Gangsters, Goons And 'Grievious Bodily Harm' In Ted Lewis' London
That's the simple version, anyway. But Lewis doesn't tell this story simply. Instead, he deftly intercuts two time-frames. One is set in the present in the off-season resort of Mablethorpe where George keeps a seaside hideout and finds himself getting involved with Lesley, a blonde who may really be a brunette, or a brunette who may really be a blonde. The other storyline takes place in London — nicknamed The Smoke — and chronicles what happened with his wife, lawyer and sidekick that forces George to hide out in Mablethorpe. As we hopscotch between present and past, The Sea and The Smoke, we discover that George is so mired in events that he doesn't fully grasp his own story.
The same may have been true of Lewis, a self-destructive sort who died at 42. He was a boozer, a womanizer, and I've heard it said, not immune to participating in dodgy enterprises. True or not, his sense of the criminal life is utterly convincing. You won't find any debonair cat burglars in his world. He knows the appetites that drive violent men, knows the codes of honor that give the underworld a kind of morality and knows how the British ruling class has its finger in every pie — even the illegal ones.
Not one to glamorize criminals, Lewis is brilliant at showing us the seedy world they inhabit. 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. It's matched by the disillusioned pungency of GBH's vision of off-season Mablethorpe with its talent-challenged cabaret, shuttered amusement park, and gigantic hotel bar that George describes as having "all the charm of a crematorium." Lewis really knows — and feels — the places he's writing about.
And his work cuts to the bone, both literally and metaphysically. At his best, he 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. Now, it might be a tad much to call GBH a tragedy. George lacks the requisite nobility of soul — he's a thuggish porn baron, after all. But his story is one of hubris, and it leads to an inexorable fall. The cocky George is a clever, masterful man who learns — too late, of course — that he's not quite as clever and masterful as he thought.
Read an excerpt of GBH