You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape.
Ted Lewis’ Get Carter (originally titled Jack’s Return Home) was first published in 1970. The swinging sixties were over, John and Yoko were having issues with Paul, George and Ringo and gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray had just received life sentences. Economic depression, three-day working weeks and electric power cuts were still a few years away. It was optioned for a film almost immediately as part of the race to cash in on public interest in gangsters following the imprisonment of the Krays. A taut slice of British noir, the book attracted the attention of Michael Caine, who, when asked why he wanted to play protagonist and all-round questionable egg Jack Carter, stated that he’d been around gangsters like Carter and wanted people to know that such figures weren’t to be admired and definitely weren’t funny. Because Jack Carter may be many things – vengeful, dishonest, borderline sociopathic – but he definitely isn’t funny.
The original title is a nod to the eponymous prodigal son’s return after years spent working in London – ‘the Smoke’ for his brother’s funeral. Frank Carter has apparently downed a bottle of scotch – we learn early on that he didn’t drink spirits – before driving his car off a cliff edge, leaving a fifteen year old daughter and a lot of people shaking their heads and muttering condolences. There are a lot of people not so happy to see Jack either, and once he’s refused the offer of a train ticket back to London, there’s little chance that any of this will end well. There is new money, old grudges, and villainy up north. And Jack Carter has the right level of bloody-mindedness to get at the right people.
The book could as easily be written by an American noir writer like Jim Thompson if not for the references to pints of mild, slang – such as calling the police ‘buttons’, and the local football team. Jack is as dubious and amoral as they come, wracked with guilt over lost relationships and present betrayals, determined to find out what happened to his brother whatever the collateral damage. This is not a town for nice people to get ahead in. It wouldn’t even be a nice place to visit – Jack’s early reference to being on a vacation there an example of the type of bleak humor there is.
There’s also, in the trope of a person coming to town bent on dealing with trouble as he finds it, quite pointed inspiration for Lee Child’s Jack Reacher character. Though while Reacher more often seems to find himself in fixes without meaning to, Jack is the kind of person who would find trouble even if it wasn’t looking for him. It’s the shaking up of the status quo, the opposition to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey as the decidedly anti-hero Jack returns home.
The novel, like the film despite its initial box office success, fell into relative obscurity for a number of years until the admiration of film-makers like Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino brought a reappraisal of both works. It even managed to survive a horrendous American-set remake starring Sylvester Stallone at the start of the century that featured a Michael Caine cameo; he plays the very character who was threatened by Caine in 1971 with the words that title this blog. Ted Lewis got to see none of this resurrection, passing away in the early 1980s. But at least one of his literary creations remains, even if the words that the character is arguably most famous for are often mis-quoted and don’t actually feature in the novel’s text. A bitter-sweet ending then. Much like his most long-lasting creation.
