Making it Real
1967–1970
In the New Year, Lewis was back at Halas and Batchelor working on The Lone Ranger – the show had been recommissioned and was scheduled to run until September 1969. By contemporary standards, The Lone Ranger appears crudely simplistic; the characterisations are one dimensional stereotypes, at odds with some surreal storylines. Lewis’s backgrounds are reminiscent of John Ford’s Monument Valley and Anthony Mann’s western landscapes. With budgets and production values set in California, it was down to the Halas team including Lewis, Elvin and Chris Miles to innovate. Miles recalls:
‘In those days all drawings were done on cells, but the backgrounds were usually painted using washes and water colours. In our case the background designs were drawn with a chinagraph sticky black pencil and the colours inserted under the cell level by using torn or cut coloured pantone papers. This was a faster way of producing a finished scene. Ted and I both designed The Lone Ranger films. Not as directors, but working out from our own illustrated storyboards the various camera angles and movement instructions that overlay the work of the animator.’
The methods employed on The Lone Ranger were certainly different. Dreamlike, almost gothic backgrounds complement what was by no means a conventional western series. It featured elements of science fiction, proto-steampunk machinery and some typically freakish bad guys. Lewis had begun to invent characters for the show and, having successfully created the ‘Deadly Glass Man’, was working on creative ideas for the new series.
In March, he arranged for Henry Treece’s son, Richard, to travel to London for work experience at Halas. The 17-year-old had followed in Lewis’s footsteps, studying graphic design in Hull at what was now the Regional College of Art and Design – renamed in 1962, but still on Anlaby Road. In an article in the Lincolnshire Times, Richard explains how he’d worked alongside Lewis for two weeks on ‘cowboy backgrounds of cactus and hills’ for a Lone Ranger episode featuring ‘Dr Destruction’. The piece says that the TV series is the ‘Number 2 top television show in America’ where it was shown ‘in colour’. In the UK, the first series had just begun screening in a Sunday teatime slot.
Towards the end of 1966 and into 1967, Lewis had achieved success with an assortment of short story commissions. All the Way Home and The Rabbit proved to be unlikely standard bearers for the kind of contemporary angst-ridden romance stories editors were looking for. Lewis found an off-beat fit with women’s magazines. Commenting on Lewis’s twin occupations of animator and writer, the Lincolnshire Times article explains that he had recently completed a story serialisation for the ‘Petticoat girls’ magazine’.
Petticoat was a new London-based teen weekly seeking to exploit the mid 60s explosion of fashion and pop culture. Janet Street-Porter and Eve Pollard were among the magazine’s early editors. Lewis’s story, The Two-Sided Triangle, was a slice of fictionalised autobiography serialised over three issues, published, with his own line-drawn illustrations, between horoscopes, ads for hairspray – ‘If he knows it’s there, we’ll give you your money back’ – and articles telling girls all they needed to know about working as a nanny – ‘how Mary Poppins went mod’. The first instalment, published on 11 March 1967, told of the meeting between Alan, an advertising designer and self-doubting novelist, and Jill, the reassuring photographer’s secretary with whom he falls in love. Their chance meeting, instant attraction, love, flat-sharing and marriage were ideal; a harmless tale from swinging London for a teen magazine aimed at the ‘young and fancy free’. But Alan’s self-destructive impulses threaten to undermine the relationship. Musing on his writing, he says, ‘I’d never feel convinced anything I did was any good, never know whether it was right or wrong, never dare feel elated about what I’d written in case it was really terrible.’ He struggles to come to terms with his girlfriend’s success in a glamorous profession and is jealous of her male colleagues. Fretting that she earns more than he does, he insists they move into a rundown flat affordable on his salary alone. Just as the relationship looks to be going well, Alan learns of the rejection of his second novel, The Shooting Party, by the publisher ‘Dickinsons’. The arrival of the news coincides with Jill’s unexpected absence for the evening. Alan agonises over his book’s failure and, as the evening wears on, based on nothing in particular, convinces himself Jill has been unfaithful.
The Two-Sided Triangle was a neutered version of the autobiographical self-reflection of All the Way Home and All the Night Through. It told a largely faithful version of the story of his and Jo’s meeting, their whirlwind romance and the rejection of his unfinished second novel. But the most notable aspect of the story is hinted at in the conclusion. After Alan has received the editor’s rejection of The Shooting Party, his agent, presumably based on John Johnson, discusses their options in a letter, suggesting that, while he could try and sell the book on its completion to another publisher, Alan would, on the whole, be better advised to ‘start completely afresh on that alternative idea we discussed some months ago’.
Assuming the not-quite-but-almost-real treatment of the subject matter, Lewis must, by now, have realised the undergraduate themes which earned him a deal with Hutchinson’s New Authors would not work a second time. Pursuing an alternative idea was sound advice and it signalled the move towards writing more commercial fiction.
Aside from preoccupations with his uncertain literary career, the early months of 1967 were among the happiest Lewis had known. The flat he and Jo rented over the Odeon cinema in Belsize Park was spacious, relatively cheap and homely. Perfect, in fact, for a film-obsessive. Lewis’s friend and colleague, David Elvin, remembers pet-sitting for their cats and a pair of chipmunks. When they weren’t working, the couple would be out and about in pubs and with friends, going to the pictures and making the most of Sunday jazz sessions at the Tally Ho in Kentish Town. The pub had built a reputation as the venue for impromptu appearances by American jazz artists, many of whom would be in London for higher profile slots at West End clubs. Tom Barling often went along and remembers ‘It used to end with Stan Tracey up there on piano playing Watermelon Man with two hundred people joining in.’
Bertha and Harry Lewis also paid a visit to London around this time. Not ones for the bright lights, they insisted on their afternoon naps and remained diffidently self-contained. Tom Barling recalls how having his parents around changed Lewis. ‘Ted wasn’t speaking to them properly; there was a division, as if they came from two different worlds.’
It’s a fair summation from Barling who would become a successful novelist in his own right, known primarily for a series of London gangland novels which included The Smoke, featuring fictional gang boss, ‘Charlie Dance’. He recalls how he and Lewis would talk at length about their shared ambition to become successful authors. ‘He wanted to know about East End villains and I knew a few so I used to tell him.’
In truth, in the spring of 1967, Lewis needed only to pick up a newspaper for an insight into the London underworld. In April, Charlie Richardson, his younger brother Eddie and their associates Frank Fraser, Tommy Clark and Roy Hall were on trial at the Old Bailey, following their arrest in a raid on the morning of England’s World Cup win in July 1966. Referred to in the papers as the ‘torture trials’ in response to lurid stories of teeth pulled with pliers, savage beatings (after which Charlie Richardson would reputedly offer the victim a clean shirt to go home in), and electric shocks from Charlie’s sinister ‘black box’, the courts examined every detail and newspapers reported each day’s developments. The Richardsons might have lacked the Kray Twins’ iconic profile, but the trial showed them to be equally ruthless and, arguably, just as successful as gangsters and criminal businessmen. Their legitimate interests included a string of scrap metal dealers, West End drinking clubs and stakes in South African mining companies. The latter involved dealings with the South African security services and an extreme right-wing organisation, the Afrikaans equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan, known as Der Broederbond. The Richardsons had a glamour of their own and their social circle included well-known entertainers, including the actors Stanley Baker and Diana Dors. Sentencing Charlie Richardson to 25 years in prison, the presiding judge, Mr Justice Lawton, branded him a ‘vicious, sadistic, criminal’. Two years later, the Kray Twins would follow the Richardsons into the dock and receive equally severe custodial sentences.
