A Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015, reissue department: GBH

The toughest parts of Ted Lewis' 1980 novel GBH make Jim Thompson look like a bit of a wuss, yet the book is filled with the same sort of mordant, observational humor that marks Lewis' other crime classic, Get Carter (Jack's Return Home).

That Lewis maintains the humor through the novel's horrific events, building tension, and explosive conclusion is the book's most distinctive feature; call it the Ted Lewis touch.

The novel's short chapters alternate between the narrative present and the recent past; George Fowler, a ruthless gangster who makes his money from pornography, narrates both. In the "past" chapters. Fowler and his diminishing band of minions in London are desperate to find out who is betraying Fowler. In the present, Fowler has gone  to ground under an assumed name in an English seaside town. And that's where the cutting comedy comes in. Lewis is no likelier to have been hired to promote Grimsby or Mablethorpe than he would have been to tout Scunthorpe or Newcastle.

That Lewis is able to induce a certain pity or sympathy for what has to be to be the most morally bankrupt gang of characters ever assembled between covers is not the least of his magic. (In Get Carter, for example, Jack Carter is activated by the noble passions of avenging his dead brother and saving his niece, who may in fact be his daughter.  George Fowler, by contrast, wants nothing more than to save himself, no matter how many of his subordinates he has to have tortured or killed to do so.) And that's why GBH is a Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015/

===========

Jordan Foster discussed Ted Lewis as part of a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald."

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon, Part IV: My first panel

Laura Lippman

I moderated one panel and one special-event discussion at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  which seems long ago but from which I only returned on Tuesday. Here's the first part of what it was like.

Kevin Burton Smith

"Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald" was a reprise of last year's similarly titled panel in which authors, editors, and other crime fiction experts talked about their favorite lesser-known crime writers of the past.  This year's panelists included Laura Lippman (above right) on the YA author Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Kevin Burton "Thrilling Detective Web Site" Smith (left) on Norbert Davis, Sarah Weinman (below right) on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Jordan Foster, who scarpered before I could snap her picture, on Ted Lewis.

Sarah Weinman

All four panelists were eloquent, illuminating, and entertaining, and, more to the point, they chose their subjects well. Lippman taught the gratifyingly packed room that an author who wrote fantasy for children could fill her stories with hard-boiled and even noir tropes.   Smith opened audience eyes to an author who proved that superb writing and hard-boiled toughness are compatible with slapstick comedy.

Weinman talked about Holding, writer of superbly tuned domestic suspense (and, I would argue, noir), and one of the best of the mid-twentieth-century female crime writers Weinman is doing so much to bring back into circulation. And Foster? She spoke comprehensively about Lewis, known for the novel now called Get Carter, but author of at least two other crime fiction classics, and one of the toughest of all crime writers, who combined sharp observational humor with Jim Thompson-like nightmare intensity.

I like to think the panel expanded the audience's idea of what crime fiction can accomplish as much as it expanded mine, because that's exactly what I set out to do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Max Allan Collins on Jack Carter's Law

How tough and convincingly authentic is Ted Lewis' 1974 novel Jack Carter's Law?  Here's what Max Allan Collins had to say in his introduction to Syndicate Books' recent reissue of the novel:

"Spillane's fever-dream Manhattan is never as real as Lewis's London, and while [Mike] Hammer is a good guy who defeats bad guys with their own methods, Carter is simply a bad guy with methods."

Maybe that bleakness, that deadpan is what makes so many of Carter's observations so unsettling and so funny at the same time, including this, about the two gangster bosses for whom he is an enforcer and planner:

"The room I am in is all Swedish.  It's a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they'd let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees ... the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple's closing-down sale."

Jack Carter's Law is bleaker and wittier than the just about anything in the great Richard Stark's bleak and witty Parker novels. And it has the style that modern-day makers of gangster movies such as Guy Ritchie can only dream about.

===========

Jordan Foster will discuss Ted Lewis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Billy Rags, Ted Lewis' American(-style) melodrama

Billy Rags is the most deliberately American of the Ted Lewis novels I've read, and the debt is more to the mid-century melodramas that later became known as film noir than it is to the more-often invoked Raymond Chadler.

