The second book of what I would call Ted Lewis' trilogy of British noir novels, starting with Jack's Return Home (Get Carter) and ending with his last book GBH. Plender, "a malevolent Humber-side blackmail thriller" may be the least well known of the three, but it is the most intensely felt and ambitious, focussing its whole attention on its two main protaganists, Brian Plender and Peter Knott, seeing the story from their two perspectives, through a series of inner reflections, flashbacks and memories, returning to a common theme of Lewis' of how the past haunts the present. By turn it is claustrophobic and invasive and you, the reader are made to feel the interloper here. Plender, is the difficult to follow up to Jack's Return Home, that had been hugely successful and been made into the equally impressive film, Get Carter. Nick Triplow who has written the excellent 'Getting Carter' biography of Ted Lewis writes that "Lewis was an ambitious writer, motivated to produce commercial fiction with depth and insight. He challenged contemporary expectations of form and function of the crime novel with a noir inflected experimentalism." Not surprisingly then Plender wasn't a commercial hit, crime fiction was considered a lesser literary form at the time and certainly writers from outside of Oxbridge were largely unrecognised. Ted Lewis never fully realised his full literary potential. He was undoubtedly self destructive and drinking undermined not only his talent but also his fragile mental health. In a life sadly cut short after falling into obscurity and addiction, he had still managed to produce several great works, including the novel Plender, that more than stand the test of time and he deserves to be remembered, rediscovered and more importantly, read.