Jack Carter's Law 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

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  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 the Night Through

  The Rabbit

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  JACK CARTER’S LAW

  TED LEWIS

  Syndicate Books

  New York

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  Copyright © 2014 The Estate of Ted Lewis

  First published in Great Britain 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

  “The Law, Crime and Ted Lewis” © Max Allan Collins

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  is available.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-505-2

  eISBN 978-1-61695-506-9

  Interior design by Jeff Wong

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE LAW, CRIME AND TED LEWIS

  an introduction by Max Allan Collins

  The crime of Ted Lewis, of course, is that he is not well-known, either here in the USA and in his native UK. He’s somewhat better known in the latter due largely to the high regard in which director Mike Hodges’s 1971 film Get Carter is held (the movie is based on Lewis’s 1969 novel Jack’s Return Home—published by Syndicate Books as Get Carter)—in 2004, a survey of film critics by Total Film magazine lauded it as the greatest British film of all time.

  Still, even in the UK, Lewis novels have been tough to find for decades. As a longtime fan, I’m hopeful that the republication of his three Jack Carter novels will lead the rest of Lewis’s books back into print. While I’m no expert on UK crime fiction, I am not surprised that many critics across the pond consider Lewis the father—and Jack’s Return Home the foundation—of a grittier school of British noir fiction.

  What little has been written of Lewis’s life indicates a man of considerable talent and suicidal impulses, not unlike his most famous character. Jack Carter is a cool-eyed professional whose risk-taking is at odds with his unflappable demeanor and the “law” that his philosophy of life seems to imply. He is neither sadist nor misogynist, but he kills without compunction and is happy to slap a female around if he thinks she needs shutting up. The uncompromising nature of Kray-era mob enforcer Carter mirrors that of Lewis the artist. Neither man does anything designed to particularly ingratiate himself with civilians.

  That may be why the Carter follow-up novels—the UK paperbacks utilizing the familiar Michael Caine imagery—were his most successful post-Get Carter publications, though some knowledgeable critics consider his long out-of-print final work, GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm), his finest novel. By any reckoning, Carter represents Lewis’s single popular success.

  Like Carter, Lewis was handsome, a womanizer, a heavy drinker, and a thumber-of-the nose at authority. He paid for all of that with a short life—like Carter—but both men made their mark. If life were fair—and I’ll pause to light up a fag while you laugh your arse off—Lewis would be as famous as Carter has become (thanks to Mike Hodges, Michael Caine, and smart UK critics).

  Like most American fans of Lewis, I met Carter in the film version and then went seeking the source novel, for which there was a movie tie-in paperback bearing the Get Carter title. In 1971 I was heavily under the influence of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels (which he had written as Richard Stark). And I had met Parker in the John Boorman directed/Lee Marvin-starring Point Blank (1967), based on another crime novel whose original title (The Hunter) was supplanted by a more famous film adaptation’s. Movie reviews at the time considered Get Carter a British take on Point Blank, and that was certainly how I viewed it. Both are great films, but Get Carter is clearly the nastier, the grittier, the more uncompromising of the pair.

  At around age twelve, I had discovered hardboiled crime fiction—the term noir still just a gleam in the eyes of various French film critics—and began with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, in part because their private-eye progeny were all over American television screens in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Lewis apparently began as a Chandler fan himself—an enthusiasm referenced by Michael Caine reading Farewell, My Lovely on the train in Get Carter—and he has at times been termed “the British Mickey Spillane.” (More about that later.)

  Soon I was reading novels with criminal protagonists, written by James M. Cain, W.R. Burnett, Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson and a slew of forgotten paperback writers. Still, that early infatuation with private eyes sent me as a young writer in that more heroic direction, which, as the ’60s darkened into the Vietnam War, began to seem more and more naive and even quaint. But Richard Stark’s Parker pointed in a new direction—it seemed a revelation that a professional thief, in the anti-establishment late ’60s and early ’70s, could fill the same kind of heroic role as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Spillane’s Mike Hammer. How much of a stretch was it? After all, Hammer had been a brutal avenger who dealt with bad guys in their same homicidal terms.

  Not that it’s important, but whether Get Carter (film or book) influenced the creation of my hitman character Quarry is something I just can’t remember. I think I’d already created Quarry by the time I saw Get Carter, but maybe not. Meaning no disrespect to Donald E. Westlake, I know I had begun to think that, for all their toughness, the Parker novels hinged on an inherent cop-out by the writer—Parker himself never killed civilians and had no truck with accomplices who did. Also, the Stark novels were told in a skillful third-person—with a strict use of point of view—that created distance from the reader. Protected
the reader.

