Derek Raymond
Encyclopedia
Robert William Arthur Cook (12 June 1931 - 30 July 1994), better known since the 1980s by his pen name Derek Raymond, was an English
crime writer, credited with being the founder of English noir.
magnate, Cook spent his early years at the family’s London
house, off Baker Street
, tormenting a series of nannies. In 1937, in anticipation of the Second World War, the family retreated to the countryside, to a house near their Kent
ish castle. In 1944 Cook went to Eton
, which he later characterized as a “hotbed of buggery
” and “an excellent preparation for vice
of any kind”. He dropped out at the age of 17. During his National Service
, Cook attained the rank of corporal
(latrines). After a brief stint working for the family business, selling lingerie in a department store in Neath
, Wales
, he spent most of the Fifties abroad. He lived in the Beat Hotel
in Paris
, rubbing shoulders with his neighbours William S. Burroughs
and Allen Ginsberg
, and danced at fashionable left bank
boîtes
with the likes of Juliette Greco
. In New York
he resided on the Lower East Side
and was married to an heiress
from New England
for all of sixty-five days. He claimed that he was sick of the dead-on-its-feet upper crust he was born into, that he didn’t believe in and didn’t want, whose values were meaningless. He was seeking to carve his way out — “Crime was the only chisel I could find.” Cook smuggled oil paintings to Amsterdam
, drove fast cars into Spain
from Gibraltar
, and consummated his downward mobility
by spending time in a Spanish jail for sounding off about Francisco Franco
in his local bar.
a property company for Charlie Da Silva, an associate of the Krays. After undergoing interrogation by the Dutch
police force in connection with an insurance scam related to the apparent theft of a Rembrandt painting, Cook claimed to have given up a life of actual crime for good in favor of a life of writing about it. Published under the name of Robin Cook, his study of one man’s deliberate descent into the milieu
of London lowlifes, The Crust on its Uppers (1962) was an immediate succès de scandale
upon publication. Lexicographers
mined it for authentic usage of Cockney rhyming slang
and thieves’ cant
. But glowing reviews failed to produce great riches. Cook was unfazed by this disparity, commenting later: “I’ve watched people like Kingsley Amis
, struggling to get on the up escalator, while I had the down escalator all to myself.” He supported his second wife, Eugene, and first child, Sebastian, by combining further novel-writing with stints as a Soho
pornographer in St Anne's Court or running gambling parties. In conducting these affairs, Cook soon found himself inspired to depart from England. He spent much of the Sixties in Italy
. The Tuscan
village in which he settled declared itself an independent anarchist
state, and appointed Cook in a dual capacity of its foreign minister and minister of finance.
By the end of 1970, Cook had a third wife, Rose, a stepson, Nicholas, an infant daughter, Zoe, a house in Holland Park
, and a job as a taxi-driver. His books earned no royalties, his third marriage was in shambles, and he lost his London house. Cook relocated to France and bought a derelict 15th-century fortified tower in Aveyron
, to the north of Montpellier
. He abandoned writing through all of the Seventies, working as a vineyard laborer with occasional sidelines in roofing, driving, and livestock slaughter. His family rejoined him for a while, but by 1979 the marriage had broken up for good. Nearing 50, Cook eased himself back into literature with a potboiler
that was published only in a French translation. He returned to London, got married to his fourth wife, Fiona, then divorced again. He worked as a minicab-driver on the night shift. He was collecting the material for the first of his “black novels”.
, best-selling author of Coma, “nor with the bloody shadow minister for health
, come to that”. In France, his books kept being published under his real name, generating some confusion with the American novelist.
The book inaugurated the Factory series, nominal police procedurals narrated by the unnamed protagonist, a sergeant
at London Metropolitan Police
’s Department of Unexplained Deaths, also known as A14. A14 handles the crummy lowlife murders, in contrast with attention-grabbing homicides handled by the prestigious Serious Crimes Division, better known as Scotland Yard
. It is “by far the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service” (He Died With His Eyes Open, p. 6). As befits his lowly professional standing and departmental affiliation, the detective is surly, sarcastic, and insubordinate. His first case in the series is an inquiry into the murder of one Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland, an unemployed writer aged fifty-one, of upper class
breeding but apparently down on his luck. He appears to be making little headway in an investigation that his departmental betters would be expected to treat as trivial. His ensuing relations with authorities proceed along the lines of this conversation with Inspector
Bowman:
with the murder victim. Accordingly, his detective plays the part of the difficult reader favored by the Symbolists. In response to Staniland’s taped lesson in forensic pathology, he recalls another underappreciated artist:
fiction exemplified toughness, idealism, and determination in his private pursuit of justice unattainable by official means. Stripped of idealism by postwar disillusionment, his English counterpart transmutes his toughness and determination into an obsessive pursuit of an inexorable existential conundrum. The victimized pretext of this pursuit was readily identifiable with the implied author
of the narrative in his physiological and metaphysical anguish. In his definitive statement of literary convictions, Cook postulated that the black novel “describes men and women whom circumstances have pushed too far, people whom existence has bent and deformed. It deals with the question of turning a small, frightened battle with oneself into a much greater struggle — the universal human struggle against the general contract, whose terms are unfillable, and where defeat is certain.” (The Hidden Files) By the general contract, the writer understood human life at its most exigent. The idea was everything.
