The design and UX isn't done, Rob and Abbie, okkurrrr! 😌
kimberly_reads's review against another edition
2.0
Good hard-core noir book but between the old British slang, confusing plot and characters .. I just really didn’t enjoy this one.
stevemcdede's review
2.0
I became very impatient with the story and just wanted to know what happened. Wrap it up. Was not worth the trip.
ameliamathias's review
1.0
Did not enjoy - I'm not even really sure what was going on half the time. Something about gangsters, or maybe they produced porn movies? Exactly, I haven't a clue.
petekeeley's review against another edition
5.0
A masterpiece. Up there with the best crime novels I'e ever read . Noir in the extreme, you can smell the paranoia wafting from each page. Ted Lewis at his very very best.
rosseroo's review
4.0
Lewis is certainly best known for writing the novel that was made into the iconic Michael Caine film Get Carter (and, less well known, the blaxploitation film Hit Man). Apparently a very lonely and depressive person, he drank himself into the grave at a very young age, and it's hard not to see evidence of those demons in this, his final book. Brought back into print some 35 years after its initial publication, it's stiff stuff.
The story revolves around a successful London gangster whose empire has just collapsed due to betrayal from within. The book opens with him hiding out in his beachfront safe house on the Lincolnshire coast about midway between Grimsby and Skegness. We then flash back to a few weeks or months previously, when his enterprise began to unravel. The book alternates between brief chapters titled "The Sea" (set in the present) and "The Smoke" (what went down in London). It's made clear that something terrible happened to his wife in London, but the details that have driven him to drink aren't revealed until near the end.
"The Smoke" chapters unfold in a semi-procedural way, as he strives to figure out which of his henchmen is the traitor, and whether or not a rival gang is involved. Meanwhile, "The Sea" chapters show a man going stir-crazy and slowly off the rails. Each set carries its own tension, and the writing is crisp and purposeful throughout, with crackling dialogue. Central to the story are the pornographic (and snuff) films the gangster trades in (and producers), which serve as his hobby, income source, and existential undoing.
This is a page-turner, but not of the pleasurable variety. There is no one here to sympathize with, and one reads on with dread. Dark stuff.
The story revolves around a successful London gangster whose empire has just collapsed due to betrayal from within. The book opens with him hiding out in his beachfront safe house on the Lincolnshire coast about midway between Grimsby and Skegness. We then flash back to a few weeks or months previously, when his enterprise began to unravel. The book alternates between brief chapters titled "The Sea" (set in the present) and "The Smoke" (what went down in London). It's made clear that something terrible happened to his wife in London, but the details that have driven him to drink aren't revealed until near the end.
"The Smoke" chapters unfold in a semi-procedural way, as he strives to figure out which of his henchmen is the traitor, and whether or not a rival gang is involved. Meanwhile, "The Sea" chapters show a man going stir-crazy and slowly off the rails. Each set carries its own tension, and the writing is crisp and purposeful throughout, with crackling dialogue. Central to the story are the pornographic (and snuff) films the gangster trades in (and producers), which serve as his hobby, income source, and existential undoing.
This is a page-turner, but not of the pleasurable variety. There is no one here to sympathize with, and one reads on with dread. Dark stuff.
nigellicus's review
5.0
Are there villains more squalid and vile than the narrator of GBH? Answer is there none. No, wait. The answer is none there. Dammit. None. None more squalid nor vile. A pornographer and snuff merchant who tortures and murders his way through his own gangland mob when threatened by rivals, a wife and sidekick nearly as bad as him, cops in his pocket and enemies under his heel. But something is going on and it's hard to put his exposed electric wires on it. We know it all goes wrong, though, because the story is split into the past, The Smoke, with Fowler at the height of his power, and the present, The Sea, with Fowler hiding out at a deserted out-of-season beach resort.
The disintegration of his empire and the disintegration of his mind are told with wonderful, calm and literate prose, reflecting the urbane civility of the man with monsters underneath. Utterly brilliant, searing and harrowing as he is brought low first by his ego, and then by the tiny sliver of a conscience he doesn't even know he has.
The disintegration of his empire and the disintegration of his mind are told with wonderful, calm and literate prose, reflecting the urbane civility of the man with monsters underneath. Utterly brilliant, searing and harrowing as he is brought low first by his ego, and then by the tiny sliver of a conscience he doesn't even know he has.
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