The Book You Have to Read: “Dead Man Upright,” by Derek Raymond

(Editor’s note: This is the 77th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. It is also the fifth and concluding entry in a special miniseries honoring the Factory novels penned by British writer Derek Raymond [aka Robin Cook]. Today The Rap Sheet welcomes Ray Banks, the author of 2009’s Beast of Burden and the forthcoming U.S. edition of No More Heroes, both of which star Manchester ex-con-turned-private eye Cal Innes. Banks makes the case for favorable recognition of Raymond’s last Factory book, Dead Man Upright.)

There’s definitely a touch of the orphan about Dead Man Upright (1993). Not only is it the final novel of Derek Raymond’s Factory quintet, but it’s also the last book that would see print before the author’s death in 1994. In addition to this, thanks to a late-career publisher switch precipitated by the appearance of I Was Dora Suarez and its subsequent reception, Dead Man Upright was released by Time Warner and was, along with Raymond’s autobiography, Hidden Files (1992), and his posthumous novel, Not Till the Red Fog Rises (1994), missing from the recent Serpent’s Tail backlist reissue. Furthermore, Dead Man Upright has a tendency to be forgotten simply because it appears as an anticlimax to the Factory series after what is generally seen as a concentration of Raymond’s themes in its immediate predecessor, Dora Suarez.

To a certain extent, that’s true. After the histrionic depravity of Dora, even the goriest of murders--and the deaths in Dead Man Upright are hardly bloodless--is going to seem cozy in comparison. Similarly, the obsessive emotional attachment between the nameless Detective Sergeant and the dead Spanish prostitute make the examination of the killing mind in Dead Man Upright seem downright chilly. But this examination is a natural follow-up to Dora Suarez, and in it Raymond takes a new direction, finally eschewing the connection with the victim that defined a majority of his previous series work. Indeed, some of the victims here appear almost complicit in their own deaths, or else provide a reflection of the murderer’s fantasies. Because while Raymond briefly examined the banality of psychosis in The Devil’s Home on Leave, Dead Man Upright is the only novel in this series that actively surrenders itself to the killer’s mindset.

The killer in question is Ronald Jidney, self-styled artist and slaughterer of single middle-aged women. His victims have plenty in the bank, but he’s not all that interested in money, because Jidney is the eponymous dead man, a quintessential Raymond psychopath whose eyes are polished mirrors set in a mask of practiced mediocrity. He prides himself on having learned the necessary “stereotyped views ... on art, death and relationships” with which he ensnares his victims, and yet revels in his apparent superiority:

As he had often said to Flora, and before her to Anna, Mandy Cronin, Judith Parkes and others, one of the greatest attributes of a god is that he condescends to resemble man. Nothing could take this rapture from him--he soared at the topmost flight of existence, he was a super-being.

I say apparent because Raymond is careful to counter Jidney’s bravado, not least when Jidney is apprehended. Following his arrest are 50 pages of what is essentially a murderer’s monologue, albeit one filtered through interrogation and prison correspondence. Raymond ostensibly gives Jidney the same confessional outlet he previously gave his victims. Where this differs is the commentary on this confession by the sergeant and the visiting lecturer (who happens to be an expert on serial-killer profiling), both men chipping in with either reaction or confirmation, leading to an overall portrait of the serial killer as ego. Far from being the attractive pantomime villain of Hannibal Lecter, Jidney is just another abused, strange little man with delusions of grandeur.

Where Dead Man Upright falters is in its procedure. For all Raymond’s virtues as a writer, he was never a particularly adept plotter, and some key plot points in this tale ring hollow. The discovery of a videotape at a stage where most of the evidence is conjecture is remarkably handy, and the clue that leads to the location of Jidney’s “murder vault” requires a suspension of disbelief that only a writer like Raymond (with that much literary good will in the bank) can afford.

But then, you don’t read Raymond for the realism, you read him for his worldview, and that worldview is shot through with a Jacobean sense of moral decay. Webster’s “possession by death” is something that also afflicts Raymond, and his portrait of London is one that reeks of the corrupt and the violated. Although in Dead Man Upright the sergeant’s world is finally opened up into one that involves colleagues who aren’t deliberately obstructive (Chief Inspector Bowman) or intangible (The Voice), the cops of the A14--the Metropolitan Police’s Department of Unexplained Deaths--aren’t that much different from the sergeant. They’ve all been irrevocably scarred by the job. One of them has been fired for alcoholism (which is something of an achievement in a department that appears to be permanently half-cut), another paralyzed after a shotgun blast to the spine. The others have dialogue that is bitterly spiced, realistic patois quickly veering into the non-sequitur of Beckettian vaudeville.

