The Fall to Greatness of Ted Lewis by John A. A. Logan
It’s been claimed that British noir crime fiction either began, or was revived, in 1970 with the publication of Ted Lewis’ novel, Jack’s Return Home. The film of the novel came out right away in 1971, with the new title, Get Carter. It starred Michael Caine in the role of Carter. Newcastle makes a pretty strong impression in the film, too, though this breaks a bit from the novel, which is not so definite on the story’s location, noting only that Jack “changes trains at Doncaster” in order to reach his home town. It’s also been pointed out that, although Jack’s Return Home is a British noir novel, its roots are not in British fiction at all, but, as David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, has observed, go back instead to American writers such as Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler. Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain may be somewhere back there in the mix also. Interestingly, Jim Thompson, the “dime store Dostoyevsky”, has also shared an epithet with Ted Le...