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Tag Archives: Hell is a City (1960)
Book Review: Getting Carter, Ted Lewis & the Birth of Brit Noir
The time is past when one could accurately describe Ted Lewis as a lost or under appreciated author. His best books have recently been re-released, Mike Hodge’s 1971 film, Get Carter, based on Lewis second novel, Jack’s Return Home, continues to be seen as a crime cinema classic, and Lewis’s profound, albeit posthumous, influence on the origins on Brit Noir is regularly reiterated by many of the leading lights of crime fiction.
But we know little about Lewis as a person and the influences on his work. Nick Triplow’s Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir is obviously the product of considerable time, energy and shoe leather spent hunting down the facts of Lewis’s life. That Triplow doesn’t completely succeed in unravelling all the mysteries surrounding Lewis’s spectacular rise and fall is not for want of trying and, it must be stressed, the book is none the worse for it.
Contemporary literary culture, with its focus on the writer’s journey, literature as personal confession and the book scribe as media celebrity, is a relatively new phenomena. Lewis went to his grave without leaving a detailed archive of papers or journals and having only done a handful of newspaper interviews. He had neither the time nor, one suspects, inclination to record his inner most thoughts.… Read more
Posted in Book Reviews, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Crime film, David Goodis, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Pulp fiction, Stanley Baker, Ted Lewis
Tagged Cy Endfield, David Goodis, GBH, Get Carter (1971), Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir, Hell Drivers (1957), Hell is a City (1960), Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, Jack Carter's law, Jack's Return Home, Joesph Losey, Mike Hodges, Nick Triplow, Ted Lewis, The Criminal (1960), Val Guest
Pulp Friday: Hell is a City
A very quick Pulp Friday offering, Maurice Procter’s Hell is a City, published by Arrow Books, 1957. I am not sure, but this edition may even be the first British release of the novel in paperback.
Procter was a former Manchester policeman turned crime writer, best known for his police procedurals featuring the character of Detective Chief Inspector Harry Martineau, based in a tough fictional northern England industrial town. Proctor penned 14 Martineau novels, which appeared between 1954 and 1969, of which Hell is a City was the first.
Two things have got me thinking about the Martineau books. The first is my PhD research at the moment, which has been looking at the prevalence of American style detective and PI crime fiction in the 1950s in the US, UK and Australia. Procter’s work is different from a lot of post-war British crime pulp, which was set in America.
I’ve also been reading Nick Triplow’s excellent biography of English crime writer, Ted Lewis, Getting Carter (which I’ll be reviewing on this site in the coming weeks).
Among the popular cultural touchstones, Triplow writes, that would inspire Lewis’s work, including the iconic series of British gangster novels featuring the character of Jack Carter, was the 1960 film adaption of Hell is City by Val Guest.… Read more
Posted in British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime film, Pulp fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Stanley Baker, Ted Lewis, Vintage pulp paperback covers
Tagged Detective Chief Inspector Harry Martineau, Getting Carter, Hell Drivers (1957), Hell is a City (1960), Jack Carter, Maurice Procter, Nick Triplow, Stanley Baker, Ted Lewis, The Criminal (1960), Val Guest