This disintegration is natural. These are, after all, the bastions of law and order in a city that appears to be eating itself alive. Throughout the book, events take place that cement London’s twisted psychogeography: a man tries to kill himself by jumping off a tower block and ends up being the victim of a freak decapitation; a family man, recently made redundant, turns on that family with a Webley pistol; and when salvation appears on the Tube, everyone squirms in their seat apart from our nameless Detective Sergeant, who thinks it takes balls to preach the gospel.

The acknowledgment is enough to lift the Factory novels from an otherwise unremittingly bleak outlook. What is often forgotten about Raymond’s work is that glimmer of hope, that belief in humanity which contrasts sharply with the inherent fascism that Jidney attributes to himself. The detective believes that we are not Jidney and his kind, because we recognize our own darkness and fight against it. We may struggle to connect with other human beings, just as the detective struggles to save his long-dead daughter in the closing lines of the book:

All at once I am speeding after Dahlia, who is wobbling down our front path on her bike. Next week, she’ll be nine. I am rushing after her with my arms open and calling out: ‘I love you! I love you!’

But she is always just out of reach.

The point is, though, that we do struggle. And that, in the end, is good enough, and it’s what keeps us from becoming those
dead men upright.

The Book You Have to Read: “I Was Dora Suarez,” by Derek Raymond

(Editor’s note: This is the 76th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. It is also, however, the fourth entry in a special miniseries honoring all five of the Factory novels penned by British writer Derek Raymond [aka Robin Cook]. Today The Rap Sheet welcomes London crime novelist Cathi Unsworth, author of the new Serpent’s Tail release, Bad Penny Blues. She has a few choice observations to share about Raymond’s most controversial work, I Was Dora Suarez.)

Dora was woman in a photograph. Lying across a sofa with one arm thrown up around her black bouffant hair, a face like an early 1960s film star now turned into a death mask, the terror still resounding in her stare. Glinting off the huge knife protruding from her midriff.

In the book of real-life crime scenes where he found her, her name was not recorded. It was author Robin Cook who named her Dora, choosing the Spanish surname Suarez because of that thick black hair, those almond-shaped black eyes. He’d given himself a new identity recently too, an amalgam of his two favorite drinking partners. He didn’t want to be mistaken for something he wasn’t, a politician or a science-fiction author. He was a ghostwriter, chasing the spirit of an anonymous dead girl through the longest night, up in his tower in Avignon, far from the London he was so vividly describing. Deep in séance for 18 months.

“If I had no guilt to purge,” he later recalled, “I would not have known where the road to Hell was, nor how to look for Dora.”

Cook risked it all with his 1990 novel, I Was Dora Suarez. He had successfully crossed over into being Derek Raymond with the publication of 1984’s He Died with His Eyes Open, the first of the Factory series in which he established his new identity with the nameless Detective Sergeant from A14 Unexplained Deaths, a grim adjunct of the Met’s murder squad. In that book, the DS had solved the murder of Charles Staniland, a 51-year-old alcoholic divorcé whose past life, described via a series of cassettes the DS finds in the murdered man’s room, was a mirror for the author’s own. The new Derek Raymond investigated the old Robin Cook in a book symbolic with death and rebirth.

The DS wasn’t a romantic figure. He was a failed husband and father, haunted by the mistakes of his past and their many repercussions. An anomaly as a copper and as a member of society in general, his only redemption was in tending to the souls of the worthless, the forgotten, and the unloved.

You reach out your hand in the darkness, and you never know
what you will touch.

In Suarez, Cook confronted a subject that few really want to acknowledge even now, in a society where, nearly 20 years on from his time of writing, two women a day die at the hands of their partners and only 5.7 percent of all reported rapes result in convictions. A simple question, the one that lies at the root of noir:

Why do men hate women so much?

To search for a solution, Robin projected himself into the mind of Dora’s killer. In the book’s harrowing opening pages, this deadly, self-contained fury breaks into the Kensington rooms that Dora is sharing with her elderly landlady, Betty Carstairs. Dispatching the old woman with a casualness that is more shocking than the violence itself, he stands on the threshold of Dora’s room, savoring the feast of death that is to come. And when it does, Cook does not hold back on the graphic description of Dora’s dismemberment and defilement, nor her unnerving passivity in submitting to her fate. There are no fava beans and fine Chianti here. This author wants us to take a good, long, unflinching look at what the last few moments were like for Dora and the man snuffing her out, to feel, smell, and taste them--how banal and brutal a killer really is.

It’s a revelation that even comes to the murderer, when, having spent his lust and come down from his homicidal high, reality impinges on the corners of his mind. He hurries to bat away these creeping feelings of disappointment and emptiness, assuaging himself with another killing on the other side of town, that of club owner Felix Roatta at his Clapham mansion.