The narrator/protagonist of the 1973 novel by the author of Get Carter (Jack's Return Home) invokes The Street With No Name and Richard Widmark, for example. (It also give a mention to René Lodge Brabazon Raymond, that Englishman who read James M. Cain, grabbed some maps and a dictionary, took the name James Hadley Chase, and wrote No Orchids for Miss Blandish.)

Billy Rags' story arc, particularly its ending, could have come straight from a 1940s filmed melodrama, and I won't spoil much if I reveal that the protagonist comes to a bad end without, however, dying.  The clincher, however, is that the phrase "no choice" and variants thereof recur throughout the book as a near-didactic invocation of all those doomed characters played by the likes of Widmark and Sterling Hayden, from back in the days when when lead characters died.

========

Jordan Foster will discuss Ted Lewis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

My Bouchecon 2015 panels

The Bouchercon 2015 schedule is up, and I'll be moderating a couple of good panels, including one special event.  On Thursday, October 8 (Thursday, 8 October, for our English friends) I'll moderate "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," in which authors, editors, and other experts in present-day crime fiction talk about their favorite lesser-known, less-remembered crime writers of the past.

This year's lineup includes Sarah Weinman on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Kevin Burton Smith on Norbert Davis, Jordan Foster on Ted Lewis, and, Mark Coggins on Paul Cain in a late-breaking addition, Laura Lippman, who will discuss that mysterious writer TBA.

On Saturday, October 10, at 8:30 a.m., I'll discuss the greatest crime writer ever with two of the people who know his work and life best. The discussion is called "Inside the Mind and Work of Dashiell Hammett," and the two insiders are Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's editor and granddaughter; and Richard Layman, Hammett's biographer and perhaps the leading name in Hammett scholarship.  This is an especially good time to talk about Hammett, what with Nathan Ward's new book and this past spring's donation of two major collections of Hammett's papers to the University of South Carolina. Layman donated one of the collections, Hammett's family the other, so this panel will be the center of the Hammett universe, and I hope you'll all attend.

Bouchercon 2015. The time: Oct. 8-11, 2015. The place: Raleigh, North Carolina. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchercon panels — I Got Carter: What movie adaptations can and cannot do

OK, so Get Carter was too good to read slowly; I finished it in one evening, and that spurred one more observation about books and movies, namely the rather obvious one that the page is a better place for getting inside a character's head than is the screen.

Mike Hodges, who directed the celebrated 1971 movie adaptation of Get Carter, explains in a foreword to the new Syndicate Books edition some of the changes he made from Ted Lewis' novel. (The book was published originally as Jack's Return Home, should you find an old copy.)  Hodges explained that he wanted to include locations in the north of England that had opened his eyes to poverty and social inequality during his naval service. He also wanted a more visually interesting location for a key confrontation in the novel.

Not from Get Carter, the book
or the movie. This is one of
my own.

But he does not explain his most obvious and, arguably, most sensible choice: not to attempt a straightforward transcription of Carter's thoughts, mostly about the brother whose death he has come to avenge and that make up a large part of the novel. The movie gives us less than the book does about the dead Frank Carter, less of Jack's mix of fondness and embarrassment about his brother, almost none of the latter. That makes the movie feel less personal than the book. This is no argument for book over movie or vice versa. In this case, both are excellent. It's just a recognition that each form can do some things better than the other can.

Now it's your turn. What do books do better than movies? Movies better than books? (Read Detective Beyond Borders posts on Why books are better than television.)

========

Jordan Foster will discuss Get Carter author Ted Lewis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m., and there is still time to register for the convention. Trust me: It's fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Crimefest memories: Mike Hodges on how to make a classic movie for £7,000

Ted Lewis' great crime novel Get Carter (along with the rest of Lewis' work) is or soon will be back in print and easily available, thanks to those good people at Syndicate Books/Soho Press.  Five years ago, at Crimefest 2010 in Bristol, England, I had the chance to meet Mike Hodges, who directed the excellent and influential movie version of Get Carter. (This is one in an occasional series of blog posts about Crimefests past and present leading up to Crimefest 2015, which takes place May 14-17.)

