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 fragile sweetness at the core of people-if we allowed that to be kicked, smashed and splintered, then we had no society at all of the kind I felt I had to uphold. I had committed my own sins against it, out of transient weakness."
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.
Article comments
1 - Rob J
I disagree with the statement that Raymond was not the equal of Jim Thompson.
The Factory novels are so beautifully written, they are closer to Voltaire than Thompson's pulp origins. Thompson was not a patch on Chandler, Goodis or Charles Williams either, but maybe history will rewrite itself one day. Regarding the Factory novels, if any recent writer has come closer to the nature of evil in recent years, come back and let me know...