It is the DS who will next stand in the cold, gray room, like an avenging angel hovering over the remains of Dora Suarez. “The tragedy of help,” he murmurs, “is that it never arrives.” In a method similar to that of Staniland in He Died, the DS is able to reconstruct Dora’s life from her diaries, and he comes in for his first shock when he discovers that her killer was also her lover. But this is very far from a crime of passion. The killer and Dora had first become acquainted at a specialist sex club in Soho called The Parallel Club, owned by the recently deceased Roatta.

The Parallel Club and what has gone on there is at the dark heart of this story, the symbol of man’s inhumanity to woman and the focus of Cook’s meditation that sex is violence. As a result of what Dora has done here, she is already dying before the killer breaks in on her, from an abominable assortment of STDs, including AIDS. Any power she might conceivably have wielded with her good looks has been systematically broken down and taken from her at its source: her genitals have virtually dissolved from disease. Her meek acceptance of her fate is also explained: Dora was preparing to commit suicide on the night she was murdered. But like all those who batter and kill their partners, her jealous lover was determined to take away what little choice over her own life she still had left.

At the root of the killer’s rage is his own inability to perform regular sexual intercourse, an extension of his general lack of personality. This is the vital theme of the entire Factory series, Cook’s philosophy of killers as bores. As the DS puts it:

“Bores and killers are much the same; dullness and despair explains most murders. Killers kill because they spew out far too much energy on being polite in a way that normal people never do ... I have never met one single stimulating killer in all my time with A14; and if you’ve never met one there then I very much doubt you will meet one anywhere.”

The killer punishes himself for his inadequacies by removing them as surely as he did for Dora--strapping his cock to a bicycle wheel and slowly pedaling away the flesh, destroying that troublesome “little self.” The pain distracts him from the tremors of self-realization that continue to blip through his consciousness: that there has never been any point to any of this and that the only possible outcome can be his own annihilation.

Cook’s insight into the psychosexual make-up of a serial killer came from his friend, the journalist Sandy Fawkes, who, while covering a story in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 1974, had a dalliance with a man called Paul John Knowles. She spent several days in his company, unaware that he had raped and killed at least 18 people. Fawkes recounted her experiences in the book Killing Time (1977, republished as Natural Born Killer in 2004), where she detailed Knowles’ inability to become sexually aroused without activating his deeper desires for domination and death. Cook always credited Fawkes for this kernel of essential information that he ran with in Suarez.

The book was not a great success on publication. In fact, even getting it accepted was an uphill struggle for Robin’s agent, Maxim Jakubowski, whose story about one editor throwing up over his desk after reading Suarez has passed into legend. Cook did not have any common ground with his peers in British crime writing and was at pains to distance himself from them. He was more at home with writers such as Stewart Home, Iain Sinclair, and Chris Petit, whose intelligent and idiosyncratic works also map the psychic plains of London; and the band Gallon Drunk, with whom he made a soundtrack to the novel I Was Dora Suarez, which was re-released on Sartorial Records last year. (The cover of that CD is shown above.)

But there was one writer that he did feel a real kinship to, who had also recently written a highly personal séance for a murdered girl. James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia (1987) stands alongside Suarez as the two books that changed everything--like the Beatles and the Stones or the Pistols and the Clash of contemporary crime writing. Everyone from David Peace to George Pelecanos, Ken Bruen to James Sallis, not to mention the authors contributing to this Rap Sheet series, have been inspired by the possibilities offered up by these books to create their own investigations under the carpet of society, asking not whodunit, but why. Personally, I Was Dora Suarez remains the most important book I ever read.

“Nothing else much matters once you have achieved the hardest thing, which is to act out of conviction,” Cook surmised in 1992. “Even if you have been beaten by evil, in the bitterness of defeat the battle has left a trace for the others, and you can go feeling clean.”

NEXT UP: Dead Man Upright (1993)

READ MORE: “Journey to the End of the Night: A Personal Journey Through Noir Writing,” by Cathi Unsworth (Nude Magazine).

The Book You Have to Read: “How the Dead Live,” by Derek Raymond

(Editor’s note: This is the 75th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. It is also, however, the third entry in a special miniseries honoring all five of the Factory novels penned by British writer Derek Raymond [aka Robin Cook]. Today The Rap Sheet welcomes Scottish novelist, critic, blogger, and self-described “general miscreant” Russel D. McLean. The author of both The Good Son and The Lost Sister, McLean has a few comments to share about Raymond’s How the Dead Live.)

When I was approached to write about How the Dead Live (1986) for The Rap Sheet, I was forced to admit that this was one of several Derek Raymond novels I had not yet encountered. I am, after all, a relative newcomer to the man’s fiction, brought into the fold only after someone claimed to have noticed a similarity in theme between my work and some of Raymond’s. By the time I finished The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985), I was hooked. When I read A State of Denmark (1964), I knew there was no running back. So this was the perfect excuse for me to continue my exploration of Raymond’s work. What follows is a gut reaction to How the Dead Live; thoughts and ideas on not only the book itself, but on the way that Raymond’s writing has affected me as a reader.