==================

Seven thousand pounds. That's how much money Mike Hodges made for writing and directing Get Carter, the classic 1971 hit-man movie starring Michael Caine, and not a penny more.

Hodges made that surprising statement during Friday's pre-screening conversation with Maxim Jakubowski at Bristol's Arnolfini cultural center. He also said the many humorous touches in the otherwise bleak tale encouraged him in the making of his 1972 follow-up, Pulp: "I really thought I would like to hear laughter."

Hodges said after a panel discussion today that yes, there had been pressure from producers and other heavies to have Michael Caine's title character walk away at the end of Get Carter. But Hodges resisted, and Carter gets— but you'll have to watch the movie to see what happens.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Guns of Brixton, or the boys from Paul Brazill

Paul D. Brazill explains the title of his novel Guns of Brixton thus:

"When I decided to write a faux London gangster story..."

Faux ... gangster story says much about Guns of Brixton's appeal. The London gangster movies that made a splash a few years back tended to be over-the-top, smirking affairs, and Brazill confronts the over-the-topness by making fun of it, by not pretending his story is anything but a comic romp, a kind of high-spirited musical without music, albeit one full of violence, the threat thereof,  and all sorts of unpleasant bodily effluvia, whether the result of gun blasts or not.  Here are two examples I liked:

"A group of elves holding cans of Special Brew raced past, chased by a wheezing Santa Claus."

and

"If Mad Mack was startled when he saw the shining barrel of a Glock 29 pointing straight at him through the lattice grid, he was certainly too shocked to react before Father Tim Cook muttered: `Sic transit Gloria friggin' Gaynor,' and blasted Mack's brains all over the confessional."

Here's more of Brazill explaining why he chose the title Guns of Brixton:

"... it seemed the sensible thing to take a title from a song by The Clash, that most London of all London bands – even though only one of them was actually born ‘dahn The Smoke.’...And I had plenty of cracking titles to choose from and reject, too – London Calling (been done to death), London’s Burning (reminded me of the naff TV show about firemen), Guns On The Roof ( a silly song about when The Clash were told off for shooting pigeons with an air rifle), Somebody Got Murdered (too obscure), The Last Gang In Town (close, close …) Police & Thieves (Maybe …)"

Now, I was not alienated enough a suburban kid to have regarded the Clash as seminal avatars of anything, but I sure did read a lot or reverent tosh from the typewriters and word processors rock and roll "critics" in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so I love Brazill's irreverence.


Any British author setting out to write a gangster story must confront the towering example of Ted Lewis.  Lewis' three  Jack Carter novels are dark, grim, and deadly serious, yet punctuated by grim, delightful humor. Few crime writers can manage that; Derek Raymond, who acknowledged Lewis' influence, is the only other example who comes immediately to mind.

Guns of Brixton does the next best thing: It has tremendous fun with the form while at the same time acknowledging Lewis' fictional world both implicitly (in the novel's several gay or lesbian minor characters) and explicitly (a brief discussion of Michael Caine and the celebrated movie adaptation of Get Carter toward the novel's end). If you love Lewis and the movie, but find Guy Ritchie irritating, you might like Guns of Brixton.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

The third in Syndicate Books' reissues of Ted Lewis' three novels about Jack Carter is a bit like Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister: a lesser work marked in places by what I suspect are the author's complaints, in Chandler's case about his (presumed) disillusionment with Los Angeles, in Lewis' about art school.

Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977), the second of two prequels to Get Carter (original title Jack's Return Home), is less a fleshed-out novel than a set-up that never quite comes together: Carter is dispatched by his feckless bosses to their Spanish villa for a vacation that turns out to be a job minding a Mafia turncoat.  And that's about it, except for an orgy of violence at the end and some bits of comedy and cruelty on the way.

But some of the the bits are delicious, the funniest probably the arrival of the janitor/butler's daughter, the grimmest the treatment of the janitor/butler by everybody, his daughter included.  Read this book by all means, but after you've read Get Carter and Jack Carter's Law.