What was clear to anyone reading reports from the Richardson trial, and later the Krays, was the extent to which London criminal interests had infiltrated provincial cities across England. A state of affairs made all the more workable with the 1960 Gaming Act which legitimised gambling in arcades, pubs and amusement parks. It offered a source of income to the criminal opportunist. The Scotland Yard hierarchy accepted that, if they were to tackle successfully London’s professional criminal class, it would require the setting up of independent, uncorrupted units from outside the capital, as their own officers were all too frequently implicated.
Lewis was intent on working on his writing and bringing a second novel to fruition, but as spring gave way to summer, he received a phone call from Tom Barling with an offer to meet and discuss an opportunity on an upcoming animated feature film.
In London’s animation community, Television Cartoons (TVC) were best known for producing the animated Beatles show that ran on Saturday morning television in the United States. The short cartoons, featuring mop-top characters with nondescript ‘British’ accents, were based on the Beatles’ 1964 vintage, hopelessly out of step with the psychedelic pop princelings seen around London by 1967. Originally conceived as a cash-in on the band’s success, the cartoons were tolerated by the Beatles’ management as a means of extending the band’s post-touring shelf life. The Beatles, understandably, hated them. Initially, when TVC announced there would be an animated Beatles film, it was assumed to be a feature-length version of the existing series, but Yellow Submarine was always going to be a different proposition. Tom Barling received an early approach from TVC. He found the production in chaos:
‘I was painting the ceiling in my new house when they came and got me in a taxi – “quick, come with us, we need you” – I was in there a week and it was amateur night. There were three different units with three different directors who weren’t speaking to each other. I was running round trying to get the layouts for this and layouts for that. There were some Americans on it who were bloody good, but the egomaniacs who were supposed to be directing…’
Barling lasted a week before quitting:
‘I thought, what the hell am I doing here? I had Heinz Edelmann, this German designer, I mean his stuff was lovely on the flat, but you try animating the bloody things; everything was so flat. There wasn’t a piece with three-dimensions in it – there was a fight between two dinosaurs. I started animating and key drawing them so they moved around a bit – like a boxing match. And it was like, “Where are the bubbles – it’s under the sea!” John Coates didn’t want to pay me – it was a joke.’
When Tom Barling told Lewis there was a major film project underway, he jumped at the chance. With his art school background, a track record in illustration, experience on The Lone Ranger, and a practised eye for detail, Lewis was interviewed and appointed to supervise the Yellow Submarine animation clean-up process. There was a final piece of work for Halas, a film commissioned for the Government’s Central Office of Information. Written by Joy Batchelor and directed by John Halas, Dying for a Smoke was a nine-and-a-half-minute animation aimed at warning children and teenagers of the perils of cigarettes. Voiced by actor Warren Mitchell, the devil, in the guise of ‘Nick O’Tine’, lures and enslaves unsuspecting children in his chain-smoking gang. Lewis, a thoroughly committed smoker, and Chris Miles are credited as background artists and the techniques pioneered for The Lone Ranger were once again to the fore.
Lewis joined the Yellow Submarine production in the summer of 1967. At his recommendation, John Coates and George Dunning interviewed Chris Miles. In September, Miles joined the team. As Yellow Submarine was to be created by an assortment of freelance animators and artists, all of whom had their own style of drawing, clean-up became an essential part of the design and production process. Lewis and Miles carried the responsibility of ensuring all drawings faithfully reproduced the work of art director, Heinz Edelmann. Miles estimates that, over the lifetime of the production, he and Lewis and their team, which at one time or another also included Ian Cowan, Richard Dakin and Ray Newman, handled somewhere in the region of 250,000 animation cells. Working side by side for long hours, the two became close. David Elvin was another arrival from Halas, joining the project later in 1967. ‘All I knew about TVC and the Beatles was that terrible cartoon series. I’d been fraternising with John Coates in the Dog and Duck. He rang up and made me an offer. By the time I arrived, Ted was already on board.’
At the height of production, there were as many as 200 artists working on the film; many were students recruited from art schools across London and bussed in for overnight shifts. Others from outside London had come to the capital specifically to work on the project. Inevitably, there were anomalies in the quality of the work they produced. The film’s animation director, Bob Balser, described the importance of Lewis’s clean-up team in Bob Hieronimus’s detailed chronicle of the production, Inside the Yellow Submarine:
The difference in drawing ability was obvious when a scene was put together. So we set up a very efficient clean up control department and every single scene passed through the hands of a small group of excellent artists (not animators), which adjusted and corrected small details to bring drawings closer to the Edelmann originals, as well as maintain a consistency of line and technique.
With most of the Halas and Batchelor team reunited at the TVC building in Knightway House, the lunchtime sessions at the Dog and Duck picked up again. The pub’s landlord and his dog, Scrumpy, found their way into the Yellow Submarine opening photo-animation sequence. The creative process continued without let up. Extraordinary when, as David Elvin recalls, ‘We were regularly drinking three or four pints at lunchtime.’ As the music played loud into the night in the trace and paint department, the artists and animators felt they were at the epicentre of fashion and creativity. The Beatles themselves showed little interest in the project, investing their time in the Magical Mystery Tour film, by then in post-production in an editing suite across Soho.
The eleven month production timeline for Yellow Submarine, together with limitations on budget and an often bewildering complexity of concept, direction, script (or lack of) and innovation at each stage, kept the project completion at risk for almost its entire duration. Clean-up was the one phase where there could be no short cuts. Repetitive and highly pressurised, it demanded intense concentration and extraordinary attention to detail. Animator Malcolm Draper remembers Lewis telling him that, along with Mike Stuart and Anne Jolliffe, they were the only ones who could really draw the Beatles’ characters to the required standard. Draper believes Lewis created one of the film’s posters. ‘I know Heinz Edelmann did one of them, but I’m sure Ted designed another one.’
Another of Lewis’s former colleagues from the Halas and Batchelor days, Gil Potter, had been employed as a layout artist and assistant to one of the two Yellow Submarine directors, Jack Stokes. Invited to Gil and Doreen Potter’s home, a seventeenth century thatched cottage in the picturesque village of Wicken Bonhunt in rural Essex, Ted and Jo fell in love with the uncomplicated charm of the place. Potter remembers Lewis coming for the weekend. ‘I said, “You’re doing alright, if you see a place why not buy one?” Within a couple of weeks I rang him up and said he should get down here, because one of the cottages was for sale.’ Lewis bought Erme Cottage towards the end of 1967. According to Jo, Harry Lewis thought it was a hovel and said so. She concedes it probably did look a little rundown and was in need of renovation.
With Lewis a stone’s throw from Gil Potter’s Clarke Cottage – the village pub, the Coach and Horses was between them – their friendship became closer. Gil remembers, ‘I used to cross the road and Ted walked up and we’d meet in the pub, and so we got talking more, and of course we both worked in London so we used to travel up together. Ted didn’t drive so I used to drive us both to the station and in the evening drive back again.’