The unnamed Detective Sergeant in this novel, who works for the London Metropolitan Police’s Department of Unexplained Deaths, is one of the most cynical and self-aware series protagonists you will ever meet. He feels sharply the pain of everyone he encounters, takes the darkness of the world and breathes it in as easily as he does the air or the alcohol that seems to get him through the day.

One of the things that immediately appealed to me about How the Dead Live was the removal of the protagonist from his zone of comfort. Rather than the urban decay of London, which is as much an extension of our nameless detective as it is its own sad character, we find ourselves in the English countryside. Called out to investigate a suspected murder (more of a missing-persons case), our man finds himself out of his environment and cast into a world he cannot understand, removed from any touchstones he might have had. I love the idea of removing a protagonist from anything he might consider comfortable. Although “comfort” is clearly a relative term in Raymond’s England.

What soon becomes clear is that the decay at the heart of Raymond’s novel is not merely limited to the urban environment. He’s far too clever for such a simple distinction. There is no respite among England’s green and pleasant land from the gray horror or the decaying amorality that our man knows so well. And that is perhaps one of the most wrenching things about this novel; the rot is there in every character we encounter. The very act of trying to live is to swim in shit for those in Raymond’s England. No one is without his or her worries. And those who think they are--such as the lecturer who opens this story by telling our detective about what it means to be a psychopath--are either deluded, ignorant, or out of touch. The truth that our man--and Raymond himself--understands is simple: No one is uncompromised.

Except, perhaps, the dead. And then, one has to wonder, perhaps that comes only in retrospect.

The people our man encounters--even those living in the country--would eat Dixon of Dock Green for lunch. An early encounter with the matriarch of a family on the outskirts of town shows our man having to fight for every inch of respect he can get. After being warned by a passing old-age pensioner that he’s unlikely to talk to this family and come out alive, Raymond’s protagonist is forced to approach the family head, to offer a reminder of what the coppers represent to them. But as she tells him, “We’ve got to live how we can. These days there’s no other way to protect your own.” And as the Detective Sergeant rises to the bait, she tells him, “I’ve got four more sons hanging around this shithole besides the half-wit there,” implying that she’ll set them on him. When he challenges her, she backs down, knowing that she doesn’t want to deal with the full force of the law. But all the same, he’s one more person trying to stop her protecting what little she has, and even if she won’t set her sons on our man, “By Christ, I’ve a mind to.”

It’s a setting that resonates for me; the dark side of the country upbringing I remember. Reading this novel, I saw something of the farms, villages, and small towns I grew up around, but in a way that rendered them in a more hellish fashion than I remembered. Raymond’s Britain is a place gone to seed, its countryside ruined by poverty and neglect, invaded by out-of-place vice, and ground down by hopelessness. This impression is assisted by Raymond’s refusal to properly stamp a time and place upon his world. As novelist-critic Will Self notes in his introduction to my particular edition of the book, Raymond uses a strange mix of slang that sometimes feels deliberately old-fashioned, but in a way that is peculiarly sheered off from reality. The book may have been written in the ’80s, but much of the slang is from Britain’s “Golden Age” of the 1960s, or even earlier. Again, this creates a strangely timeless feel, not marking Raymond’s fictional world as modern or dated, but very much as a time of its own; an England steeped in a unique, skewed, and yet recognizable atmosphere.

And Raymond’s strength lies in atmosphere. The plot is almost incidental--and indeed takes a final turn that is thematically incredible, but verging on the ludicrous--to the evocation of dark feelings of dread recognition brought about by Raymond’s desperate characters and their interactions with the world around them. As a writer of noir, Raymond has very few equals. His atmosphere is unparalleled and his questioning of morals, both at a personal level and on a more global level, is something that many other writers since have seemed unable or unwilling to confront. For this reader, Raymond’s ultimate achievement is to break the mold of mainstream crime writing--British and otherwise--and get down to true questions of ethics, morality, and society without offering patronizing or easy answers. This is crime writing as it should be.

NEXT UP: I Was Dora Suarez (1990)

The Book You Have to Read: “The Devil’s Home on Leave,” by Derek Raymond

(Editor’s note: This is the 74th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. It is also, however, the second entry in a special miniseries honoring all five of the Factory novels penned by UK writer Derek Raymond [aka Robin Cook]. Today The Rap Sheet welcomes John Harvey, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association [CWA] Silver Dagger, recipient of CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, and the author most recently of Far Cry. He shares his thoughts about The Devil’s Home on Leave.)

