Happy Birthday to Ted Lewis: Announcing Nick Triplow's GETTING CARTER and Jack Carter's Golden Anniversary Publication

“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, writing for the LOS ANGELES TIMES

You may have noticed but we’ve had a bit of a fallow stretch here at Syndicate Books. But down isn’t out and in this case it isn’t even really down. 2020 will see an exciting array of new projects announced and important writers and books restored to readers. This will include the announcement of Difficult Lives, a new imprint of Syndicate Books focusing on biographical, critical, and memoir writing from the crime and mystery fiction genre. If the imprint name sounds familiar that’s because the anchor title on this list is a new and expanded edition of James Sallis’ seminal work of noir biography, Difficult Lives.

There will be more on those projects in the coming weeks but today the focus is on the birthday boy, Ted Lewis, Syndicate’s first author and pioneer of the modern British crime novel (not to mention one of its all-time finest practitioners). Lewis, who passed at the too-young age of 42 in 1982, would have been 80 today and fans will always wonder what the enigmatic Lewis might have produced after his final novel, the mind-blowing and nearly perfect psychological thriller, GBH.

Enigmatic is a word worth noting above. Lewis, despite the iconic Michael Caine-driven film adaptation of his most famous novel and graphic design work on high profile projects like the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, has remained an obscure figure. Aside from these professional moments the life of Ted Lewis has truly become something of a mystery unto itself. It’s a fairly stubborn mystery too. A few have tried their hand at reconstructing his story over the years and these projects have all bogged down at some point or another.

That is until Nick Triplow. Nick is a literary detective with the soul and pen of a poet. His now critically acclaimed Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir is truly a remarkable achievement. Published two years ago in the UK, Getting Carter artfully presents over a decade of research with Triplow’s uncanny understanding of the interior life of his often quite difficult subject.

Nick was a big help in Syndicate’s push to resurrect Lewis. A weekend in Barton-upon-Humber and a Triplow-led tour of Lewis’ old haunts (including an overnighter at one of Lewis’ favored boozer, The George) helped bring the details of the project into focus. It imbued an otherwise somewhat lonely pursuit with a bigger sense of purpose. Nick’s afterword to Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon was, at the time of its release, the best single piece of literary summation of Lewis’ contributions.

That afterword isn’t even 1% of what Triplow achieved in Getting Carter. So it is with great pleasure that Syndicate Books can announce that we’re bringing Nick’s wonderful book out as a part of the Difficult Lives debut list. This book, already acclaimed in the UK, will see its North American release on 9/1/2020. Look for more details on that very soon.

And last but certainly not least: Get Carter, or as it was originally titled, Jack’s Return Home, turns 50 this year. To celebrate the 50th birthday of our boy, Jack, Syndicate Books is assembling all of his menacing one-liners and mod cool under one roof. The omnibus edition,The Complete Get Carter: Jack’s Return Home, Jack Carter’s Law, and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, will be bring the trilogy together in one volume, with introductions by Get Carter director Mike Hodges, novelist Max Allan Collins (who must be credited with turning us on to Lewis in the first place) and the aforementioned afterword by Nick Triplow. It seems right to restore Ted’s original title to the cover in this, its golden anniversary.

So stay tuned. We’re back in business and soon we’ll all be changing trains at Doncaster on our way back to the land of Ted Lewis and Jack Carter.

GET CARTER for just $1.99

"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

APRIL ONLY: AVAILABLE FOR $1.99
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Famously adapted into the iconic film starring Michael Caine, Get Carter—originally published as Jack’s Return Home—ranks among the most canonical of crime novels.

With a special Foreword by Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter

It’s a rainy night in the mill town of Scunthorpe when a London fixer named Jack Carter steps off a northbound train. He’s left the neon lights and mod lifestyle of Soho behind to come north to his hometown for a funeral—his brother Frank’s. Frank was very drunk when he drove his car off a cliff and that doesn’t sit well with Jack. Mild-mannered Frank never touched the stuff.

Jack and Frank didn’t exactly like one another. They hadn’t spoken in years and Jack is far from the sentimental type. So it takes more than a few people by surprise when Jack starts plying his trade in order to get to the bottom of his brother’s death. Then again, Frank’s last name was Carter, and that’s Jack’s name too. Sometimes that’s enough.

Set in the late 1960s amidst the smokestacks and hardcases of the industrial north of England, Get Carter redefined British crime fiction and cinema alike. Along with the other two novels in the Jack Carter Trilogy, it is one of the most important crime novels of all time.

Praise for Get Carter

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 

"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

"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

 

Never has GBH been praised so much!

“A pulp-fiction triumph worthy of Jim Thompson or James Ellroy. I can’t remember the last time I turned pages so eagerly.”

— John Powers, NPR's FRESH AIR

GBH by Ted Lewis. Afterword by Derek Raymond.

The swan song of a noir master finally gets its due. GBH, the late Ted Lewis' final and some say greatest (I might argue for another) novel, is finally getting its day in court and the critics are placing it where it belongs, in the cannon, among the pulp and noir greats.

So here's what's being said:

NPR's FRESH AIR — "Gangsters, Goons, and 'Grievous Bodily Harm' in Ted Lewis' London"

NPR Fresh Air critic John Powers writes that, "At his best, [Lewis] achieves something only a handful of crime writers ever do — the chilling sense of cosmic fatality that links noir anti-heroes to the likes of Oedipus and Macbeth" and of Lewis' celebrated, claustrophobic, and brutal Get Carter he writes, "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."

You can listen to the whole piece on Lewis HERE.

BOOKPAGE

Simple and to the point, BookPage dubs GBH: "Lewis' masterpiece."

THE LIFE SENTENCE — "The Grievous Life of Ted Lewis"

Lisa Levy's brilliant new crime and mystery fiction focused website published a wonderful, and thorough, piece on Lewis and GBH by Brian Greene, which among other things, says: "While [Get Carter] will likely always be the most noted of Ted Lewis’s nine novels, GBH, the final book Lewis published, is his masterwork."

That rest can be read HERE.

THE BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW — "Ted Lewis and His Kitchen Sink Thrillers"

The online literary review of the nation's largest brick & mortar bookstore chain, and the company where I had my first book related job, ran a terrific review by Charles Taylor about the Carter Trilogy and GBH. Taylor pulls no punches: "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."

You can read the rest of Charles Taylor's review HERE.

And hopefully there's more to come!