Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

by Ted Lewis

Overview

With an Afterword by Nick Triplow

Published in North America for the first time—the final novel featuring Jack Carter (Get Carter, Jack Carter’s Law) has London’s slickest operator journeying to a Spanish villa to protect a wise-cracking Italian-American mobster.

Jack Carter is not thrilled when his frustratingly unprofessional employers—London mob kingpins Gerald and Les Fletcher—force him to take a vacation. Jack doesn’t like leaving the business in other people’s hands, but the company villa in Spain promises sunshine and some time to plot his next move. Jack soon finds he is on anything but a vacation. The villa is already inhabited by a cowardly house steward and a knuckle-dragging American gangster. Jack has apparently been sent to protect the American, who has turned informant. There are few things that Jack Carter hates more than surprises. Informants being chief among them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616955083
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/04/2014
Series:	The Jack Carter Trilogy , #3
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Born in Manchester, England, Ted Lewis (1940-1982) spent most of his youth in Barton-upon-Humber in the north of England. After graduating from Hull Art School, Lewis moved to London and first worked in advertising before becoming an animation specialist, working on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. His novels are the product of his lifelong fascination with the criminal lifestyle of London’s Soho district and the down-and-out lifestyle of the English factory town. Lewis' novels pioneered the British noir school. He authored nine novels, the second of which was famously adapted in 1971 as the now iconic Get Carter, which stars Michael Caine.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Ted Lewis

"Carter is no hero, killing rival villains without compunction, manipulating one and all (male or female) to his advantage. But he does have a darkly contagious sense of humor, and his observing eye is keen and mean, as always."
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

"At his best, [Lewis] 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."
—NPR's Fresh Air

"He is an example of how dangerous writing can really be when it is done properly, and Ted Lewis’s writing proves that he never ran away from the page. Because with Lewis, the page was the battle.”
—Derek Raymond, author of He Died with His Eyes Open

"Lewis remains a sharp social anatomist of the hopelessness and soul-sucking dinginess of his era. Starting with [Get Carter], Lewis sketched the horror of a Britain where home was the kitchen sink, the sodden bar towel, the decrepit industrial landscape: a kingdom from which Carter and his like cannot escape."
—Barnes and Noble Review

“Ted Lewis is one of the most influential crime novelists Britain has ever produced, and his shadow falls on all noir fiction, whether on page or screen, created on these isles since his passing. I wouldn’t be the writer I am without Ted Lewis. It’s time the world rediscovered him.”
—Stuart Neville, author of The Ghosts of Belfast

“Lewis is major.”
—Max Alan Collins, author of Road to Perdition

"Ted Lewis cuts to the bone."
—James Sallis, author of Drive

"When it comes to dealing with your actual hard man, no one does it better than the late, great Ted Lewis."
—John Williams

"Rereading all three books, I was struck by the influence Lewis' novels have had on so many current hard-boiled writers whose main characters are hard cases (certainly Lee Child's Jack Reacher is a literary son). Written in first person and present tense, Lewis' trilogy has an immediacy that belies its age."
—Carole Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"The year's big event in international noir is the republication of the Jack Carter Trilogy by England's Ted Lewis. Few crime writers could inject menace and desperation into small talk the way Lewis did, and he had a fine eye for period detail."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Publisher