  I decided that Quarry would be a hit man, not just a thief, and that the stories would be told in the first-person. In the opening chapter of Quarry (1975), the lead character murders a priest—it was my way of telling readers, “Now’s your opportunity to get off the bus.” I can’t say how Quarry compares to Jack Carter—both are very much men of their home countries—but as written by Lewis, Carter makes Parker look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

  The Carter novels are not only told in the first person but in present tense, usually an unbearable approach but, in the hands of an artistic craftsman like Lewis, a dazzling way to keep the action in the now, all while staying invisible as a technique. Carter is not only unapologetic about his activities and attitude, it never occurs to him an apology might be necessary. He is that rare character—one that we quickly understand but who remains able to surprise us at every turn. Oddly, he often surprises us as much by those he chooses not to kill as by those he does.

  Jack Carter’s Law is not for the faint-hearted crime fiction aficionado, and for the American fan, the experience can be challenging, as Lewis immerses us not only in the milieu of the London underworld of the late ’60s, but in its pungent slang as well. I have a hunch that even readers in the UK might need some help here. But like any good writer using slang that might be unfamiliar, Lewis is careful to provide context that will show the way. It doesn’t take long, for example, to realize “the Filth” are the police.

  In Get Carter/Jack’s Return Home, the protagonist is operating as a kind of unlicensed private eye, very much a Mike Hammer type seeking revenge over the murder of his brother. That element of shared humanity—who among us doesn’t understand the desire to avenge a murdered friend or sibling?—gives the first Carter novel an aspect of protagonist justification that makes the uncomfortable experience more palatable. It’s a mystery novel, after all—we’re looking for a murderer, and he or she will be brought to rough justice. (Just how rough, we would never have imagined.)

  But in the prequel Jack Carter’s Law, the mob enforcer has nothing remotely noble in mind. His job is to find a squealer and kill him, and his motivation is to keep himself and his bosses out of jail. In this way, Jack Carter’s Law is even tougher and more uncompromising than its famous predecessor. And perhaps it’s why no prequel film came about from it, and why the two later Carter novels were only modestly successful.

  Still, it’s also an indication that those two follow-up novels were not just fast-buck affairs—nothing at all pandering is to be found in their pages. Lewis was too crafty an artist to give his audience a free ride. But he gives them a ride, all right, and a wild one, the only shock absorber that deadpan understatement from the narrator himself.

  As gritty as Lewis is in Jack Carter’s Law, he still reveals the influence of Chandler, although Lewis doesn’t strain for poetry in the way that Chandler sometimes can (and that all of his imitators do). Lewis finds the simile that doesn’t seem unlikely coming from a hard man’s mouth, as when he describes the drawing of curtains making “a noise like paper money,” and when he describes a gay joint as smelling “like the inside of a handbag.” Not that poetry is absent in Lewis, who points out that “scraps of cloud race across a cold-glowing moon.”

  The Spillane influence is here as well, and for all the American critics (then and now) who like to diss and dismiss Mickey, his impact was felt enormously throughout crime fiction in the ’50s and ’60s, and not just in America. Spillane was the most widely translated author of his day and was particularly popular in Great Britain—he liked to say they translated him into English (referencing words like “center” becoming “centre” and “color” becoming “colour”).

  The grittiness of Carter’s underworld—stale smoky bars and glittering ganglord’s pads and grungy underlings’ flats—is as vivid and surreal as the New York of 1950s Spillane. And Lewis describes all of this in mesmerizing detail, painting scenes with care and in no hurry. Elmore Leonard was a crime fiction writer of understandable renown, but his famous “rules of writing” includes: “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” This clearly does not apply to Lewis.

  Consider this: “The only lighting in the hall apart from the rectangles above the billiard tables comes from behind the counter, illuminating the Kit Kats and Mars Bars and the cellophane of the cigarette packets beneath the dirty glass of the display cases.” That’s just one sentence in a long paragraph that puts you inside the Premier Social and Sporting Club in a way screenwriter Leonard never could, or at least didn’t bother to.

  The most overt Spillane influence has nothing to do with tough guys or murder mystery—it’s the breakneck manner in which Lewis describes action, pulling the reader in and down into a breathless captivity marked by long sentences and scant punctuation, where run-on sentences and the over-use of “and” are something the copy editor will just have to fucking live with.