As Lewis left London behind, the move placed him further from the friendships with which he’d grown up. Mike Shucksmith had married, although they kept in touch; by now John Dickinson was firmly ensconced in Barton as a general practitioner, and there was little contact with the other Riverbank Boys for whom work and family were overriding interests. Lewis’s own world revolved around Jo, his work on Yellow Submarine and his writing. Tom Barling wasn’t surprised to see Lewis leave London. ‘He was clearly split. He liked London, but I think in a way he was frightened of it.’ There was another reason for leaving: Jo was pregnant. With a new baby due the following year, Lewis and Jo were determined to provide a secure and stable home. Wicken seemed an ideal place to bring up children. Before leaving, Lewis caught up with Juliet Raahauge. She remembers they met for a drink a couple of times. ‘It was very odd. He asked me if he could borrow some money. He was working on Yellow Submarine and I thought he should be earning much more than me. It was friendly. He told me about Jo, how he’d fallen in love.’
With around 200 residents, village life in Wicken had something of the simplicity of a bygone age. At the bakery, if no one was around, customers took their bread and left the money on the counter. The Coach and Horses still counted a sprinkling of rustic eccentrics and domino-playing old timers among its regulars. The downside was the landlord, Dave Kinnear, who would habitually bar customers for minor indiscretions or a word out of turn. The ban never seemed to last long and most regulars knew to keep a low profile for a few days then return quietly, by which time the misdemeanour would be forgotten. One regular was Frank Monk, a local oddjob man. Wearing his shirt open in all weathers to reveal a brass chain around his neck which had become green with corrosion, Monk dominated the public bar. When he’d been chicken-plucking or turkey-killing, he’d arrive at the pub covered in blood and feathers. He would also habitually refer to the local policeman, Constable Dicky Bright, as a ‘button man’.
Lewis was a reluctant commuter, but settled into a routine of early starts, taking the train from Audley End Station into Liverpool Street, then travelling by tube into the West End. TVC’s offices were a short walk through Soho. He worked until lunch, drank, worked, and slept off the lunchtime beer on the way home to Wicken on the train or as a passenger in Gil Potter’s car. Most evenings, he would spend time with Jo or drinking at the Coach and Horses. Although Jo doesn’t recall their time at Wicken being one of excess, or of Lewis drinking more than was usual, a scene of sorts developed around the Yellow Submarine crew. At weekends there were parties, usually at the Potters’ cottage. Artists, animators and filmmakers made the trip to Wicken. Affairs began, were consummated, climaxed and came to an end during the film’s production.
While the pub was the main meeting place for locals, there was also a transient population of teachers and students at the residential education centre located in the village. Funded by Essex County Council and delivering courses in what was loosely termed ‘Liberal Studies’, Barri Hooper was the long-term warden at Wicken House. He and Lewis struck up a friendship after Lewis had come to the pub one evening with a telltale bulge in his jacket. Hooper joked, was he ‘packing a piece’? It turned out to be a toy Colt pistol. Lewis had been trying to replicate the experience of carrying a weapon, feeling the weight in his jacket and testing to see whether it would be noticed. Hooper, a former Royal Air Force armament mechanic, had carried his interest in firearms into civilian life. He found Lewis a willing listener, hungry for details about weapons and their capabilities. ‘I told him he’d need a holster for something like that and certainly not an imitation Colt. The barrel was too long for a start.’
On Hooper’s nights off he would drink with Lewis and Gil Potter until closing time. Afterwards, they’d go back to Wicken House for more drinks and a game of snooker in the basement games room. Potting fifteen reds and colours after a few pints and whiskies took some time and it wasn’t unknown for sessions to last half the night, often interrupted by arguments over the score in which Lewis would accuse the others of moving the counter along when his back was turned. Hooper remembers he’d become incensed, slamming his cue on the table. ‘I’d say, “Come on, it’s only a game.” And he’d say, “No, if you do a thing, you do it properly”.’
When Hooper came across a collection of second hand Police Journal magazines detailing true crime cases and methods used in their detection, he and Lewis shared long conversations about real life crimes. Sitting in the public bar at the Coach, Hooper set out hypothetical scenarios based on cases in the journals and challenged Lewis to work out the solutions. A memorable case involved two men holding a conversation in an open field with the nearest cover 200 yards away. When one of the men is shot dead with a pistol, the other is naturally the chief suspect, but no weapon is found. Hooper asked, was it possible to shoot someone with a pistol from a distance of over 200 yards? Lewis thought not, but the case file suggested it was possible if you had the right weapon. Hooper showed Lewis a decommissioned Mauser pistol he’d recently bought. When I spoke to Hooper at his house in Newport, a few miles from Wicken Bonhunt, he produced the Mauser and laid it on the table. It was heavy in my hand, a solid weight, incapable of firing, but still somehow carrying a threat. The rear sight was calibrated to a wildly optimistic thousand metres. Originally, he explained, it would have had a wooden stock that could be attached, effectively giving it the stability of a rifle. Based on available evidence, the police in the true crime case had assumed the assassin’s weapon was a rifle; meanwhile the perpetrator had his pistol in a backpack and was long gone. For a while, Lewis borrowed the Mauser and lived with it alongside the toy Colt and a dagger on his desk in the Erme Cottage annex, a well appointed wooden cabin that he had taken over as a writing studio.
At a party at Clarke Cottage one evening, Lewis noticed what he took to be an ornamental Beretta handgun Gil had mounted on the wall. Hooper remembers they’d all had a lot to drink when Lewis took the gun down. ‘Ted was pointing this gun at me. I told him you should never point a gun at anybody. He said it wasn’t loaded, but when we had a look it was. If he’d pulled the trigger, I’d have been shot.’ The weapon, an early model 6.35 calibre Beretta Jetfire, had no safety catch. Having narrowly avoided being shot, Hooper explained to Lewis that, in spite of its lack of punch, the Beretta would be the ideal assassin’s gun at close range, because it could be carried undetected. (It had been Ian Fleming’s original choice of firearm for James Bond, later replaced with a Walther PPK.) Hooper had the distinct impression Lewis was working out specific scenes. After watching a film fight in which a tough guy’s jacket was pulled down over his arms rendering him unable to retaliate, Lewis insisted they test the theory. They replicated the scene in the Coach and Horse public bar one evening. It was possible, they discovered, but relatively easy for the protagonist to pull his arms out.
With TVC’s offices in Soho Square and nearby Dean Street, and the habitual drinking culture amongst artists and animators on Yellow Submarine, Lewis became a recognised face on the Soho scene around this time. Nick Hague had lived and worked in Soho since the early 1960s. Starting out as an actor, he began directing in television and, by the mid 60s, was working for Associated Rediffusion, later setting up his own production company in Hanway Street, then Wardour Street. He got to know Lewis through a mutual association with the actors’ agent, Peter Crouch:
‘Peter, who I knew very well, had an office next door to the Dog and Duck. He was a very heavy drinker and he used to spend much of his day in the pub. I’d join him for a drink and that’s how I met Ted initially. He and Peter were quite good buddies. Ted drank in the Coach and Horses in Greek Street, too. He used to pop into the French House and I remember him coming down to Gerry’s with Peter a couple of times.’
Gerry’s Club, originally on Shaftesbury Avenue, had been opened in 1955 by the actor, Gerald Campion, best known for playing Billy Bunter on BBC Television. By the mid 60s it was a regular haunt for those in film, television and media and was used by certain members of the press on the understanding that nothing they witnessed there would find its way into the papers. Nick Hague remembers Gerry’s attracted ‘an awful lot of people who were in the limelight, but who didn’t want their story published – actors who liked a drink or six, that kind of thing’. The reporting embargo also appealed to players in London’s underworld:
‘There’s no question about that at all. A lot of East End boys used to drift in and out of Soho and socialise and Gerry’s Club was the place where a lot of it used to happen – mixing with actors and directors and theatre folk, and film and television folk. I don’t think there’s any doubt that if those were the kinds of circles Ted was drinking in, he’d have encountered the East End boys. They were difficult to avoid.’
