Jack Carter's Law (2 page)

I decided that Quarry would be a hit man, not just a thief, and that the stories would be told in the first-person. In the opening chapter of
Quarry
(1975), the lead character murders a priest—it was my way of telling readers, “Now’s your opportunity to get off the bus.” I can’t say how Quarry compares to Jack Carter—both are very much men of their home countries—but as written by Lewis, Carter makes Parker look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

The Carter novels are not only told in the first person but in present tense, usually an unbearable approach but, in the hands of an artistic craftsman like Lewis, a dazzling way to keep the action in the now, all while staying invisible as a technique. Carter is not only unapologetic about his activities and attitude, it never occurs to him an apology might be necessary. He is that rare character—one that we quickly understand but who remains able to surprise us at every turn. Oddly, he often surprises us as much by those he chooses not to kill as by those he does.

Jack Carter’s Law
is not for the faint-hearted crime fiction aficionado, and for the American fan, the experience can be challenging, as Lewis immerses us not only in the milieu of the London underworld of the late ’60s, but in its pungent slang as well. I have a hunch that even readers in the UK might need some help here. But like any good writer using slang that might be unfamiliar, Lewis is careful to provide context that will show the way. It doesn’t take long, for example, to realize “the Filth” are the police.

In
Get Carter/Jack’s Return Home
, the protagonist is operating as a kind of unlicensed private eye, very much a Mike Hammer type seeking revenge over the murder of his brother. That element of shared humanity—who among us doesn’t understand the desire to avenge a murdered friend or sibling?—gives the first Carter novel an aspect of protagonist justification that makes the uncomfortable experience more palatable. It’s a mystery novel, after all—we’re looking for a murderer, and he or she will be brought to rough justice. (Just
how
rough, we would never have imagined.)

But in the prequel
Jack Carter’s Law
, the mob enforcer has nothing remotely noble in mind. His job is to find a squealer and kill him, and his motivation is to keep himself and his bosses out of jail. In this way,
Jack Carter’s Law
is even tougher and more uncompromising than its famous predecessor. And perhaps it’s why no prequel film came about from it, and why the two later Carter novels were only modestly successful.

Still, it’s also an indication that those two follow-up novels were not just fast-buck affairs—nothing at all pandering is to be found in their pages. Lewis was too crafty an artist to give his audience a free ride. But he gives them a ride, all right, and a wild one, the only shock absorber that deadpan understatement from the narrator himself.

As gritty as Lewis is in
Jack Carter’s Law
, he still reveals the influence of Chandler, although Lewis doesn’t strain for poetry in the way that Chandler sometimes can (and that all of his imitators do). Lewis finds the simile that doesn’t seem unlikely coming from a hard man’s mouth, as when he describes the drawing of curtains making “a noise like paper money,” and when he describes a gay joint as smelling “like the inside of a handbag.” Not that poetry is absent in Lewis, who points out that “scraps of cloud race across a cold-glowing moon.”

The Spillane influence is here as well, and for all the American critics (then and now) who like to diss and dismiss Mickey, his impact was felt enormously throughout crime fiction in the ’50s and ’60s, and not just in America. Spillane was the most widely translated author of his day and was particularly popular in Great Britain—he liked to say they translated him into English (referencing words like “center” becoming “centre” and “color” becoming “colour”).

The grittiness of Carter’s underworld—stale smoky bars and glittering ganglord’s pads and grungy underlings’ flats—is as vivid and surreal as the New York of 1950s Spillane. And Lewis describes all of this in mesmerizing detail, painting scenes with care and in no hurry. Elmore Leonard was a crime fiction writer of understandable renown, but his famous “rules of writing” includes: “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” This clearly does not apply to Lewis.

Consider this: “The only lighting in the hall apart from the rectangles above the billiard tables comes from behind the counter, illuminating the Kit Kats and Mars Bars and the cellophane of the cigarette packets beneath the dirty glass of the display cases.” That’s just one sentence in a long paragraph that puts you inside the Premier Social and Sporting Club in a way screenwriter Leonard never could, or at least didn’t bother to.

The most overt Spillane influence has nothing to do with tough guys or murder mystery—it’s the breakneck manner in which Lewis describes action, pulling the reader in and down into a breathless captivity marked by long sentences and scant punctuation, where run-on sentences and the over-use of “and” are something the copy editor will just have to fucking live with.

But Spillane’s fever-dream Manhattan is never as real as Lewis’s London, and while Hammer is a good guy who defeats bad guys with their own methods, Carter is simply a bad guy with methods. Neither Hammer nor Parker would lose any sleep over killing him. So why do we care about him?

We’re back to Lewis, the craftsman, the artist, who knows that locking us inside Carter’s first-person narration means we’ll early on decide whether or not to take the ride. Lewis also knows that as bad a man as Carter is, he remains the best man in his world—which is the real secret behind writing a story about a criminal protagonist. The people around Carter are even worse than he is. Like Stark’s Parker, Lewis’s Carter is a professional and not gratuitously mean. Even when he hits a woman, Jack only gives what is needed at the time to complete the job.

