Ted Lewis (1940 - 1982) created the noir school of English crime fiction with his brilliant 1970 novel Jack's Return Home. It is the story of London enforcer Jack Carter's return to an unspecified northern city to find out who killed his brother. Lewis's novel was brilliantly filmed by Mike Hodges as Get Carter.
Michael Caine's classic performance is etched in the memory of three generations of film-goers, but even these ardent fans may find it surprising to discover that there is a book that surpasses the film not only in overall quality, but also in grittiness, sense of place, characterization, and convincingly rendered violence.
Although a watershed in its ferocity and power, Jack's Return Home is very different and more humane in comparison with the cool and distant film. Lewis's Carter is burdened with a much greater sense of the past than Caine's character, and it is his memories of his childhood and his gradually deteriorating relationship with his brother, features that are absent from the film, that lend the novel an almost unbearable depth and sadness. The book is both perhaps the best literary thriller, as Dr John Fraser has argued, and also a work of imagination and yearning that is equal and similar to that greatest of American novels, The Great Gatsby, especially in its articulation of the theme of aspiration.
But what happened? Why isn't the book more well known? Lewis and his novel have sunk almost without trace, and this is a terrible loss for British literature. Lewis lives on in a sense in Get Carter, which has gone on to be regarded as a classic, even being voted the best British film of the twentieth century in a magazine reader's poll, but we are still left with a series of fascinating puzzles.
The main puzzle will always be the character of Ted Lewis himself. He died at age 42, and aside from the nine novels he left, he remains an enigma and a mass of contradictions. On the one hand he was a tough man who jumped head first into the abyss, and on the other he was a musician, painter and writer of great sensitivity and almost painful shyness. He was an only child who wrote one of the great books about brothers. He seemed to be a family man with no experience of crime, yet he wrote probably the best and most vivid depiction of the underworld in British literature. But is this the whole picture? Was there a side to him that even many of his friends didn't know about? How did he know so much about the milieu of Jack Carter?
It is high time for a documentary that will establish Jack's Return Home in its rightful position as a classic British novel, shed light on a fascinating novelist and man, and offer a portrait of a grittier England that has largely vanished.