Ted Lewis

by Brian Greene

I have read 9 Ted Lewis novels in a row now, and the one I just finished, Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH), has left me breathless. I won't disparage other crime fiction writers I like in praising this book, but I just don't know how I will feel about a novel by Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, or Jim Thompson after reading GBH. It is more suspenseful than any of theirs, more convincingly hard-edged than any of theirs, and I am having a level of reaction to it that I can't remember having to any book in a long, long time.

Lewis seems to have been an interesting guy. Born in Manchester, England, in 1940. Attended art school, then worked in advertising before getting a gig doing animation on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film. Wrote an autobiographical novel (which is next to impossible to find now – all of his books [except Get Carter] are hard to come by; it's called All the Way Home and All The Night Through) in 1965. Then turned to writing crime novels, the first of which was Jack's Return Home, which was published in 1970. Within two years, there would be two films made from this novel: Get Carter, which stars Michael Caine as Carter, and which is now considered to be one of the finest British films of all time; and The Hit Man, a Blaxploitation take on the story, featuring Pam Grier. Went on to write six more crime novels, none of which seems to have been as well received, critically or commercially, as Jack's Return Home. Also did some writing for a British TV show called "Z Cars." Then died in 1982, only 42 years old, and the details of his death are as hard to come by as copies of his first novel.

These things always come into play in Ted Lewis's crime novels:

* Music
* Pornography
* Revenge
* Homosexuality
* Violence
* Drinking (people never stop drinking, at all times of day and night)
* Car Names
* Rivalry
* Hideouts
* People taking baths while cooling out after a big crime

Something else that makes Lewis's books stand out is that there are generally no characters in them that are likeable. With Chandler and Macdonald you've got their narrators/consciences Marlowe and Archer, with Thompson you are usually cheering for somebody who has been taking guff from bad people for too long and is now out to get his. But in the novels of Ted Lewis, most everybody is rotten. You might root for Jack Carter as he sets about getting revenge on the people who killed his innocent brother, but you don't really like Carter, because you know that if you got in his way he would simply pop your head off. Somehow the lack of a hero in these books gives them a deeper dimension than what you get in the stories with heroes, even if those are anti-heroes.

I could go on for days about Lewis and these books, but since I've said GBH may be the best crime novel in existence (or if I didn't say that before, I'm saying it now), let me just tell you a little more about that one. Published in 1980, GBH is narrated (for the most part) by George Fowler, who runs a far-reaching and highly successful blue movie ring. All is going well until Fowler and his wife discover that some of the agents working for them are cheating - taking extra money and not reporting it. When the Fowlers start investigating this, they are sent into a downward-spiraling adventure, and soon come to find that they can trust nobody, including the few people they have always been able to count on before. Half of the chapters are titled The Smoke (the city), and these are in the past tense, as Fowler is telling you about the investigation and all the wild and violent things that happened as a result of it. The other chapters are titled The Sea, these are in the present, and here Fowler is writing from a seaside hideout he has had to retreat to after all the bloodshed and intrigue that came about as a result of his investigations. Every word of every chapter had every nerve in my system standing on end, and by the last few chapters I was shaking as I read. The book is that suspenseful, and that good.

I have focused here on Grievous Bodily Harm, but that is far from being Ted Lewis’s only notable book. My thoughts on the others are as such:

All the Way Home and All The Night Through (1965)
Lewis’s first novel is – well, a first novel. The entire 300-odd pages are taken up by a painstaking account of the ups and downs of a love-affair between Victor Graves, a college art student, and a girl he falls for. You could be charitable and call this an Angry Young Man novel, as Victor certainly seems to have that Look Back in Anger/Saturday Night and Sunday Morning edge to him. And if you really want to stretch things, you could draw a comparison between the cycle of infatuation-love-heartbreak Victor goes through with his girl and the similar succession of episodes that play out between the narrator and Albertine in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (a character named Marcel pops up in the book, a possible hint that Lewis was indeed thinking of Proust when writing this). But the fact is this novel is unremarkable at best, and in its worst moments (some of the love talk between Victor and the girl) is shy-making. After this book Lewis left off of fiction writing for a few years; when he came back to the pen and paper and wrote Jack’s Return Home, he was a different man and a different writer.