Ted Lewis

Here's Brian Greene on Lewis and why you should read him. And here is a slew of Lewis posts from Nick Triplow, who wrote an afterword for Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Max Allan Collins on Jack Carter's Law

Max Allan Collins will be on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 next month in Long Beach, Calif. He'll discuss writers from the past (The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras), but I decided to read some of his own work as part of my preparation. I read his Quarry novels, liked them, read the graphic novel Road to Perdition, and liked it.

Then I decided to take a break with Jack Carter Law's, second in Syndicate Books' welcome reissues of the great Ted Lewis' catalogue, and lo, this new edition of Lewis' chilling, funny, deadpan 1974 classic comes with an introduction by—Max Allan Collins.

Collins notes Lewis' bleak sense of place and Carter's deadpan first-person narration. (Carter is also the protagonist of Get Carter, published originally as Jack's Return Home, then retitled after the success of the celebrated movie that starred Michael Caine. He is also the protagonist of Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, coming soon from Syndicate.) Did I mention bleakness?  Here's Collins comparing Lewis and Carter to Collins' beloved Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer:

"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."

Maybe that bleakness, that deadpan is what makes so many of Carter's observations so unsettling and so funny at the same time, including this, about the two gangster bosses for whom he is an enforcer and planner:

"The room I am in is all Swedish.  It's a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they'd let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees ... the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple's closing-down sale."

Jack Carter's Law is. so far, bleaker and wittier than the just about anything in the great Richard Stark's bleak and witty Parker novels. And it has the style that modern-day makers of gangster movies such as Guy Ritchie can only dream about.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

New York, New Jerk

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Good fun at Mysterious Bookshop (right/above) in New York this evening for the launch of Syndicate Books' reissue of Ted Lewis' Get Carter.  I bought a nice pile of books, including titles by Paul Charles, Gary Phillips, Bert and Dolores Hitchens, and James Ellroy, who will read from his new Perfidia next week at the shop before an audience that will include me.

Luminaries and near-luminaries of New York's crime fiction scene celebrated the launch of Lewis' dark, moving crime novel, and, more so than usual, the talk was about books. It's good to hear writers talk about their favorite writers (Ed Lin on Paul  Cain) and to talk up some favorites of my own.

Before and after the launch, I wandered around the Lower East Side and Tribeca with my camera. On the way, I spotted some attractive neon over a bar's entrance. "Excuse me," I said, indicating my camera and directing my question to the bouncer,  "mind if I shoot your sign?" My one multisyllabic word was apparently too much for him, because he just raised his eyebrows and kept masticating his cigarette. The only point in the moron's favor is that he did not wear his hair in a ponytail.

"I'll take that as a yes (you do mind)," said I, and continued on my way.  Good thing I'd taken a picture of the sign before I asked.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Get Carter: Who needs an accent if you can act?

I've rolled my eyes here at Detectives Beyond Borders at movie stars whose hardest work seems to consist in showing us how hard they work. My targets have included Kevin Spacey's award mugging and Benicio Del Toro's lisping and mumbling in The Usual Suspects,  Ed Norton's meta-mugging in The Score, and the unspeakably awful accents in The Drowning Pool.

Then there's Michael Caine in Get Carter, playing a gangster who returns home to investigate his brother's death. Caine's character is from the north of England, but to my uneducated ears, he might never have ventured out of earshot of Bow Bells. And you know what? It doesn't matter, because Caine does not see it as his job to mumble, lurch, limp, or gain 60 pounds to play a role. All he does is act, and if you can do that, you don't need an accent or any other Method crap.  Watch Caine in Get Carter, and you'll see a great actor in a great movie based on a great crime novel.

Ted Lewis

And that brings me to the international crime fiction event of the year. This week I'll attend a launch for Syndicate Books, a new imprint that is releasing not only Get Carter (original title: Jack's Return Home) in the U.S. for the first time in decades, but a good chunk of rest of author Ted Lewis' oeuvre, including two more of the Jack Carter novels, some for the first time ever in the U.S.

