Repentance

Ted Lewis came across in the 1960s while working in advertising and animation; Soho also inspired his preoccupation with the area’s open secret of porn and all the cynicism and hypocrisy that went with it: it was a theme of Lewis’s, as well as a style — his way with fear and violence has the sickly sheen of porn. The producer who got Get Carter off the crowd was Michael Klinger, a man with extensive commercial interests in the Soho blue movie scene.

Thanks to the pioneering work of his excellent biographer and critic Nick Triplow, Ted Lewis is finally starting to get the respect he deserves. Lewis also wrote more sombre and more literary novels about the loneliness and vulnerability of his own boyhood in Humberside, including All the Way Home and All The Night Through (Triplow shrewdly calls this title “Sillitoe-esque”. I think it might also be Hemingway-esque, inspired by Across The River and Into The Trees).

Ted Lewis isn’t simply the Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler of Britain, much though he is inspired by the American masters of noir. With his vivid and uncomfortable scenes of boys and young men facing snobbery and trying desperately hard to fit in and get on, Lewis has a brilliant way with scenes of provincial life and the working-class north: a satirist and anatomist of British snobbery, along with casual racism and sexism. And more than that: his books are about shame and sin. Having developed a Lewis obsession myself, I won’t be happy until Plender or Jack’s Return Home find their place alongside Brighton Rock on the GCSE syllabus.

The Get Carter movie certainly has a strong sense of place. But not as strong as the book. There is the hilarious grimness of his description of Doncaster railway station: “Rain noiselessly emphasising the emptiness. The roller front of WH Smith’s pulled hard down.” Nothing shows the lack of interest in consumer service in 1970s Britain like that Smith’s roller front being “hard” down. Then there is the description of Frank’s shelf of books and LPs: “There were rows of Reader’s Digest, of Wide World, of Argosy, of Real Male… Above these were his records. Band of the Coldstream Guards, Eric Coates, Stan Kenton, Ray Anthony, Mel Tormé, Frankie Laine, Ted Heath, This is Hancock, Vaughan Williams.”

This is a superb, almost Mass Observationstyle snapshot of an aspirational, working-class household’s reading and listening matter. (My Uncle Don in Hendon had a shelf of LPs like that in the 1970s, only they were dominated by Perry Como.) And Eric Coates! The lightmusic composer who wrote “The Dam Busters March”! I have only read one other reference to him in fiction and that’s in Kingsley Amis’s autobiographical The Riverside Villas Murder where the grumpy father figure tells his teenage son to listen to Coates, not jazz.

Lewis’s novel Plender is a magnificent study of that perennially fascinating British sin: envy. Brian Plender is a crooked private investigator who runs a blackmail scam, luring respectable older chaps into S&M scenarios with young girls via small ads in skin-crawling “specialist” magazines — he secretly films them and demands money. Then he finds a way to blackmail a suave young photographer called Peter Knott who used to humiliate him and look down on him when they were at school together, and it ends in violence. One-upmanship, schooldaysflashback horror, envy, sex, porn, shame — it’s a perfect storm of British wretchedness. (This too became a film in 2006, but a French one: The Serpent, by Eric Barbier.)

Lewis’s work reminds me of Janet Green and Patrick Hamilton at their very bleakest, and also Graham Greene: there is a whiff of sulphur in the idea of sexual fantasy leading only to an endless horror of blackmail and the fear when i was 17, i got a girlfriend. The relationship divided my four older siblings along two lines: some who felt I was too young and would be corrupted by it, and those who thought it worthwhile. In the first camp were two of my older brothers, and in the second, my sister, and my oldest brother who saw himself as a philanderer. He’d had his first sex around that age and saw in my move a manliness that aped his own, especially because my girlfriend was considered by most of the boys who lived in our gated estate to be a great beauty.

The sibling to whom I was closest at the time, Joseph, was in the first camp, however. His objection stemmed mostly from his of exposure, a life lived like a bully victim in school, trying to pretend that it’s all normal, but for years and decades. It lasts forever, like hell.

Lewis’s books turned out to have a weird, prophetic resonance with his own unhappy life. He was an alcoholic and probably an undiagnosed bipolar personality, who wrecked his work and marriage with drink, womanising and cruelty and wound up leaving London, that epicentre of his early glamorous success and coming back to his own hometown and finally living with his mum, and dying at the age of 42.

That glum narrative trajectory is prefigured in the awful destiny of Jack Carter and also the crime king George Fowler in GBH, whose story is told in intercutting sections: in London and in the little seaside bungalow that this crime lord later has to hole up in — rather like the bungalow that Lewis himself rented in bleak Theddlethorpe in Lincolnshire, right on the North Sea, a place he poignantly hoped might be nice for the kids to come and visit. Was the pulpy melodrama of crime just a displacement activity for Lewis, an indirect way of expressing some more intimate yearning and need to be rid of some awful pain and heartache?

I don’t know. But his novels are addictive.

○ religious devotion to pre-marital celibacy. Like most southern Nigerian families, we were devout Christians. When he saw that I would not break off the sinful union, he withdrew from me.

To draw Joseph back, I decided to join the group in the church with which he was most involved. The evangelism group of the church consisted of the most devout. They went out every Saturday evening to take the gospel to the doorsteps of the unsaved, knocking on doors and standing on street corners. Even though we had not had sex — my girlfriend was a Muslim who wanted to have sex only after marriage — I felt indelibly stained by the kissing and humping we did behind the

stairs of my side of the estate and in other covert spaces. I hoped my brother would see that though I had a girlfriend, I was still a believer.

I found the task of street evangelism to be daring at first. We were speaking to strangers, knocking on the doors of unknown people. There were those who sought our message, children who danced to our singing, aided by tambourines and flutes, those whom we met at their broken moments, who sank to their knees at our approach, desiring our message. Once, we knocked on the door of a woman who listened to us with tears in her eyes. She confessed that the man whose voice we’d heard within the house was not her husband, but one who visited while her husband was away.

We preached once to a man who sobbed with a great, wasting lamentation. He confessed to being haunted by the guilt of a murder he’d committed. “I killed him with my own bare hands,” he kept saying. But there were those who saw us as a nuisance and slammed their doors on our faces.

Once, a sister decided to preach to two men crouched under a tree near the Makurdi stadium, smoking ganja. When the sister began to speak, one of the men mumbled something over a whiff of airborne smoke, that he did not care about Christ. But the sister had seen this as an encouragement to continue. The man sat still, his dry, chapped lips pursed in some kind of discombobulated restraint for some time.

Then he stood suddenly and gave the sister a wide slap across the face. We fled.

One evening, two months into my joining, we ventured far out into Makurdi city, preaching and singing. We stood at the junction near the iconic statue of the food basket on the roundabout’s centre island. We’d been preaching here for about an hour and 30 minutes or more when, across the junction, a lady walked up to me and another brother. We’d seen her earlier and the brother had tried to speak to her, but she’d merely hissed and walked past him. A relentless proselytizer, the brother had followed her, riffling between other commuters, hawkers bearing their wares on trays balanced on their heads, until he managed to slip