Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Get Carter by Ted Lewis (1965)

‘The rain rained. It hadn’t stopped since Euston. Inside the train it was close, the kind of closeness that makes your fingernails dirty even when all you’re doing is sitting there looking out of the blurring windows.’

Jack Carter, hitman for a gang of London pornographers, goes home to Doncaster for his brother’s funeral. Mild Frank died drunk in a car crash – but Frank didn’t drink. Suspicious Jack starts poking around, and the local firms don’t like that at all…

The noir private eye genre is peculiarly American – this is the only British attempt at it that is any good that I can think of. Making the ‘detective’ a gangster outside the law was a masterstroke, as it’s at once an investigation and a revenge thriller that comes across like a western. As in its American models, sense of place is vitally important; the whole thing takes place in pool halls, smoky pubs and grimy back to backs that are described so vividly you feel the need to shower while you read – it’s grim up north.

this is not the care-free side of the swinging sixties – the characters are teenage prostitutes, bouncers, council tenants; the gangsters are fighting over a slot machine empire; the plot hinges around a porn film featuring Frank’s daughter called ‘Schoolgirl Wanks’. The book has lost none of its power to shock with laconic descriptions of causal violence and poverty.

The best British noir, bar none. And made into the best British noir film too, of course; only in the book, Carter doesn’t die at the end, and Lewis wrote a couple of sequels set in London.