For Lewis, the contrast between family life in rural Wicken and the frantic hustle of Soho could hardly have been plainer. Filmmakers, writers and advertising executives rubbed shoulders, drank together and cut deals in the same pubs as Berwick Street market traders, small time chancers, bag-men, pornographers and protection racketeers. Tom Barling remembers introducing Lewis to his own underworld connections, but says that he didn’t usually stick around. ‘They were scary guys if they didn’t know you. You had to get to know them before they’d trust you.’ Yellow Submarine production administrator, Norman Kauffman, remembers Kray associates threatening local shopkeepers. The Krays and, before them, Jack Spot’s gang and the Maltese gangs had extorted money from Soho businesses for decades. There wasn’t a lot you could do about it and the police weren’t always sympathetic. Interviewed for the book Getting it Straight some years later, former Kray gang member, Freddie Foreman, recalled the Premier Club in Little Newport Street as the place to ‘do a deal with the Old Bill’. Kauffman remembers the violence came close to home one evening when a young woman was murdered on the doorstep of TVC’s Dean Street offices.
In Gerry’s and The French Pub, on the streets and in the clubs, Lewis was observing, listening, and making notes for stories and characters to take back to his writing studio. In 1971 he would speak about the underworld origins that inspired Jack’s Return Home, including an account of a chance meeting with Michael Tink, an old friend from Barton Grammar School now working as a tout for a Soho strip joint:
‘I was walking through Soho, in London, one afternoon, when a strip club barker stepped in front of me and began his spiel trying to persuade me to enter the club. We simultaneously recognised one another as being old schoolfriends! It turned out he had a regular job but was earning extra money by doing this. I met his girlfriend, who was a stripper, and through them gradually got to know several underworld criminal types.
‘I mixed with them freely and never let on that I was a writer. In time they accepted me as “one of the crowd” and I learnt an enormous amount about the economic structure of crime, gangs, blue movies, gambling clubs, who had just beaten up who, and so on.
‘I learnt about crime syndicates with tie ups in the north of England. A lot of the big time crooks are based in London, but many prefer to run their crime operations in the provincial cities. They would rather be big fish in small ponds than relatively small time in London.
Jack Carter is based on two or three different people I met in those days. He’s tough, vicious, ruthless, but like so many criminals, he has a great family feeling.’
Whether Lewis’s exposure to the London underworld came through a series of detailed but distant observations in the streets of Soho and a crowded Dog and Duck, or personal introductions to Tom Barling’s old East End mates over pints and stiff whiskies in pubs, or on visits to West End clubs like Gerry’s with Peter Crouch, or through semi-integration and acceptance thanks to Mike Tink and his stripper girlfriend’s dubious contacts, he was intent on devising a story whose central character was a criminal, a hard man who’d be at ease in the streets of Soho. For that to be convincing the character would need real substance and that meant bringing him into his own world.
In tracing the evolution of Jack Carter and the development of what was to become Jack’s Return Home, there are countless sources and influences. Lewis crafted conscious and subconscious fragments of lived experience, history, anecdote and fiction into his story, drawing inspiration from as far back as EC comics and B-movie gangster flicks. A single clear cut realisation of what he might be able to achieve came in February 1968 with the release of the film, Point Blank. Directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin, and adapted from the 1962 novel, The Hunter, by Donald Westlake (Westlake used the pen name, Richard Stark), Point Blank starred Marvin as Walker, an amoral protagonist hellbent on revenge with little thought for himself and none at all for those he places in harm’s way. Jo remembers they saw it together and, not surprisingly, Lewis loved it.
Speaking about the origins of Walker, originally named Parker in the novel, Westlake said, ‘I gave him none of the softness you’re supposed to give a series character, and no band of sidekicks to chat with, because he was going to pound through one book and goodbye’. As it turned out, his editor would persuade him otherwise, but the nihilistic disregard of a one-way-ticket antihero remains crucial to the story and clearly sparked something in Lewis. In his ruthless pursuit of those who betrayed and left him for dead, Walker confronts his wife, a few low grade hoods and middle-ranking mafia bosses (including one named Fred Carter) on his way to an unforgettable showdown on Alcatraz Island. Typically, Marvin invests Walker with relentless, brooding intensity, the threat of violence in every step.
Point Blank was one of a handful of films that included another Lewis favourite, Bonnie and Clyde – Tom Barling remembers they were drunk when they saw it and thought it a comedy – which shifted the limits of acceptability in terms of the degree of violence a mainstream audience could be exposed to. Marvin’s performance in Point Blank led the field. It encouraged Lewis to express similar conviction with depictions of violence in his own writing.
He picked up the threads of ideas he’d been collecting and, with Marvin’s Walker in mind, began writing what would become Jack’s Return Home. Jo remembers him working on the manuscript at weekends. ‘I couldn’t wait to type each new page. I’d snatch them from him as soon as they were finished.’ Lewis was adamant that nothing should be changed. He would read the typed versions and ask Jo’s opinion, but never rewrite. ‘He thought it would suffer if it was overworked, if it wasn’t spontaneous.’ Gil Potter was sometimes enlisted for a second opinion. ‘Ted was never confident, he needed criticism before he showed it to anyone else.’
With the final animated sequences of Yellow Submarine segueing into the Beatles’ half-hearted live end section, the psychedelic fairytale reached its uneven conclusion in summer 1968. Lewis’s clean-up team was left to work on the film’s final scenes, pulling a string of long days and all-nighters to get the work finished with money running out and people leaving the production. Chris Miles recalls they’d had a significant amount of work to complete and no certainty where funds were coming from – at one point John Coates and George Dunning hid reels of the completed film to ensure the project couldn’t be taken from them. Lewis was one of the last freelance artists to leave Yellow Submarine. The film premiered at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus on 17 July 1968. A little over a week later, on 29 July, Jo gave birth to a daughter, Nancy.
Towards the end of his time with TVC, Lewis was asked to assist in the development of a cartoon series in Germany. It was five weeks work, mainly in London, but also involving some travel. Norman Kauffman remembers being surprised at what he read as Lewis’s unworldliness: ‘They’d given him the air ticket and he asked me what he had to do. I asked him which airline he was flying with. He told me it was “Luftwaffe”.’
Within weeks, Lewis found himself working in animation once again, this time employed by the BBC as designer and animator on Zokko!, a new format show described by its producers as a ‘weekly comic for children – electronic style’. Zokko! ran between 1968–70 and was entirely characteristic of its time, with the BBC attempting to embrace new creative freedoms in children’s programming. Presented by Mr Zokko!, a speaking pinball machine whose Radiophonic Workshop voice fascinated some children and terrified others, the show moved between a series of short features, intending to replicate the fast-read flick through of a cartoon strip or teen magazine. It was, as vintage television aficionado, TJ Worthington, writes, ‘perplexing… a combination of inhouse animation, stock footage, pop music, and a small amount of specially shot light entertainment material, all cut together using “pop art” editing effects and graphical design’.
Beginning its first 13 week run on 31 October 1968, Zokko! retains a place in television history as the first BBC TV children’s programme to air on a Saturday morning. As well as using library footage, much of the animated material was created by the BBC team. Malcolm Draper, Lewis’s friend and colleague from the Halas and TVC days, worked as an animator. ‘We got about 50 pounds a week for that as well. You couldn’t turn it down.’