I knew Robin Cook by reputation long before I ever met him. His publisher in France, François Guerif, had talked at such length and with such enthusiasm for both the man and his writing, that when I finally laid eyes on Robin himself, standing up to the bar in the conference hotel hosting Nottingham’s Shots in the Dark International Mystery and Thriller Festival some years back, I was more than a little in awe. Everything about him was immediately recognizable: the leather jacket, the black beret, the cigarette, even the blonde on his arm. We were introduced and shook hands and he was nice enough to say he knew my work, though I suspect he was being polite; he was affable and friendly, greeting me as a colleague, a co-conspirator, both then and on the several further occasions we were to meet.

I must have read The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985), the second of the Factory novels he wrote as Derek Raymond, round about that time, and I read it again before writing this.

He knows how to get you, Derek/Robin; knows how to pull you in.

This, it its entirety, is Chapter One.

I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street.

After a while I heard steps the other side of the door. “McGruder?”

“Who’s that?” said a man’s voice. “Who wants him?”

“I do,” I said. “Open up. Police.”

Right. As a reader, you’re nicked.

The novel, as it develops, becomes, at its heart, a duel between the copper telling the story--the detective sergeant who works in The Factory, a small, under-resourced, off-the-wall unit that investigates low-level murders, the kind where nobody usually gives a shit about the victim, including, at times, the victims themselves--and the principal villain, Billy McGruder, an ex-Squaddie who grew up in Northern Ireland in a brutal loveless home that’s infected his behavior ever since.

It’s this clash of opposites who are, in fact, in so many ways alike, that is the nerve center of the book and gives it its main focus and strength. The Factory copper has lost his wife, other than as a demented non-person, and lost his child. He’s a man alone with his grievances against the world and his heart of stone. And McGruder is ... well, this is McGruder:

He stared at me without any expression at all, and I knew it was no use. He would always come out in pieces, in fury and despair, his way of describing a sense of loss. He would feel for a second, or a minute, if you reached out far enough to him; but he was too far gone, with violence behind him, violence in front and behind him. Like a broken piano, he could only make discords.

It’s the violence, of course, that lies at the heart of the novel, at the heart of all of Factory novels, at the terrible heart of Robin’s Derek Raymond enterprise, culminating in I Was Dora Suarez (1990), a book I have several times started reading and never, squeamish as I am, been able to finish.

Violence in these books, it seems to me, is both a reality and a metaphor: a metaphor for Robin’s growing disgust at the world around him. I can understand, I think, what he is doing, where he is going, without wanting to take that journey all the way with him.

I was reminded in places of an interview I heard with the late J.G. Ballard, in which he expressed an old-fashioned regret for the fact that when we jettisoned the certainties of the post-World War II world in Britain, we neglected to replace them with anything else other than thoughtless consumerism and a love for vacuous celebrity. Robin, I think, might have gone along with that--his protagonist certainly would.

There used to be dignity in life; I used to see it all around me when I was young. But now it’s gone. People no longer care about each other the way they used to--not the way my old man used to tell me life was when he worked in the Fire Service during the war and the bombing. Then, people who didn’t even know each other would go down into flattened buildings after a raid and shovel to get at the people buried down there as if the victims were their brothers. Even after the war there was some trust left; it ran on nearly into the Sixties. But now it’s all sorry, squire, don’t want to know.

And there’s a beautifully written section--Chapter 14--in which the narrator harks back to his time as a young policeman in London and muses on the effects of the war, and it’s in extended passages like this, and the occasional down-to-earth and precise metaphor--“She was a hard-looking woman in her thirties with about as much pity in her face as an empty plate.”--that the strengths of Robin Cook’s writing come through most clearly.

Elsewhere, when he allows the plot to take him into areas he doesn’t truly seem interested in or to be capable of rendering convincingly--such as a late subplot involving Russian spies and a threat to the life of the defense minister--the tension drops and the quality of the book suffers.

Robin’s compass in these novels is a limited one--the scruffy low-life of down-at-heel pubs and seedy London back streets, the very real anguish of personal pain and loss, the extremities of violence itself. Limited but, once acknowledged, none the worse for that. Indeed, that very concentration is the books’ great gain; it gives them, at their best, an intensity that is rarely matched elsewhere.

NEXT UP: How the Dead Live (1986)

The Book You Have to Read: “He Died with His Eyes Open,” by Derek Raymond

(Editor’s note: This is the 73rd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. It is also, however, the first entry in a special miniseries honoring all five of the Factory novels penned by British writer Derek Raymond. Today The Rap Sheet welcomes Tony Black, the Australia-born Edinburgh author of the Gus Dury series [Gutted and Paying for It], who has a few things to say about Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open.)

I arrived at the genius of Derek Raymond too late. But, as the adage goes, better late than never. If memory serves, I’d been struggling with a reading slump. One of those dispiriting patches where nothing I picked up seemed to be what I wanted to read. Everything was too wordy, too writerly, or the voice grated, the story took too long to start, the prose lacked sparkle. I turned to the recommendations of well-meaning friends but struggled to get past the first few pages of anything I picked up. I couldn’t re-read, either. Even old favorites seemed unappealing. The printed word was dead to me.

