Born in Manchester, England, Ted Lewis (1940-1982) spent most of his youth in Barton-upon-Humber in the north of England. After graduating from Hull Art School, Lewis moved to London and first worked in advertising before becoming an animation specialist, working on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. His novels are the product of his lifelong fascination with the criminal lifestyle of London’s Soho district and the down-and-out lifestyle of the English factory town. Lewis' novels pioneered the British noir school. He authored nine novels, the second of which was famously adapted in 1971 as the now iconic Get Carter, which stars Michael Caine.
Praise for Get CarterParade Magazine 110 Best Thrillers of All
Time
A Philadelphia Inquirer Best Book of 2014"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"Brilliant... Get
Carter is one of the best-ever fictional portraits of a small,
industrial English city with its tawdry shops, dingy rooming
houses, and suffocating air of decline from something that wasn't
that great to begin with."
—John Powers, NPR's Fresh Air
"The book [Get Carter] gave readers a brutal look at hitherto
hidden English sleaze and seediness. “It ripped off the rose-tinted
glasses through which most people saw our mutual homeland,” writes
Mr. Hodges. Forty-four years later, the book... still has the power
to jolt."
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
"Sums up the hard-boiled ethos as well as anything I’ve ever
read... As far as classic hard-boiled fiction, Get Carter is sui
generis, the place where British noir begins."
—David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times"Rereading all three books, I
was struck by the influence Lewis's novels have had on so many
current hard-boiled writers whose main characters are hard cases
(certainly Lee Child's Jack Reacher is a literary son). Written in
first person and present tense, Lewis' trilogy has an immediacy
that belies its age."
—Carole Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel"Masterful... Lewis
had a shrewd eye for the shifting class politics of late-’60s
England, the point at which the austerity of the postwar years had
melted away and prosperity was slowly creeping into the regions,
creating a new middle class."
—Los Angeles Review of Books"The year's big event in international
noir is the republication of the Jack Carter Trilogy by England's
Ted Lewis. 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 Philadelphia Inquirer"Incomperable scene-setting and eloquent
descriptive prose."
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
"Among crime-novel aficionados, it's generally accepted that Ted
Lewis established the noir school of writing in Britain, and one
novel in particular got it going: Get Carter."
—Shelf Awareness"Lewis remains a sharp social anatomist of the
hopelessness and soul-sucking dinginess of his era. Starting with
[Get Carter], Lewis sketched the horror of a Britain where home was
the kitchen sink, the sodden bar towel, the decrepit industrial
landscape: a kingdom from which Carter and his like cannot
escape."
—Barnes and Noble Review
"One of the very best tough guy novels of all time."
—Acadiana Lifestyle
"Get Carter is one of the most influential works of crime fiction
in existence. In the world of U.K. hardboiled literature it’s had
the kind of impact that books by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler had on the genre in the U.S."
—Criminal Element
"It arrived in the post, out of the blue, along with an offer 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."
—Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter, from the Foreword to this
edition
"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
“Lewis is major.”
—Max Alan Collins, author of Road to Perdition
"The finest British crime novel ever written."
—John Williams, author of The Cardiff Trilogy
"Despite a taste for hard-boiled on wry, Lewis has the soul of a
serious novelist, capturing the brothers’ troubled relationship,
the grimness of the surroundings, and, ultimately, the futility of
being top dog."
—Booklist, STARRED Review
"[An] impressive novel... Evocative prose sets this above similarly
themed crime stories... Ian Rankin fans who have not yet read Lewis
will be pleased."
—Publishers Weekly
"Much like Hammett and Cain, Lewis used the hard boiled novel to
make subtle social commentary on his country. Despite his many dark
qualities, we follow Jack Carter because of his willingness to be
his own man in both the criminal and British class system."
—Scott Montgomery, Mystery People Bookstore
"Too good to read slowly."
—Detectives Beyond Borders
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