Not so much hard-boiled as stuck, burned and blackened, to the pan, the late Derek Raymond's work attracts an obsessive dedication in his fans who should celebrate Serpent's Tail's long-overdue decision to reprint his black novels.

He Died with His Eyes Open is the opening shot in the Factory series, generally accepted to be the author's best work and an introduction to his Marlowe: the unnamed Detective Sergeant with the Department of Unexplained Deaths, also known as A14; whose tireless troubled trawling through a world which disgusts him continue through a further four novels, all of which Serpent's Tail will reissue. Raymond (in reality Old Etonian, ex-criminal Robin Cook) sits somewhat uneasily on the crime fiction shelves.

As police procedurals the Factory series -- named after the villains' nickname for Poland Street nick from which the Sgt. occasionally operates -- are beneath a joke.

Who dunnit? Who cares, as the Sgt. 'investigates' the brutal murder of Charles Staniland - a failed writer, who, it is safe to assume owes a great deal to his creator's colourful life - we are in the world of autobiography, dreams, nightmares and beautiful, angry, compassionate, writing. 

This is dark stuff, Raymond referred to his works as Black Novels, and he is often compared to Jacobean dramatists and other earlier metaphysicians. You are enclosed in a hyper-real and deeply unpleasant world illuminated by Raymond's own deeply pessimistic philosophical musings.   

The only similar crime writing I have encountered is that of Jim Thompson, the American master of the psychopathicnovel and another popular fiction writer who has won comparisons with Dostoyesvsky.