Jack’s Return Home (later re-titled Get Carter, after the film) (1970)
Lewis’s first crime novel and the first of 3 of his books which feature Jack Carter, the top henchman working for two London-based gangster brothers, Gerald and Les Fletcher. When Carter’s brother Frank, who was not involved in the underworld, dies from (apparently) drinking himself into a stupor and driving off of a bridge, Jack knows there is more than meets the eye here and decides (against the wishes of his bosses) to go back to his home town and do some investigating. He quickly discovers that a gang based in the Northern town had everything to do with his brother’s early demise, and sets out on a tear of revenge-seeking that makes Charles Bronson’s grudges look tame. As great as the 1970 film of this story is, it fails to touch on one of the most central aspects of the novel, that being the complexity of the relationship between Jack and his brother. In the film you just know that Jack Carter - the badass gangster - had a brother who was killed by some thugs and that Jack is going to pay those thugs back because you don’t do that to Jack’s brother. But through the novel you know that much of the rage that Jack visits upon the Northern gang is actually based in the anger and guilt he always felt towards his brother, a clean-living type who made a point of letting Jack know how dirty and unworthy he was. Gritty as this novel is, there is an undercurrent of emotional desolation that runs throughout it, a sense of everlasting grief that is often lurking beneath the violence and tension of Lewis’s novels.

Plender (1971)
Brian Plender is a blackmailing private investigator who specializes in luring his marks into compromising positions (usually sexual), getting it all on film and tape, and then putting the screws into the victims. Peter Knott is a womanizing photographer who loves his wife (and loves the posh lifestyle her father's money allows them to lead) but can't keep from having countless one-night stands with his female models. When Plender and Knott were boys growing up together, Plender looked up to Knott, who was the smarter and more popular of the two, and Knott was always knocking him down. When they cross paths as adults, Plender decides it's time to get some long overdue revenge on his old schoolmate. But when the young girl Plender uses to lure Knott into the sack (this to be filmed by a watching Plender) winds up dying in a bizarre accident on the night of their soiree, things get much hairier than what's generally at hand in Plender's frame-up numbers. Plender is the first of Lewis's novels in which homosexuality is widely explored. The drinking hole Plender does much of his dirty work in is a gay bar; and in an excruciating memory passage from when the two were boys, Plender tells of the time Knott forced him into a humiliating sexual encounter between the two of them. Plender was made into the French film Les Serpent in 2006.

Billy Rags (1973)
The combination of grittiness and despair so prevalent in Jack’s Return Home is revisited in this taut prison novel. Billy Cracken never does things the easy way. Raised by a father who never gives him the attention or praise he craves, and a mother who is too much of a nervous wreck to do much good, and with a little sister who looks up to him too much, Billy, not much of a student, turns to crime as a way of finding a place for himself. He quickly becomes a rising star in the underworld, but when he refuses to be recruited into the ranks of a leading gang, he makes lifelong enemies of the very people who might be able to make his career as a con a little easier. Roughly half of this book is taken up by Billy’s telling of the escape he and some of his jailhouse cronies arrange and execute from the prison they’re all in. The other half finds Billy on the other side, with his wife and toddler son, trying to work out a way to both stay free and raise enough money to flee to another country. All along there are memory passages from Billy’s childhood, anecdotes that show you what made him the hardass ne’er-do-well that he is. This book is like a hardboiled The Catcher in the Rye, and Cracken’s relationship with his mother and sister is reminiscent of the heartbreaking complex formed between Raskolnikov and his family members in Crime and Punishment.

Jack Carter and the Law (1974)
The second Carter novel has Jack still working for Gerald and Les Fletcher, still humping Gerald’s wife Audrey, and still dreaming of one day being rid of the Fletcher brothers so he and Audrey can get married and run the mobster firm themselves (the Audrey subplot was first developed in Jack’s Return Home). Lewis does some self-referencing in this novel: a Plender Street is mentioned in the book’s first paragraph, and the name of one of the one leaders of the gang that rivals the Fletcher’s outfit is Walter Coleman – the same name (although spelled slightly differently there) of Billy Cracken’s chief adversary in Billy Rags. Another Ted Lewis continuum at hand here is the theme of homosexuality. As in Plender, one of the clubs many of the gangsters hang out in is a gay bar. That establishment is the site of one of Lewis’s grisliest (although also humorous) scenes, wherein the bawdy wife of a gang boss decides to humiliate a catty transvestite bartender and does this by tearing off his/her wig and dress with one hand while putting a vice grip on his/her tackle with her other hand. The main plotline here involves double-dealing, as someone has decided to pull the rug out from under the cozy relationship the Fletchers have been enjoying with the crooked law enforcement personnel on their black market payroll. It’s up to Jack to do the dirty work and find out who’s behind the intrigue, and nobody wants to be on his list when he starts putting things together. This is an absolutely compelling and realistic story told by a writer who is becoming a master of the Noir form. There is not a wasted word from the first page to the last, not a single paragraph that doesn’t hold the reader in a grip of enthralling suspense.

