Max Decharne at the Spectator
offers a piece on the biography of crime writer Ted Lewis, the author of Jack’s
Return Home, the great crime novel behind the great crime film Get Carter.
If you search Google Images
for Ted Lewis, the results show an American jazz-age band-leader in a battered
top hat, or the determined features of the world champion boxer Ted ‘Kid’
Lewis, the ‘Aldgate Sphinx’. In between falls a picture of the crime writer Ted
Lewis perched on a stool at a cable-strewn film location in 1970, portable
typewriter on his knees, cigarette on his lip, and a sardonically knowing look
which says that after years of struggle, overnight success has finally arrived.
The film was Get Carter, anote-perfect transcription of Lewis’s hardboiled
masterpiece Jack’s Return Home, published in February that year.
Alfred Edward Lewis — Edward
to his parents, Ted to his friends — was born in Manchester in 1940, but grew
up in the Lincolnshire town of Barton-upon-Humber, close by the southern end of
the Humber Bridge, where he roamed as a child with a group of friends called
the Riverbank Boys. For more urban excitement, there were Hull and Scunthorpe
nearby, and despite the film’s distinctive Newcastle and Gateshead locations,
the home to which Jack returns in Ted’s book is essentially Scunthorpe, with a
side order of Grimsby.
One of the most valuable
aspects of Nick Triplow’s welcome new book — the first biography of Lewis — is
the care he has put into finding a wide variety of the author’s family,
friends, colleagues and acquaintances. From Ted’s earliest days at school,
through his time at Hull Art College, playing piano in local jazz bands,
working as an illustrator in London and on the animated Beatles film Yellow
Submarine, there are many first-hand reminiscences of a man whose story was
previously very sketchily known. If only someone in the mid-20th century had
put equal effort into locating people from the formative years of Raymond Chandler
and Dashiell Hammett.
The portrait which emerges is
of an innovative and profoundly talented writer who had difficult relations
with many of those around him, not least because of his lifelong attachment to
alcohol. He was a regular pub-goer from the age of 14, so it is hardly
surprising that his evocations of dismal bars with ‘singing till 10, fighting
till 11’ are pin-sharp.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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