I’d been at that point before. When I was a nipper, anything beyond comic books was a struggle for me, seemed like hard work, or worse, school work. It took an overly dramatic primary teacher’s enthusiasm for Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island to get me reading; after discovering Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, I never looked back. I devoured those books, and, if truth be told, had been looking for that heady fix ever since ... This latest reading slump was a sure sign that I needed to up the dose once more.

I’d taken reading advice from friends before but it’s a tricky business; as any writer knows, everyone’s reading is subjective, what one person takes from a book won’t necessarily be the same as another; everyone filters the page through his or her own worldview, tastes, and assumptions. Taking a book to read from a friend is like letting someone else pick your dinner from the menu.

At least three close friends had recommended Derek Raymond’s work to me before; they were all Londoners. Somehow, I made the association in my subconscious that Raymond was “a London writer.” I’d tried putting Irvine Welsh books on people and got looks askance and comments such as “It’s very Edinburgh”; I anticipated the same would happen with Raymond.

Then there was the mythology: Raymond’s privileged upbringing courtesy of a textile-magnate father; his running long firms for the criminal Krays; his rebirth as an author and his Rimbaud-esque abandonment of the form; bad marriage after bad marriage; the wholesale praise from latter-day noirist masters like Ken Bruen and Cathi Unsworth; and the gaunt-thin, world-weary, well-lived-in face with piercing eyes that crept after you and yelled, “I’m the man, doubt me?”

I first cracked the spine on He Died with His Eyes Open (1984) on a typically dreich, gray, Saturday morning in my then cold-water Edinburgh flat with the sound of jakeys fighting over the spoils of supermarket dumpsters below my window. There had been a fire in a new-build block of yuppie apartments just the night before and the blaze had been abandoned by the fire brigade, spreading an ominous gray pall over the horizon that added to the already dystopian air at my end of town.

Raymond, or to give him his proper name, Robin Cook, wrote the first book in his acclaimed Factory series after a writing hiatus of around 10 years. He had been living peripatetically in Europe and, legend tells, was challenged to write again by a friend who taunted him that he had penned his last. He adopted a pseudonym to avoid confusion with the truck-stop thriller writer who shared his real name, and the rest is history.

By the time I got to this book, Raymond’s reputation was unassailable. I’ve always been wary of heady praise. Popularity is no marker of quality and I’ve got a finely tuned hype detector which goes off, it seems, at least once a month these days. But it was clear from its opening lines that He Died with His Eyes Open was something special:

He was found in the shrubbery in front of the West of God House in Albatross Road, West Five. It was the thirteenth of March, during the evening rush-hour.

The reader is dropped into the action immediately. This is a murder story, in case you’re in any doubt. Raymond covers some territory in those two sentences--the brutality of a killing contrasted with the gentility of a shrubbery; a body uncovered in the rush-hour. My imagination was fired already, without the allusions of “Albatross,” “West of God,” or the unlucky number “thirteen.”

What followed was unlike any other crime novel I’d read before. On the surface, He Died with His Eyes Open is a police procedural, but the unnamed officer from the Met’s A14, Department of Unexplained Deaths, follows little or no procedure. He barely follows his nose; his assumed task is a psychological investigation. A stripping of the thin epidermis of respectability that covers a rotten society.

Even while studying the corpse of a man who had been “systematically beaten” to death, Raymond’s world-weary detective can’t help commenting on the shittiness of 1980s London, with its mass unemployment and air of faded grandeur:

Inside the ambulance the ruined face of Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland screamed silently up at its white roof which a British Leyland operator had sprayed one day when he happened not to be on strike and needed the overtime.

Perhaps because he is on the lower rungs himself, the investigating officer--languishing in “the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service”--treats the murder of a 51-year-old down-on-his-luck writer with a degree of probity his fellow officers find laughable.

An early exchange with the cocky Chief Inspector Bowman from Serious Crimes shows what the investigating officer is up against.

“I like to see justice.”

“Justice? You‘re a berk,” said Bowman. “You’re forty, you’re a sergeant, and you actually despise promotion.”

“I’m not on my way upstairs like you are,” I said. “Not with cases like this one.”

“It won’t even be reported.”

“No, I know,” I said. “And that sort of thing matters to you.”

“Of course it does.”

“But the trouble with you is, it shows.”

“Have it your own way,” said Bowman, “You can stay on at Unexplained Deaths till you rot, for all I care ... ”

The victim, Staniland, as an upper-class writer, currently living down-at-heel, shares some biographical baggage with Raymond; undoubtedly an effective resource to draw on as the murder victim is portrayed as one of the most fully rounded and carefully executed characters I’ve encountered. And he’s dead. As an exploration of the crime, Raymond’s purview covers the full 360 degrees; he misses nothing, getting under the skin of all his characters with a skill I still find is unmatched.