This new edition of Get Carter includes an introduction by Mike Hodges, who directed the film adaptation that starred Caine.The novel earns a spot as one of Allan Guthrie's 200 Noirs (as does Lewis' Billy Rags, due as an e-book from Syndicate)  Eight more novels to look forward to from an author whose admirers include David Peace and Derek Raymond? I'm excited, and you should be, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Get Carter, or what crime movies are just about as good as the novels from which they are adapted?

I've started reading Syndicate Books' reprint of Ted Lewis' 1970 crime novel Get Carter (first published as Jack's Return Home), and I'll want to read it slowly because it's so good.

Few crime writers could inject menace and desperation into small talk the way Lewis did, and he had a fine eye for period detail — the Hammond organ in the bar at the Cecil, for instance. Does anything say 1960s like the cheesy warbling of a Hammond?

This new edition of the novel, to be published in September, includes an introduction by Mike Hodges, who directed the celebrated 1971 film adaptation, starring Michael Caine and chosen by the Guardian/Observer in 2010 as the seventh-best crime movie of all time. (Its top crime film is Chinatown, so the list is by no means perfect, but still ... )

Hodges is both forthright about the changes he made and highly respectful and deeply admiring of Lewis' novel. And that raises this interesting question: What other crime movie adaptations rank as high in critical and popular esteem as do the novels on which they are based as do Lewis' Get Carter and Hodges'? The closest example I can think of is The Maltese Falcon. How about you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Get Carter is coming to America

I have on my desk as I type this post the upcoming U.S. rerelease of Ted Lewis' 1970 novel Get Carter (originally published as Jack's Return Home), the first U.S. publication of the influential, gritty, downbeat British crime classic in many, many years.  The new edition arrives in September from Syndicate Books, an imprint distributed by Soho Crime and "focusing on out-of-print or neglected mystery and crime fiction of cultural relevance." 
 
Syndicate also plans to publish two more Lewis novels this year, one of them for the first time in North America, according to the company.  While you wait to read them, here's a post I first put up a few years ago about Jack's Return Home/Get Carter and Mike Hodges' celebrated movie version. The new edition of the novel includes a foreword by Hodges that offers illuminating discussion of his feelings about the book and of changes he made when filming it.  And here's a link to another post I put up after hearing Hodges speak at Crimefest 2010 in Bristol.

 ============================

Mike Hodges' 1971 movie Get Carter is rich with a sense of place. So is the 1970 Ted Lewis novel on which it is based though, so far, in a somewhat different way.

Jack's Return Home, later rereleased under the same title as the movie, is full of angry observations on the North England city to which tough-guy Jack Carter return to investigate his brother's death. (The setting is Newcastle in the movie, the Doncaster area in the book.)

Hodges' movie is full of gritty interiors, rows of housing apparently foreshortened by a long camera lens to emphasize the degree to which they are squashed together beneath giant belching smokestacks. Hodges and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky also offer up a gorgeous gallery of deeply etched local faces drinking in a local pub. That first pub scene and the shots of houses and smokestacks look straight out of a gritty documentary. (Go here for a rundown and photos of real locations used in the movie.)

Lewis' social portraits are more cutting, here in a dissection of the crowd at Cyril Kinnear's club:

"The clientele thought they were select. There were farmers, garage proprietors, owners of chains of cafés, electrical contractors, builders, quarry owners, the new Gentry. And occasionally, though never with them, their terrible offspring. The Sprite drivers with the accents not quite right, but ten times more like it than their parents ... Not one of (the wives) was not overdressed. ... They'd had nothing when they were younger, since the war they'd gradually got the lot, and the change had been so surprising they could never stop wanting ... "

or

"The dark, close trees came to and end and I was back bathing in the rateable value of the yellow street lights. ... The California-style homes were still and silent, tucked away beyond the yards and yards of civic-style lawn. Where a house showed signs of life naturally the curtains were drawn well back to inform the neighbours of the riches smugly placed within."

The second bit is more sneering and less specific than the first and therefore has dated less well. But by God, they both give the novel an attitude.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010, 2014