Getting Carter

Nick Triplow’s soulful biography of enigmatic British crime fiction pioneer, Ted Lewis (author of Get Carter ), is one of those rare works of literary investigation that relentlessly asserts its own status as art. Like Philip Hoare’s Melville in The Whale or James Sallis’ Chester Himes: A Life , Triplow more than uncovers the forgotten godfather of the modern British crime story; he also spins a noir morality tale with a poetry all its own. Mike Hodges’ 1971 cinema classic was based on a book ca