Along those lines, you’ll in these pages meet a compelling and even tragic character, Lesley, who demonstrates Carter’s complicated take on how a woman with information should be handled. When Lesley’s mistreated, he saves her; when she misbehaves, he slaps her; when someone else gives her more rough stuff than seems deserved to Carter, somebody might get killed over it. You may have guessed that political correctness is not an issue in Carter’s world or Lewis’s fiction.

In the end, Lewis is his own man, quirkily, defiantly so. Whatever he may owe to Chandler and Spillane, however he and Jack Carter may be compared to Richard Stark and Parker, no one can honestly say that anyone else ever wrote books like these before, which perhaps explains why Lewis is considered a cult favorite. Westlake—often termed such himself— once said, “Being a cult favorite is three readers short of the writer making a living.” Lewis, like Jim Thompson, did not live to see his work widely appreciated and applauded. But like Thompson, Lewis deserves discovery and major reevaluation.

What is Jack Carter’s law? Well, the title only
seems
to refer to the Old Bill (police), even if the American title of the book was
Jack Carter and the Law
. Carter’s law, filtered through his own off-kilter hooded-gazed point of view, is the law of the underworld, where a “grass” is a betrayer who must be coldly cut down, just as the killer of your brother must meet your fiery rage.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS is the author of the Shamus-winning Nathan Heller historical thrillers (
Ask Not
) and the graphic novel
Road to Perdition
, basis for the Academy Award-winning film. His innovative ’70s series, Quarry, has been revived by Hard Case Crime (
Quarry’s Choice
) and he has completed eight posthumous Mickey Spillane novels (
King of the Weeds
).

--

Cross

T
HE PARKED
R
OVER SHUDDERS
and sways in the wet wind that races down Plender Street. Plender Street is empty and lifeless except for the toffee papers and the newspapers and the fag packets that now and then are caught up in the swirling drizzle that’s slapping away against the steamy windows and deserted landings of the flats.

I look at my watch. Cross is late by forty minutes. Jesus, I could have been tucked up between clean sheets humping Audrey by now. As it is I might not even have the time, not with Gerald and Les breathing down my neck to find out what’s going on.

I look in the driving mirror and there’s a taxi coming round the corner, making spray like a corporation water cart. After it comes out of its drift the driver points it at the rear end of the Rover so I get out and walk to the back of the car. The taxi pulls in to the curb and the door opens and I get in. The taxi begins to move again.

“So where the fucking hell have you been?” I ask Cross, and he says, “It’s silly being like that, Jack. You know that. I mean, you ought to by now.”

“Don’t shoot shit at me,” I tell him. “You’ve never been late before.”

And he says, “No, but there’s never been a situation like this before, has there?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “You tell me. That’s what we pay you for.”

The cab smells of old cigarette ends and Cross’s damp raincoat. I pull the window down slightly and Cross takes his hands out of his coat pockets and places them in his lap and examines his fingernails like all the cheap
B-feature coppers do. I take out my cigarettes and my lighter and Cross’s eyelashes flicker when he realises that I’m not producing the envelope. He can wait, like I’ve had to.

The cab crosses Camden High Street and I light my cigarette and as I light it I look at my watch and wonder how long Audrey could risk waiting for me at the flat.

“All right, let’s be having it,” I say to Cross and Cross reaches up and takes hold of the passenger strap and looks out of the window and says, “Well, for a start, nobody knows where he is.”

“What are you talking about, nobody knows where he is? He was taken into West End Central three days ago. Mallory goes to see him two hours after he’s been picked up and
he goes to see him again yesterday for the appearance. Then Swann goes down again to await Her Majesty’s Pleasure. So what the fuck are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is that Swann never went back whence he came,” Cross says. “As far as I can discover he never even left Bow Street. He did, of course, but nobody saw him go. And as nobody saw him go, well . . . ”

Cross leans forward and taps on the partition and slides back the glass and says to the driver, “Turn round and stop on the other side of the road.”

The driver does as he’s told. Now it’s my turn to look out of the window. The rolling slope of Primrose Hill swings into view and beyond it the smudgy city shimmers through the steamy window. The cab stops and rain sweeps against its bodywork.

“I’ve asked everyone that can be asked,” Cross says, “and nobody knows a dickybird.”

“And so what do you think?”

Cross allows himself a faint grin. “Approximately the same as you,” he says.

When I don’t say anything Cross says, “Well, there
you are.”

Then he leans forward and slides open the partition again and tells the driver to take us back to Plender Street.

On the way Cross says, “If, for one reason or another, this turns out to be the last time we meet on a professional basis, I’d just like to be able to think that when you remember all the little favours I’ve done you and Gerald and Les, then you’ll forget you ever heard my name or saw my face.”

I put my hand in my inside pocket and take out the envelope and put it against Cross’s mouth and push upwards, causing the envelope tobuckle against the underside of his nose, forcing his head back onto the shelf behind the seat.

“Listen, cunt,” I tell him, “what’s in this envelope is all you get in return for your favours. And just remember this: I’m not so stupid that I don’t tumble you’re just telling me half of what you know, like you always do. So if there’s a time when there’s a few names flying this way and that don’t forget that yours begins with the third letter of the alphabet.”

The taxi draws up behind my Rover and Cross tries to get the envelope away from his face and says, “What I’ve told you is all I know.”