As the case proceeds, the investigating officer uncovers Staniland’s tape-recorded journal, an eerie voice from beyond the grave which brings two disparate strands of the story together, unites victim and avenger and delves deeper into the heart of darkness. A pained relationship between the victim and a woman called Barbara is revealed; she is a classic femme fatale, but Raymond’s detective turns the tables on her, beginning a relationship to ferret out information about the murder. Barbara’s connection to a man called Harvey Fenton, whom Staniland refers to as the “Laughing Cavalier” on his tapes, contains the vital key to solving the crime. From Staniland’s recordings:

Last night I met the Laughing Cavalier again in the Agincourt. I don’t know if I can really stand going in there much longer, in spite of my determination. Barbara was with me. This terrible man hates me. He gives off waves of hatred towards me, even when his back is turned. It’s strange to be the object of raw, naked hatred, it glares out of the person at you like the truth, or a disease.

In these two, barely socialized psychopaths, Raymond’s detective confronts the failures of a rotten, brutal society which had turned on itself like a mad dog chasing its tail. As Britain’s Conservative Thatcher government of the ’80s was starving the miners and breaking union power to facilitate the transition to all-out consumerism, those people at society’s low end were of little value; life was cheap.

Derek Raymond offers us disillusioned mean streets. His detective no more cares for upholding the mores of a diseased corporate body than he does for playing a role in the chaos; he’s trying simply to make sense of it all. To find some understanding. It’s an existential quest for meaning. Pure undiluted noir from a man who knew the life, and wrote the book on it.

NEXT UP: The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985)

Not Everybody Loves Raymond

Beginning tomorrow, and running through early January 2010, The Rap Sheet will interrupt its usual catch-all succession of “forgotten books” posts in order to roll out a mini-series concentrating on the work of novelist Derek Raymond (1931-1994). Raymond, whose real name was Robin Cook (not to be confused with the still-extant American medical thriller writer), is frequently credited as “the Godfather of British neo-noir,” and has many big-name admirers, among them James Sallis and Cathi Unsworth. But, despite a number of his books having been reissued this decade by Serpent’s Tail, his work is unknown to many crime-fiction readers, especially those in the States. We hope to correct that deficiency with our mini-series, which will focus on Raymond’s succession of five “Factory novels,” bleak and often violent police procedurals of a sort, that reflected Great Britain’s changing political and social orders during Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times’ Richard Rayner gave a good accounting of Cook/Raymond’s evolution as a crime novelist:

Cook, married five times, was the son of a millionaire British textile magnate, born with the silver spoon and all that. He went to school at Eton, “the assembly line for rulers and bastards” (as he called it). Then, rather than proceed to Oxbridge or the army, he rebelled against his background, drifting into a world of petty, and sometimes not so petty, crime--his affable manners and toff accent were useful in ways that he hadn’t expected. He was an excellent con man.

In the early 1960s, Cook ran gaming tables in Chelsea and sold pornography in Soho. His name was splashed across the front pages because of a scam involving a stolen Rubens or two. He rubbed shoulders with aristocrats and gangsters and wrote books--comedies, but always with a nasty edge--about the dangerous demimonde he’d chosen to inhabit. The Crust on Its Uppers, Bombe Surprise and A State of Denmark are novels that feel as much a part of their time as those by Iris Murdoch--except that Cook wrote about tarts, thugs, chancers, rent boys and Fascists, not the sexual rondelays of academic Oxford.

The Crust on Its Uppers (a great title) is memorable for its slang and linguistic freshness. Going crazy becomes, in Cook-speak, “he lost his pedals in a serious manner.” By 1970, Cook had a career going, five or so novels written--and then something happened. He too lost his pedals. A marriage broke up and London became too hot, or maybe just too boring. He went to live abroad, first in Italy, then in remotest rural France, where he quit writing altogether for almost a decade, working on farms and in vineyards. Robin Cook had vanished, or died, it seemed to most people, and maybe he had.

By the time he reappeared in London in the early 1980s, his already slender, rakish form had become almost skeletally thin. Beady eyes stared at you from a skull that belonged on a cadaver. His hair was filthy and his teeth were best not to think about. His haggard face was craggy and lined, and his sheet-like pallor suggested perpetual hangover. Yet there was unmistakable charisma too. He wore a black leather jacket and a beret and pronounced himself miffed by the existence of the new Robin Cook, referring to him as “the Coma bloke. Cheeky sod’s taken over my name. Bit much that.” So he was forced to publish the novel he’d just completed, He Died with His Eyes Open, under a pseudonym, Derek Raymond.

