Getting Carter by Triplow Nick;

Author:Triplow, Nick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2017-09-19T16:25:33+00:00

7

Plender

1971–1974

In the wake of Get Carter’s success, Eady secured what he considered an ‘unprecedented deal’ for Lewis with Edmund Fisher, then a young editor at Michael Joseph. Eady subsequently told Jo that ‘Fisher was a bit of a drunk and that’s how Ted got the book contract’. Fisher, a similar age to Lewis with a gift for friendship and a taste for long, liquid lunches, was a charismatic publishing executive with an instinctive feel for the market. Unsurprisingly, given the success of Carter, he saw potential in Lewis’s writing. The deal guaranteed Lewis an advance of around £5,000 for one book a year. It meant he hardly had to write anything else, but in reality it gave him time and money to drink. Gil Potter remembers, ‘They’d give him five grand up front to write something, but he’d have to live on that for the next eight months or something. He’d show them an idea, but that’s all, and sometimes it wouldn’t get done till the last minute, so all he had to do was get through the money. Gradually it got done, he was producing.’ Lewis seemed no more confident in his own work than he had been before the success of Carter. ‘Sometimes he’d say, “Can you read this, what do you think?” And I’d say there’s bits that are a bit funny and he’d go, “They’ve just sent it all back.” That got him down.’

He’d begun work on his next novel, Plender, soon after the publication of Jack’s Return Home in 1970. A malevolent Humberside-set blackmail thriller, Plender was more provincially claustrophobic even than Carter. Where Plender excelled, and what Hodges had necessarily set aside in Get Carter, was in the internal, psychological struggle and troubled backstory of its main characters. Lewis gave full reign to the inner reflections of his two protagonists, Brian Plender and Peter Knott. In doing so, he returned to his theme of the past haunting the present. There were implicit, provocative statements about his own life; at times ironic, at others sincere, Lewis explores the notion that our sins will surely find us out.

The novel opens with Brian Plender surveying an unnamed provincial city – obviously Hull – from the window of his twelfth-floor office. He looks over the docks and the river below, following the lights of the ferry bringing his blackmail victim. He is a fixer in the pay of the ‘Movement’, a powerful right-wing cadre within the British establishment with which Plender has established a reputation as a blackmailer and honey trap operator. Plender describes the cityscape, zeroing in on shuffling shoppers late on a wet winter Saturday afternoon, with Larkinesque detail: the ‘grey wet wind’ screams up the estuary and dirty barges ‘shift surlily on the greasy swell’. He is a malignant puppet master, manipulative, friendless and damaged. Pulling strings of plots in which he entangles his victims, Plender plans his conquests with enticingly placed small ads in the newspapers. The first we see arrive is the daughter

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