On Tuesday 4 March 1969, the Kray twins, their older brother Charlie, and associates including Tony and Christopher Lambrianou, Freddie Foreman, John Barrie, Ronald Bender and Cornelius Whitehead were found guilty after what was then the longest murder trial in British criminal history. The judge, Justice Melford Stevenson, postponed sentencing until the following morning. The accused returned to court in a convoy of police vans and motorcycle escorts. This was the underworld presented as entertainment. One reporter likened the sensation of being at the trial to ‘sitting right inside a superior thriller’. Reggie Kray had asked if James Bond would be appearing and at one point, according to his defence counsel, Ronnie had been ‘convulsing himself with laughter’.
In all probability, Lewis completed the draft of Jack’s Return Home around this time. Containing few of the self-conscious literary flourishes of his first novel, it was vividly and determinedly non-metropolitan, the work of a writer finding his own voice. Padded prose was superseded by an altogether more muscular style. In terse, stripped sentences, he balanced atmosphere, character and story with note-perfect execution. He was out on his own, writing on the fringes of English crime fiction which, at the time, generally meant PD James or Ruth Rendell, or others with a direct line to golden age murder stories. The noir novel was overwhelmingly regarded as an American or a French medium.
It’s not to say there weren’t good crime novels, tense thrillers or gritty underworld stories. But reading British novels which might be considered contemporaries, particularly those which transferred from page to screen – James Barlow’s The Burden of Proof (1968), filmed as Villain, and James Mitchell’s Callan novel A Magnum for Schneider (1969) (later published as Red File for Callan) come to mind – as well-written and absorbing as they are, they don’t have the depth, the edge, the intensity, the honesty or the innovation of language of Jack’s Return Home. No wonder Lewis wasn’t keen to revise the early draft; had he thought too much about themes of exploitative sex, graphic violence or language written as spoken, that nagging self-doubt might have persuaded him to draw back. Rather, it is in place from the first sentence as we meet Carter heading for his connection at Doncaster on a wet October Thursday afternoon. Lewis wrote ‘The rain rained.’ Noun and verb inseparable. Jack Carter is what he does, and what he does is as inevitable as rain.
Questioning what makes Jack’s Return Home the most important British crime novel of its era and the inspiration for one of the greatest British crime films ever made, inevitably you look to the character of Jack Carter. At which point it’s difficult not to dial up a stock image of Michael Caine in a midnight blue mohair suit and Aquascutum raincoat, pints in thin glasses, Gitanes cigarettes, Ford Cortinas and big men out of shape. But to fully understand the unique place Carter has in the evolution of British crime writing, it’s important to place him in context as Lewis originally intended. An ultra-real small town enforcer, violent, sadistic, irretrievably flawed, shouldering the burden of guilt; one of us maybe, if we dare to think it, taken a wrong turn, corrupted and unflinching. While he’s not entirely without precedent, emerging from the roll call of irredeemably damned fictional villains that begins with Bill Sikes and gives us, among others, Kersh’s Harry Fabian and Greene’s Pinkie Brown, Jack Carter’s consuming determination for revenge and his inability to be reasoned with exceeds every other lawless, amoral protagonist who’d been before. His appeal owes much to the traits Patricia Highsmith ascribes to the ‘sleuth hero’; able, she wrote, to ‘beat women, be brutal and sexually unscrupulous’ knowing the ‘public will still cheer them on because they are chasing “something worse than themselves, presumably”’. In Carter’s case, for much of the novel, that’s only just true. Lewis makes it plain that Carter is a psychopath, a misogynist, a torturer and killer; yet he challenges us not to identify with him as he grinds, beats and bruises through his manifestly personal crusade.
The story is straightforward. In terms of structure, it resembles a classic ‘outsider’ Western: Jack Carter, a fixer and enforcer in the employ of London gangsters, the Kray/Richardson-like Fletcher brothers, returns to his home town for the funeral of his brother, Frank. He suspects Frank, who never touched hard liquor, but was found drunk on whisky and dead at the wheel of his car, has been murdered. Thursday through to Sunday, Jack pursues the truth about the circumstances of Frank’s death. The loner villain turned detective, antagonising associates and adversaries, refusing to stop, even when notice to cease and desist reaches him from the Fletchers.
Making Scunthorpe (unnamed), the surrounding towns and villages and the northern Lincolnshire landscape integral to the story was a masterstroke. Lewis brought characters from his Soho observations and gave them licence to wander the rain-washed streets, dead end alleys and riverside wastelands of his youth. In a vision of the industrial north untouched by London’s swinging pop culture and faux hippy mysticism, he saw beyond the optimism and free love sloganeering of the age and committed to a compelling vision of the place he knew. It begins with Carter’s entry to Scunthorpe by train, a journey Lewis had made on countless occasions. Set apart from the main text, the description of the heat, smoke and blast furnace glow hanging over this nameless rained-on town reads like a voiceover. Lewis shifts from Jack Carter’s dominant first person voice to the second person to describe a ‘Disney version of the Dawn of Creation’. Dawn of creation or descent into hell. No post-war British crime novel had opened with such a bold, panoramic statement of a place you’d never visited and probably never would.
Scunthorpe’s sense of dislocation and geographical anonymity is crucial. Far from swinging London, the town’s sole concession to fashionable modernity is a shop called ‘Hurdy Gurdy’ which, Jack observes, sells ‘poove clothes and military uniforms’ and had once been Rowson’s the grocers. An incongruous splash of King’s Road colour amongst the browns, greys and beiges that bring to mind Larkin’s ‘grim head-scarved wives’. Teenagers hanging around outside Scunthorpe Baths in ‘open neck shirts and Walker Brothers’ haircuts’ are conspicuously behind the times, as if a watery version of the swinging sixties is only now spilling into the provinces as the decade closes.
Jack Carter arrives with the air of a man whose experience of London’s clubs and clip joints, and the status afforded by working for the Fletchers, make him a cut above his local adversaries. Yet, before long, he reverts to the creed of the small town enforcer, losing himself in tight, terraced streets he knows well. Here, Lewis uses a succession of nearly, but not quite, street names and place names: Lindum Street becomes Linden Street; Jackson Road becomes Jackson Street, the Carters’ family home a short distance from the outskirts of town and the Wolds beyond.
Scunthorpe is a grey rainswept version of the classic one-street frontier town. There is no hiding place. On the edge sits the dilapidated house Albert Swift runs as a brothel. We meet Greer – chain-smoking, hair in curlers – and two grubby kids, both girls. They’re all glued to the television. The emphysemic Swift, Jack’s one-time mentor, for whom he served a spell in prison, slumps in his chair, too old and sick for work. He’s married Lucille, Greer’s sister, a prostitute, and takes a cut of her earnings. There’s a baby in a carrycot on the kitchen table, unattended as Lucille is having sex with an off-shift steelworker in the back bedroom. When one of the two small girls rushes to open the door for the punter on his way out, shrieking goodbyes and grinning as Greer and Lucille lose themselves in the pages of a mail order catalogue, the suggestion is that the child, too, will be earning a similar living before long. Lewis has a gift for the seedy, the bleak observances of an underclass existence. No one here needs reminding that they’re peripheral, disposable.