Published in 1984, He Died with His Eyes Open was the first of Raymond’s Factory novels (“factory” being a colloquial term for cop-shop). The Guardian calls that series “a master-class of noir,” in which the author places “his unnamed detective sergeant protagonist within the framework of the worst possible despair and blind rage that would fell most men. But Raymond, through his anti-heroic alter ego, makes the point again and again that there must be someone to speak for the dead, to answer the bellow of justice from beyond the grave even if they didn’t directly seek him out. The shitty end of the stick may be where the truth is, to paraphrase Raymond, but it also signified a welcome change of direction and voice that won him many admirers in London literary circles.”

Brooklyn writer Charles Taylor went further, in a piece published last year by The Nation, toward explaining what it is that motivates Raymond’s central character:

The nameless cop hero of the Factory novels--we’ll call him No Name--is one of those denizens of detective stories and police procedurals who get into trouble because they break the rules and rub the top brass the wrong way. No Name has no time for niceties or regulations or respect for his superiors (one book ends with him breaking a supervisor’s jaw). He’s an outcast, but not because he’s a brutal bastard. Rather, he’s an outcast because, in a society that has given up nearly all notions of justice or service, he takes his job seriously.

The police division No Name works for is Unexplained Deaths, the sinkhole reserved for the cases that will bring the cops who solve them no publicity, no promotion. “We work on obscure, unimportant, apparently irrelevant deaths of people who don’t matter and who never did,” says No Name in He Died with His Eyes Open. “We have the lowest budget, we’re last in line for allocations, and promotion is so slow that most of us never get past the rank of sergeant. ... No murder is casual to us, and no murder is unimportant, even though murder happens the whole time in a city like this.”

The voice may sound familiar to readers of detective fiction: it’s the hard-boiled hero, cynical on the outside, wounded on the inside. But pay attention to the stray lines: “people who don’t matter and who never did” and "”we’re last in line for allocations.” Then consider these seemingly tossed-off remarks about the deaths No Name investigates over the course of the books: “There was nothing about Staniland in the paper. Staniland wasn’t news.” “Nobody was ever caught for her, and Mrs. Mayhew made four lines in the Watford Observer.” No Name on his superiors’ reaction to a double murder: “It’s the press that bothers them up there ... not the bodies.” The England of the Factory series is a place where the idea of government service has become, at best, quaint, and where murder has become a convenient means of disposing of the undesirable.

I also like something Jeff VanderMeer wrote in the blog Ecstatic Days about the Factory series’ nameless narrator:

He often clashes with his superior, Bowman, and has turned down promotion at every turn. His wife is in a lunatic asylum and is responsible for the central tragedy of the detective’s life--as is an earlier relationship with a woman who will always retain a gravitational pull on his heart but who can never be brought back to him. He has a sister he wishes he were closer to, but otherwise, at the time of the cases related in the novels, the detective is utterly alone.

This isolation is key to understanding the inner psychology of the Factory novels. The detective literally lives through his work, and feels most fully engaged and connected to the world when he can inhabit the lives of the victims. Although the detective alludes to other cases, ones not related in the novels, the reader has the sense that he wasn’t as invested in those victims. He can recite the details, but there’s no emotional life to them.

But the cases in front of him--they’re all about an inner life, of bringing back the dead. In each case, to greater and lesser extents, the detective reanimates the victims, attempts to identify with them, attempts to honor them, to memorialize them through his efforts.

As Mike Ashley said of the Factory series in his must-have 2002 non-fiction resource, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, “Although these books are bleak and noisome--I Was Dora Suarez has been called “one of the most gruesome books ever published”--they are also honest and portray a life too many traditional crime novels try to avoid. [Raymond] painted the underbelly of London in all its shades of black.”

I hope all those shades will be shown clearly over the next month.

Our series about Raymond’s work was the brainchild of British Rap Sheet contributor Gordon Harries, who recruited a stellar collection of notable novelists to ponder the strengths and bleaknesses of the five Factory books. Tomorrow’s opening entry, about He Died with His Eyes Open, was penned by Tony Black, the Australia-born Edinburgh author of the Gus Dury series (Gutted and Paying for It). It will be followed by Diamond Dagger Award winner John Harvey’s reconsideration of The Devil’s Home on Leave; a tribute to How the Dead Live, written by Scottish novelist Russel D. McLean (The Good Son); a fervent defense of I Was Dora Suarez, composed by Cathi Unsworth (Bad Penny Blues); and No More Heroes author Ray Banks’ admiring essay about Dead Man Upright, the “anticlimax to the Factory series.”

Thanks again to Harries for his inspiration and dogged efforts to make this project happen. And I hope that Rap Sheet readers will enjoy the results, and learn from them as much as I did in reading all of these excellent essays.

READ MORE: “Obituary: Robin Cook,” by John Williams (The Independent); “Derek Raymond and a Few Upcoming Titles,” by Glenn Harper (International Noir Fiction).