Get Carter

Author/Guide: Ted Lewis

Why a Booktrail?

Get Carter: The book which started crime fiction?

ISBN: 978-0749013639
Genre: Crime, Hitman/Gangster

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What you need to know before your trail

Jack Carter is home for a funeral – his brother Frank’s. Frank’s car was found at the bottom of a cliff, with Frank inside. He was not only dead drunk but dead as well. What could have made sensible Frank down a bottle of whisky and get behind the wheel? For Jack, his death doesn’t add up. So he decides to talk to a few people, do some sniffing around. He does, but is soon told to stop. By Gerald and Les, his bosses from the smoke. Not to mention the men who run things in Doncaster, who aren’t happy with Jack’s little holiday at home. They want him back in London, and fast. Now Frank was a mild man and did as he was told, but Jack’s not a bit like that …

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Travel Guide

Get Carter

The book was inspired by Lincolnshire (Some of the physical descriptions in Get Carter are based squarely on places in North Lincolnshire, just as various characters are named after Lewis’s childhood friends from Barton-Upon-Humber) but the main locations in the film are all in Newcastle and Gateshead. Sadly the locations such as the iconic car park and pubs aren’t recognisable. However, the bridges are of course and the streets where the actors chased, shot at and escaped down in the film.

There is also a butchers in Gateshead called Get Carters which is where the car park used to be. Butchered meat on sale in such an iconic spot?

Newcastle

“And a little later, the train passes through a cutting and curving away towards the town, a small bright concentrated area of light and beyond and around the town you can see the causes of the flow: the half- dozen steelworks stretching to the ring of the semicircular bowl of hills, flames shooting upwards, soft reds pulsing on the insides of melting shops white heat sparking in blast furnaces – the structures of the worlds black against the collective glow all if it looking like a Disney version of the Dawn of Creation. Even when the train enters the sprawl of backyards and behinds of petrol stations and tows of too-bright street lights, the reflected ribbon of flame still draws attention up to the sky.”