More than once, Lewis spoke in interviews of how he’d tried to give Jack Carter a ‘family feeling’. Whether this relates to his niece, Doreen, or his brother – present throughout the novel in a sequence of reminiscences – these relationships, never less than complex, are essential to understanding his motivations. Frank, we learn, was hard working and dourly conventional. A man not unlike Harry Lewis. As Jack moves through what was once their family home with Frank’s open coffin in the front room, his brother’s life is reduced to a collection of possessions, many of which, it’s fair to assume, had been Lewis’s own at one time or another: pulp western novels by Max Brand and JT Edson; spy thrillers by Alistair MacLean and Ian Fleming; Winston Churchill’s and Guy Gibson’s war memoirs; sports books by Bobby Charlton and Bill Bowes; records of brass bands, a handful of middling jazz LPs, a Vaughan Williams record and, notably, a Tony Hancock comedy album. The effort that Frank had put into making good around the house – newish wallpaper, carpets and shelves and boxed-in television cabinets with a space for the Radio and TV Times – needles Jack, perhaps because of its sheer ordinariness. By comparison, Frank’s own room is drably austere with its iron frame bed, pre-war tallboy and wardrobe. Jack stubs out his cigarette on the linoleum. At the back of the wardrobe, he finds the shotgun they’d scrimped to buy between them as kids, each taking a turn to carry it to the river to shoot.
To begin with, then, Lewis paints Carter’s desire for revenge as a familial obligation; justice meted out because that’s the way things must be: what you do to mine, I do to you. Jack’s status demands that the murder of his brother be avenged, but Lewis reveals his need to settle the score is fuelled equally by guilt. In the years he’s been away, he has felt little other than contempt for his brother. He reminisces how, as kids, Frank made him feel ashamed after ‘penny a wank’ sessions with Valerie Marshbanks. Later, he recalls the billiard hall face-off when, as teenagers, they encounter a younger, tougher Albert Swift and his gang. Jack is shamed by his brother’s refusal to fight Swift after a head butt gives him a bloody nose. He fronts up, knowing he’ll take a beating, as if somehow that will compensate. When Frank staunches the flow of blood with a clean handkerchief, Jack finds it repellent, a sign of weakness. It marks the beginning of his descent into criminality and the souring of the brothers’ relationship.
Worse still is Jack’s self-loathing at conceiving a child with Muriel, his brother’s plain-looking, mucky minded wife-to-be, the result of a drunken fuck on the front room carpet, shortly before they were married. He describes how Muriel wrote to Frank after he’d discovered her affair with a Pakistani neighbour and she’d left. She claims Doreen is Jack’s daughter, not his. Frank simply and quietly tells Jack that he never wants to see him again. It is the last time they speak.
Jack visits the place on ‘top road’ where Frank’s car had crashed. In reality, this is the A1077 Winterton Road near Dragonby, running across the Wolds from Barton-upon-Humber, through the villages of South Ferriby and Winterton, twisting steeply into Scunthorpe. Jack reminisces about Frank and their ride to ‘Back Hill’ as kids, describing the town, the Wolds, the river beyond, and the sky that was ‘wider than any other sky could be’. There, as they lay on their backs in sunshine, Frank had daydreamed of playing drums in a jazz band like Gene Krupa. America was the Promised Land. Freedom an open road, a drape suit and a shirt worn without a tie ‘like Richard Widmark’. Returning to town, Jack’s American reverie is confronted by the kitsch reality of ersatz ranch-style houses in the affluent suburbs.
Thread by thread, Lewis unpicks the relationship between the brothers. It would be the first of a series of close, usually interdependent, connections between men that he would write. It’s evident that Frank’s notions of right and wrong are at the heart of Jack’s internal struggle; they share an inclination to shut out unpalatable truths, compartmentalising thought and feeling. Now, back home in Scunthorpe, with memories rekindled and his brother dead, fuelled by whisky, bitterness and revenge, Jack is unravelling.
None of the principal characters Lewis writes about in Jack’s Return Home is honest, least of all with themselves. To varying degrees, all suffer from the corrosive effects of lying, of lies compounding lies, of the habit of manipulation and the paranoia it feeds. Truth is a device deployed to conceal greater untruth. Everybody smiles a smile which isn’t a smile; laughter betrays a deeper knowing. When Jack meets Margaret, the prostitute with whom Frank had a relationship, she smiles in a way that makes Jack think he’s missed something. The landlady’s smile, had it surfaced, he knows could only have been sarcastic; the barman, Keith, gives a grotesque half smile at Carter’s suggestion that Frank committed suicide. The initial verbal sparring between Jack and Eric Paice produces a virtual symphony of smiles, Eric giving ‘the biggest smile ever’ as Carter tries to find out who he’s working for. When Jack tracks him to Cyril Kinnear’s casino, Lewis writes a perfectly pitched old chums together routine over a game of poker that barely conceals the enmity between them.
Carter is an inveterate user of people, particularly women. Encountering Edna Garfoot, his prospective middle aged landlady for the weekend, he sums her up on the basis of whether or not she’ll be up for sex, largely, it seems, determined by the colour of her underwear. He’s polite, almost charming, in order to get what he wants. He uses Keith, the young barman, playing on the lad’s naivety. With the help of a few large scotches, Jack strings him along on the promise of a few quid and the chance to help find out what happened to Frank without making him aware of the risk attached. In the wake of the beating Keith receives, Jack offers money. Lies and exploitation are part of his code. What happens to Keith is of little consequence.
Carter’s path to retribution leaves behind a trail of damaged lives. The more he drinks – and he drinks a lot – the more he struggles to keep his paranoia in check. Where he finds those who might be friends, he uses, then alienates, them. His intimacy with his landlady, Edna, is because she is disposable, an older woman he no more cares for than the barman who pours his pint. That said, she is unique among the women in Jack’s Return Home in that she offers a glimmer of resistance. Returning to his lodgings following his ill-informed confrontation with Cliff Brumby, Jack encounters Edna, roughed up by Thorpe’s men. She accuses him of murdering the wrong man – assuming correctly that killing Brumby had been his intention – and reminds him how easily he was duped. At first his response is offhand, then silent; she mocks him and he loses his temper. She hits him and he embraces her forcefully, pinning her arms underneath her whilst massaging the bruise on her breast that Thorpe’s boys have given her. Whatever resistance she had shown is subdued in Carter’s intimate pain and pleasure foreplay.
Lewis raises the stakes with the Saturday morning arrival of Peter the Dutchman and Con McCarty, sent by the Fletchers from London to bring Carter back. Interrupting Jack and Edna’s morning fuck, a naked Carter grabs the shotgun. Con and Peter mug their way through the ‘you know you won’t use it’/‘the gun he means’ lines. A twisted Bethnal Green incarnation of Hemingway’s assassins in The Killers, Con is affable, but a killer nonetheless; Peter, a sadistic homosexual with a reputation for taking pleasure in hurting women.
In contrast with the easy conquest of Edna Garfoot, Jack’s libido fails with Brumby and Kinnear’s more glamorous confidante, his ‘fairy Godmother’, Glenda. After a few large scotches, a degree of flirting and blue movie wordplay, when Glenda goes down on him, he can’t respond. Compared with his control over Edna Garfoot, impotence with Glenda is significant. Lewis seems to be pointing the finger at the root of his character’s contempt for women and perhaps his own. The scene, pivotal in the drama which follows, suggests a deeper insight into Carter’s motivations. Glenda’s response to his poor performance is to lead Jack to the bedroom where a film projector is set up to play porn movies. The bedroom colour scheme is hotter – a deep orange carpet and red silk counterpane, floor to ceiling mirrors and a plain white wall which functions as a projector screen. Glenda screens ‘Schoolgirl Wanks’, a shambolic cipher of a blue movie; more importantly, Jack witnesses Doreen being made to go down on Albert Swift and take a spanking from Glenda. Jack drags Glenda to the bathroom, wrapped in the silk counterpane, and repeatedly pushes her under the bathwater. He threatens to cut her with the knife he’s taken from Con McCarty until she tells him all she knows about the set-up for the film, who had involved Doreen and why.