  But Spillane’s fever-dream Manhattan is never as real as Lewis’s London, and while Hammer is a good guy who defeats bad guys with their own methods, Carter is simply a bad guy with methods. Neither Hammer nor Parker would lose any sleep over killing him. So why do we care about him?

  We’re back to Lewis, the craftsman, the artist, who knows that locking us inside Carter’s first-person narration means we’ll early on decide whether or not to take the ride. Lewis also knows that as bad a man as Carter is, he remains the best man in his world—which is the real secret behind writing a story about a criminal protagonist. The people around Carter are even worse than he is. Like Stark’s Parker, Lewis’s Carter is a professional and not gratuitously mean. Even when he hits a woman, Jack only gives what is needed at the time to complete the job.

  Along those lines, you’ll in these pages meet a compelling and even tragic character, Lesley, who demonstrates Carter’s complicated take on how a woman with information should be handled. When Lesley’s mistreated, he saves her; when she misbehaves, he slaps her; when someone else gives her more rough stuff than seems deserved to Carter, somebody might get killed over it. You may have guessed that political correctness is not an issue in Carter’s world or Lewis’s fiction.

  In the end, Lewis is his own man, quirkily, defiantly so. Whatever he may owe to Chandler and Spillane, however he and Jack Carter may be compared to Richard Stark and Parker, no one can honestly say that anyone else ever wrote books like these before, which perhaps explains why Lewis is considered a cult favorite. Westlake—often termed such himself— once said, “Being a cult favorite is three readers short of the writer making a living.” Lewis, like Jim Thompson, did not live to see his work widely appreciated and applauded. But like Thompson, Lewis deserves discovery and major reevaluation.

  What is Jack Carter’s law? Well, the title only seems to refer to the Old Bill (police), even if the American title of the book was Jack Carter and the Law. Carter’s law, filtered through his own off-kilter hooded-gazed point of view, is the law of the underworld, where a “grass” is a betrayer who must be coldly cut down, just as the killer of your brother must meet your fiery rage.

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS is the author of the Shamus-winning Nathan Heller historical thrillers (Ask Not) and the graphic novel Road to Perdition, basis for the Academy Award-winning film. His innovative ’70s series, Quarry, has been revived by Hard Case Crime (Quarry’s Choice) and he has completed eight posthumous Mickey Spillane novels (King of the Weeds).

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  Cross

  The parked Rover shudders and sways in the wet wind that races down Plender Street. Plender Street is empty and lifeless except for the toffee papers and the newspapers and the fag packets that now and then are caught up in the swirling drizzle that’s slapping away against the steamy windows and deserted landings of the flats.

  I look at my watch. Cross is late by forty minutes. Jesus, I could have been tucked up between clean sheets humping Audrey by now. As it is I might not e
ven have the time, not with Gerald and Les breathing down my neck to find out what’s going on.

  I look in the driving mirror and there’s a taxi coming round the corner, making spray like a corporation water cart. After it comes out of its drift the driver points it at the rear end of the Rover so I get out and walk to the back of the car. The taxi pulls in to the curb and the door opens and I get in. The taxi begins to move again.

  “So where the fucking hell have you been?” I ask Cross, and he says, “It’s silly being like that, Jack. You know that. I mean, you ought to by now.”

  “Don’t shoot shit at me,” I tell him. “You’ve never been late before.”

  And he says, “No, but there’s never been a situation like this before, has there?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “You tell me. That’s what we pay you for.”

  The cab smells of old cigarette ends and Cross’s damp raincoat. I pull the window down slightly and Cross takes his hands out of his coat pockets and places them in his lap and examines his fingernails like all the cheap

  B-feature coppers do. I take out my cigarettes and my lighter and Cross’s eyelashes flicker when he realises that I’m not producing the envelope. He can wait, like I’ve had to.

  The cab crosses Camden High Street and I light my cigarette and as I light it I look at my watch and wonder how long Audrey could risk waiting for me at the flat.

  “All right, let’s be having it,” I say to Cross and Cross reaches up and takes hold of the passenger strap and looks out of the window and says, “Well, for a start, nobody knows where he is.”

  “What are you talking about, nobody knows where he is? He was taken into West End Central three days ago. Mallory goes to see him two hours after he’s been picked up and

  he goes to see him again yesterday for the appearance. Then Swann goes down again to await Her Majesty’s Pleasure. So what the fuck are you talking about?”