Books I Wish I'd Written, part 1

I was on my way to a book launch. It was a humid late afternoon, still stinking hot. The southerly buster had cancelled. I got there early and killed some time cruising the shelves of the bookshop. The air-conditioning was bliss. As usual, I wanted to buy about a dozen books. As usual, I didn’t have any money. I had just enough to buy a copy of the book being launched and have it signed by the author (the minimum of good manners) and then to catch a bus three-quarters of the way home after I had drunk as many free wines as I could without looking like that was the only reason I was there. Anyway, before I got too depressed smelling all the nice clean new releases, I decided to take my time killing someplace else.

Not far away was a second-hand bookshop. I crossed the road. Maybe I could squeeze a two-dollar Elmore Leonard into the budget for the bus trip home? Just in case the launch was a particularly literary affair, where everybody talked about the significance of place. Or you never knew your luck: what about a battered old Cornell Woolrich, or something by W.R. Burnett? (I’ve been after High Sierra for many moons.) I went in and had a look.

The crime section was nothing but flabby airport stuff. Five bucks a kilo. I scanned it anyway, hopeful, squinting hard at the frayed and faded spines. I began with the A’s…then the B’s…the C’s…by the time I got to K my head was starting to hurt. I made it to L. Thank God. Who knows when I might have discovered him if not for the split-second decision to drag my eyes just that little further along? Who knows when my life might have been so enriched, if ever?

Ted Lewis.

All I knew before this moment was that Get Carter was a brilliant, terrific film. That it and The Third Man, plus the TV series The Professionals, were the best things to ever come out of the UK as regards film and television. So when I saw CARTER written on the spine, my memory tagged it and I reached up and tugged the slim book out. A 1971 Pan Books paperback. Michael Caine on the cover, dreary black gravel beach beneath his black leather shoes, double-barrel shotgun high in the air. Originally titled Jack’s Return Home. I opened it up and read the first line: The rain rained. I felt cooler already.

The bastards wanted ten dollars. I paid it. I went to the book launch, drank the wine and snuck out without buying the author’s book. I’d get it later. When I got home, I started to read. I kept reading until it was all finished. The next day, I started again.

Great films based on books have a tendency to be based on not very good ones. But here was a unique, rare situation: a great film based on an even greater book. I’d never heard of Ted Lewis before and now I was wondering why. Exquisite, hard, lean writing, coupled with an intense, fast-moving revenge story. Brothers and daughters and fathers, the past and the present, truth and justice and fate: it was all in there, like a Greek tragedy.

I often get asked to list my top five or top ten novels. My favourites or what I consider the best. But the most instructive list an author could ever compile would be the one listing the books he or she wished they had written. It’s a subtle difference, but I think it gets to the heart of the matter more directly. No academic considerations or articulate defences of your choices or intellectual argument. Like Keith Richards said about rock 'n roll, it should happen from the neck down. It's all about bottom end. Nobody’s watching: it’s just you and what you like. And boy oh boy, Mr Lewis, I like…