Jack goes after Albert Swift, a Saturday afternoon pursuit that begins as Eddie Waring commentates on a Hull Kingston Rovers and St Helens rugby league match on the television. It’s hard to imagine a more resolutely ‘northern’ chase, more specifically a Scunthorpe chase. When Albert runs towards the steelworks’ western entrance on Brigg Road, he’s running for the town’s industrial heart. Carter keeps pace as Albert falters, falls, picks himself up and runs again. Lewis describes the narrow gauge railway and the pans transporting molten furnace waste. Carter corners Albert. He comes clean, explaining that it was Cliff Brumby who’d wanted Doreen ‘pulled’, that they hadn’t known her father was Jack’s brother. Albert’s protestations and pleadings fall on deaf ears. When Carter stabs him twice, then stands back to watch him die, you sense it’s as much for what he did to humiliate Frank in the billiard hall all those years before as for Doreen and the film. The violence is close, unflinching.
Similarly, when Peter takes Doreen hostage, she watches in horror as Jack, effecting a rescue, beats him until his fists are ‘slippery’ with blood. She rejects him, adamant that she won’t go with him to South Africa, and we see her for the abused, confused and vulnerable young woman she has undoubtedly become. Later, Jack drives to where she is staying with a friend with the intention of giving her money, but is thwarted by the presence of the police. It seems Doreen is being cared for, making her the only character to come out of the novel with any hope for the future.
Carter’s affair and planned getaway to South Africa with Gerald Fletcher’s wife, Audrey, always seems delusional. As does his conviction that Gerald won’t find out about the affair with so many people in the know, most of whom Jack antagonises in one way or another. When Con McCarty tells him they’ve told Gerald about the affair, Carter knows Audrey will be beaten up, possibly cut and disfigured. His stomach turns at the prospect. Attempts to reach her fail. Calling contacts in London, he discovers that Gerald has done ‘the worst’ and arranged for the doctor, ‘Camm’, to treat Audrey to keep her away from hospital. Carter refuses to persuade her to escape to South Africa and wait for him, instructing Maurice to tell her he’ll follow and make her believe it’s the truth. The implication is that he has no intention of remaining with her. He has ceased to care about anything but revenge.
Lewis brings Jack Carter to the banks of the River Humber for the novel’s final scenes. This is the real ‘home’ of the title, author and character sharing a childhood playground. A place of escape: Jack and Frank from their father’s beatings; Lewis from grammar school taunts, bullying teachers and a repressive home life. This is the final ‘return’. Lewis slows the rhythm of the prose, reflecting the river’s steady ebb and flow, measured steps towards a reckoning. The Humber mud ripples with dawn colours. Carter takes in the brickworks’ walls, briar and elderberry growing wild, the roofless shells of the tileries, the remains of a burned-out landing stage, kilns and vats full of old bricks and rainwater. He reminisces about childhood games of tracking and hunting.
Whether Carter’s hubris means he believes himself invincible, indispensable, or is beyond caring, his judgement is distorted by revenge. Earlier he has proven himself an effective streetfighter, dishing out a beating to Thorpe’s men. Up against Eric Paice one-to-one on home ground by the river, Carter is off guard. He catches up with Eric and, at gunpoint, forces him to drink from the bottle of scotch he’s brought, just as Eric had with Frank. But in his moment of victory, Carter is careless. Eric stabs him. The blood pumps out ‘much too quickly’. Eric picks up the shotgun to finish Carter off. In a rain-sodden, blood and mud soaked irony, when he pulls the trigger, it explodes in his face, killing him instantly. Con McCarty arrives to find Carter bleeding; he walks away, leaving him to die. Finally, for Jack, ‘there is nothing, nothing at all’.
Lewis’s initial belief in the novel was dealt a blow when his agent, John Johnson, refused to handle the manuscript. He thought it too violent. As Jo recalls, the rejection came as a shock. ‘At the time, we had no money. That’s when Toby came along.’ Persuaded to seek a second opinion, Lewis sent a section of the manuscript to literary agent Toby Eady.
A relative newcomer to the London literary scene, Eady had originally worked in banking before becoming an agent in 1966. Branching out on his own, he set up Toby Eady Associates as an independent agency in 1968 and found himself inspired by emerging cultural ideas and changes in the way language was being used, particularly evident on stage at The Royal Court. ‘You had that wonderful man, Devine, changing what was on every month. And to stand at something like that was two shillings and sixpence. Half the audience would walk out because they were so offended. It wasn’t conventional theatre, but as an agent, you knew everything was being challenged.’
Although from vastly different backgrounds – Eady, son of the novelist, Mary Wesley, had attended Summerfields preparatory school, boarding school, and Oxford – he and Lewis shared a similar contempt for formal education. Learning by rote and beatings from teachers were as commonplace at Summerfields as a dressing down and a slap from Norman Goddard at Barton Grammar. Interviewed by Danny Danziger for the Independent in 1994, Eady explained how, after the first three weeks settling in period, new boys had been fair game. ‘The minute the three weeks were over, I was beaten. There wasn’t a reason: I was beaten as an example to the other boys.’ In common with Lewis, school had taught him to ‘hide what he really felt’.
I met Eady at the end of 2009 in his office at Orme Court, the same offices in which Jo had once typed letters for Associated London Scripts. An imperious presence, he sat behind a large desk uncluttered by anything resembling technology. I spoke with his associate about Lewis and my plans for the book. After what felt like a long time, Eady entered the conversation, speaking in general terms about London in the 1960s and the background to Jack’s Return Home in the days when underworld figures shared gaming tables with members of the aristocracy and cabinet ministers. He spoke guardedly about his friendship with Lewis, referring to the author’s ‘darkness’ and the way it had informed his writing. I asked about their first meeting. He recalled that Lewis had shown him the school exercise books with the first few handwritten chapters of Jack’s Return Home and, within a matter of weeks, had written the rest of the book.
Jo remembered it differently. ‘It didn’t happen like that. I typed it. I can remember Ted was very single-minded about that book. He went into the studio and he wrote. A thousand words a day was his goal and I’d type it. It was quick. When Toby came along, I think Ted told him he’d only got this small amount written, but really he’d got far more.’
It isn’t difficult to see why Eady was enthusiastic about Jack’s Return Home. No one had written a British gangster novel as relevant, hard-hitting and thoroughly authentic. It had pace and anger; it was relentless, a fusion of hard-boiled crime storytelling and the language and register of the best northern English fiction. It had Jack Carter, a grinding, sardonic, flawed and thoroughly ruthless protagonist – the singular vision of its cine-literate author. Nevertheless, Eady had difficulties placing Jack’s Return Home with editors whose expectations of the crime novel seemed to begin and end with the country house murders of a previous age. ‘Publishers wouldn’t touch it because of the language. It was considered ungrammatical.’ Eventually, he pitched the book to Peter Day, editor at Michael Joseph, the company which had published Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City in 1938 – one of the books which, along with Brighton Rock and James Curtis’s They Drive by Night, both published in 1938, had come closest to establishing a British noir tradition. Indeed, Curtis’s brooding ‘Lone-Wolf’ killer might be a precursor of Lewis’s embittered antiheroes. Thirty years on, in 1969, Peter Day was having to contend with a reader’s report on Lewis which said ‘he couldn’t write English’. Interviewed years later, Day acknowledged the university educated publishers’ readers weren’t ready for a novelist who ‘writes as he speaks’.