The Rabbit (1975)
After writing 4 excellent crime novels, Lewis returned to the literary fiction milieu he first worked in with his debut. In The Rabbit we are reintroduced to Victor Graves, the college art student whose love life was so thoroughly explored in All the Way Home and All the Night Through. This much finer novel finds Victor home for the summer, and working at the rock quarry his father manages. Victor comes off here as much more of a sensitive, almost frail type than he appeared to be in the earlier novel. He desperately wants to be One of the Guys on the jobsite, and in particular tries to impress a co-worker named Clacker, a Teddy Boy who will have nothing to do with him. The character of Victor, and a few of the other circumstances found in the novel, are really the only things The Rabbit has in common with All the Way Home and All the Night Through. 10 years and 4 published books had changed Ted Lewis, who was now writing like a seasoned pro. Great as his crime books are, I have to wonder why Lewis didn’t write more literary novels, as he seems quite comfortable and masterly working in this vein. I also have to wonder how much of the character of Victor, as he is portrayed in The Rabbit, is a reflection of Lewis himself – it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Victor writing pulp novels populated with the kind of tough guy characters he wishes he could be.

Boldt (1976)
This is the odd Ted Lewis novel. For one thing, it’s set in America. For another, the narrator/protagonist (all of Lewis’s novels are told in the first person) is a police detective and not a criminal. Also, Boldt has a TV cop show feel about it, right down to Roy Boldt’s chief at headquarters always giving he and his partner a rough time (my copy of the book, a Jove mass market paperback, has that TV cop show look about it, as well). Boldt is also the most unsettling of Lewis’s works. None of his novels were written for the easily-offended reader, but this is the one that might put such a person over the edge; Boldt and his partner casually and constantly sling racial slurs, and the main homosexual character is portrayed as a perverted sadist. The story is that Boldt’s brother, a famous politician, is coming through town and that he has had an anonymous threat made on his life. Boldt gets the assignment to protect his brother from the potential assassin, and when he is told to lay off the man he figures to be the prime suspect, he doesn’t know where he or the law stands and he is going to have to take things into his own hands and become a vigilante, a la Jack Carter. A possible subtle salute to Raymond Chandler is made by Lewis in this book, as one of its characters is named Florian, a prominent name in Farewell, My Lovely (Michael Caine, as Jack Carter, is reading that same book on a train in one of the opening scenes of the film Get Carter). Boldt is well written and suspenseful, but if there is one Ted Lewis book I might not recommend, this is it.

Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977)
Gerald and Les Fletcher are so appreciative of all the good work Jack Carter has been doing for their firm, they’ve decided to give him two weeks’ vacation at their villa in Majorca. Problem 1: Jack has never been abroad before, and has a fear of flying. Problem 2: The Fletchers have deceived Jack again – what he actually is doing in Majorca is not sipping tropical drinks in the Spanish sun, but acting as bodyguard of an American friend of some friends of the Fletchers, Carter’s charge being a member of the Mafia on the run. Problem 3: Neither the hunted American nor the Fletchers’ caretaker of the villa were forewarned about Jack’s arrival. Problems 4 and 5: The caretaker’s attractive and troubled daughter decides this is a good time for her to spend some time at the villa, and if that’s not enough female complication, Audrey Fletcher (who’s still cheating on Gerald with Jack) insinuates herself into the off-kilter atmosphere of the villa. Another great crime novel from Ted Lewis here, but probably the least powerful of the 3 Carter books. With this one coming on the heels of Boldt, a reader might have started to wonder if the power of Lewis’s pen was going into decline. Happily for all of us, he was apparently saving up energy for his final and strongest work, GBH.

Ted Lewis is a name that should be routinely mentioned when people are talking about the great crime fiction writers of all time. None of his books should ever be out of print (yet, almost all of them are at the moment), and more films based on his writings should be made. Yet somehow the fact that he has not received his critical due, and that his work is so hard to come by, only adds to the intrigue when one tries to get their head around his enigmatic character – intrigue much aided by the fact that a curious person can not seem to find out the cause of his early death, never mind the circumstances around the cause. In the meantime, those of us fortunate enough to own copies of GBH and Lewis’s other novels will have to suffice with reading and re-reading these fine books.

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Copyright© Brian Greene, 2008

BRIAN GREENE’s short stories, personal and travel essays, and writings on books and music have appeared in a variety of print and on-line publications, from 1991 to the present year. He was recently a semi-finalist in the University of Iowa's annual book-length fiction contest. He lives in North Carolina with his wife Abby, their daughter Violet, and two cats. He works in academic administration, and in his spare time is a DJ in bars.
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