

  “On business?”

  “Not really.”

  He drove on a bit more.

  “Know it round here, do you?”

  “A bit.”