Lewis was devastated by the early criticism, but Eady persisted. ‘We read it aloud to the editors. It was Ted’s language and you couldn’t muck about with it.’ Day was won round and Michael Joseph agreed to publish. Eady secured Lewis a generous £6,000 advance for paperback, American and German rights. Peter Day travelled to Wicken Bonhunt for the weekend, and he and Lewis edited the book into shape.
Jack’s Return Home was published in hardback by Michael Joseph on 9 March 1970. The front cover image was another ‘designed by Ted Lewis’. Gil Potter (becoming the first man to appear as Jack Carter) is photographed wearing his own leather coat, a borrowed trilby hat and carrying a shotgun. On the morning I visited Wicken Bonhunt, with Barri Hooper as tour guide, he recalled how Lewis and Gil Potter had walked round the village searching for the ‘right wall’ on which to stage the photograph. He couldn’t remember which it was, although there were one or two potential candidates. I pulled back the overgrown ivy half-expecting to reveal faded white lettering.
Jack’s Return Home turned Lewis’s life around before it had reached the bookshop shelves. Under the title, ‘A Cracking Novel That Almost Died the Death’, Graham Lord’s Sunday Express review, published on 8 March 1970, tells the story of the book’s initial rejection and troubled journey into print. Describing a ‘fast, earthy and violent, but also extremely well written’ revenge thriller, Lord pays tribute to Lewis’s cinematic style which, he says, ‘makes compulsive reading’. He continues, ‘so is the case, you may say, with 100 other crime novels. But Mr Lewis scores not only with his story but the way he has written it. His ear for dialogue and his feeling for atmosphere are both remarkable. He conveys exactly the tight frustration of a small English town …’ Ted Lewis, he concludes, ‘is a name to watch’. Interviewed for the piece, Lewis once again tells the story of his own criminal associations and the realism he sought to convey:
‘When I was working on Yellow Submarine I got to know people on the fringe of the underworld – in protection and vice rackets – which gave me the idea for the book. Even after the recent trials like those of the Richardsons and Krays, people find it very difficult to believe that others can behave this way. I’ve tried to make it real. Perhaps in a novel it’s easier to make the public understand it.’
No one seems to have asked about the title. Consciously or otherwise, when Lewis named the novel Jack’s Return Home he was borrowing from the 1958 Hancock’s Half Hour episode. Listening to Hattie Jacques’s opening lament as Jack’s mother – ‘Tis thirteen years since our son, Jack, left this house to seek his fortune in the colonies, I wonder what has become of him …’ – it seems a wry nod to Lewis himself, perhaps a playful allusion to Bertha. It might also have been a tribute to Tony Hancock who had committed suicide in June 1968. Hancock had been notoriously self-critical, tormented by alcohol and marriage problems. Interviewed for Q magazine in 1989, Spike Milligan said of Hancock that ‘He ended up on his own. I thought, he’s got rid of everybody else, he’s going to get rid of himself and he did.’
Looking back, it’s almost impossible to understate both Lewis’s achievement in writing Jack’s Return Home and its subsequent impact on crime fiction. It was brave and ambitious, an expression of instinct crafted from a lifetime of pulp fiction, movie influences and real life observations. Jack’s Return Home had a depth which belied its status as a populist crime novel. It was on a par with its American forerunners for exactly that reason. It threw a light on the social, cultural and political in a way which other British writers hadn’t managed to pull off, at least not with anything like the same conviction or authenticity.
Lewis’s initial motivation might well have been the need to pay the mortgage and support Jo, Nancy and Sally, the couple’s second daughter having been born on 2 April 1970; but this was the novel he needed to write for so many other reasons. One after another he navigates autobiographical reference points: Brumby, a village outside Scunthorpe; Eric Paice, the writer of The Avengers and Dixon of Dock Green; Kinnear, the landlord of the Coach and Horses in Wicken Bonhunt; Doreen, married to his friend Gil Potter; Eddie Appleyard ‘a local’, a member of an old Barton family. Representatives of Lewis’s world are reimagined and cast in the one inhabited by Jack Carter. When asked about his methods in a 1969 interview, he was unapologetic:
‘You have to be ruthless. When you write you are drawing on your own emotions and relationships, your family and friends – and if this means you are exploiting people, well, it has to be done. My wife has come to terms with this now, I think – but my parents, for example, still find it painful to be “used”.’
Lewis and his contemporaries had ridden the post-war cultural escalator. They had the advantages and opportunities of grammar school and higher education. For the most part, the art school crowd escaped the white-collar humdrum of day jobs which would have been their lot a generation earlier. In Jack Carter’s burning disillusionment and confused sense of self and belonging, Lewis blurred the boundaries between his own and his character’s experience. Jack’s Return Home served as revenge for the rejection and humiliation endured in the town he left behind. The part of himself that would be Jack Carter poured onto the page, most memorably in the scene at Kinnear’s Casino, complete with its ‘British B-feature’ décor. In one of the novel’s most revealing passages, Carter casts his contemptuous eye over the ‘farmers, garage proprietors, owners of chains of cafes, electrical contractors, builders, and quarry owners’. These were Harry Lewis’s masonic brothers and their families, the small businessmen, and their ‘terrible offspring’ with ‘ex-grammar school girlfriends’. His greatest scorn is reserved for their wives ‘sick to their stomachs with jealousy of someone or something’. He concludes they were ‘the kind of people who made me know I was right’. It’s a withering critique of the post-war generation and their provincial, materialist aspirations, as if to say: you had all this opportunity and this is what you chose to do with it. Interviewed by Brian Doyle, Lewis admitted that he’d put something of himself, or himself as he might have been, into the work. He claimed this was incidental, his subconscious at play:
‘I had to imagine how it would be if I was involved in the same happenings that Carter was. So whether or not a lot of deep, subconscious leanings and desires came out in the character, I don’t know. Maybe there’s some of Carter in me – and some of me in Carter. Perhaps, deep down, I would like to have been a tough, masterful thug like Carter. But I think I’m happier as I am.’
The question that no one asked was the degree to which he’d invested himself in the character of Frank Carter. Those ‘deep, subconscious leanings’ might just as equally have created parallels between him and Frank as between him and Jack. The truth of which seems strikingly obvious in hindsight with Frank Carter forced to drink whisky to soften him up before he is killed.
What makes Jack’s Return Home the greatest British crime novel of its era, the place where British noir begins, isn’t simply that it was more extreme in its observations, darker, more violent, earthier, and more grounded in reality than its predecessors and contemporaries. Or that Jack Carter is the definitive antihero, the ultimate outsider, a hitherto unrepentant sinner faced with his Maker. Neither is it that Lewis achieved such a note-perfect synthesis of American hardboiled and British social realism that there was no longer a distinction. It’s that Jack’s Return Home was all of those things. It was literary, cinematic, and psychological. It was unique, fully formed. A stone cold crime classic.