His first black novel soon made Cook’s new nom de plume
famous in France. It was filmed in 1985 as On ne meurt que 2 fois, with Charlotte Rampling
and Michel Serrault
in the lead roles. Its successor, The Devil’s Home On Leave (1985), featured an informer turning up in five posh supermarket bags as boiled meat, and provided greater insight into the motives of its unnamed protagonist. It was also filmed in France in 1987 as Les Mois d’avril sont meurtriers. How the Dead Live (1986) had its detective sent away from London to a remote village called Thornhill, looking into the disappearance of a local doctor’s wife and gleaning unique insights into consensual justification of homicide. Cook, in his trademark black jeans, black leather jacket and black beret, became a star act on the Continental
literary circuit. When his Factory novels were reprinted in paperback
in the late Eighties, Derek Raymond began to gather momentum in the Anglosphere
.
, a shotgun blows the top off the head of Felix Roatta, part-owner of the seedy Parallel Club. As the detective obsesses with the young woman whose murder he investigates, he discovers that her death is even more bizarre than he had suspected: the murderer ate bits of flesh from Suarez’s corpse and ejaculated against her thigh. Autopsy results accrue the revulsion as they compound the puzzle: Suarez was dying of AIDS
, but the pathologist is unable to determine how she had contracted HIV
. Then a photo, supplied by a former Parallel hostess, links Suarez to Roatta, and inquiries at the nightclub reveal her vile and inhuman exploitation.
To Cook’s delight, the ensuing novel caused Dan Franklin, the publisher of its three predecessors, to vomit over his desk. As a result of this reader response, Secker & Warburg told the author to take his nauseating wares elsewhere. Scribner
took over the fourth novel in the factory series. Writing for The New York Times
, Marilyn Stasio
proclaimed: “Everything about I Was Dora Suarez […] shrieks of the joy and pain of going too far.” Filmmaker Chris Petit described it in The Times
as “a book full of coagulating disgust and compassion for the world’s contamination, disease and mutilation, all dwelt on with a feverish, metaphysical
intensity that recalls Donne
and the Jacobeans more than any of Raymond’s contemporaries.” Showing up its surfeit of intestinal fortitude, the French government named its author a Chevalier of Arts and Letters
in 1991.
Cook recognized I Was Dora Suarez as his greatest and most onerous achievement: “Writing Suarez broke me; I see that now. I don’t mean that it broke me physically or mentally, although it came near to doing both. But it changed me; it separated out for ever what was living and what was dead. I realised it was doing so at the time, but not fully, and not how, and not at once. […] I asked for it, though. If you go down into the darkness, you must expect it to leave traces on you coming up — if you do come up. It’s like working in a mine; you hope that hands you can’t see know what they’re doing and will pull you through. I know I wondered half way through Suarez if I would get through — I mean, if my reason would get through. For the trouble with an experience like Suarez is that you become what you’re writing, passing like Alice
through the language into the situation.” (The Hidden Files, pp. 132–133.)
by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair
, about the search for a possibly non-existent rare book, featured Cook as himself, reunited with such Sixties “morries” (his term for notable characters) as Jewish anarchist writer Emanuel Litvinoff and Tony Lambrianou, an ex-convict corpse disposer for Reg and Ron Kray and alumnus of Mosleyite
Jew-baiting. Derek Raymond’s fifth novel in the Factory series, Dead Man Upright, was brought out by Time Warner
in 1993, regrettably failing to sustain the momentum of the preceding entries. But its author demonstrated his versatile capacity by playing a sell-out gig at the South Bank
in the company of indie pop stars Gallon Drunk, with whom he recorded a musical interpretation of I Was Dora Suarez.
Robert William Arthur “Robin” Cook, also known as Derek Raymond, died peacefully at the age of 63. His cause of death was given as cancer. His literary executor is John Williams, the author of the novels Cardiff Dead, The Prince of Wales, and Temperance Town. Derek Raymond’s final novel,Not Till the Red Fog Rises, appeared posthumously in 1994. It served up a perverse and funny apotheosis of its protagonist Gust, on parole after serving 10 years for armed robbery. In a review published in The Observer
, Jane McLoughlin compared the quality of its writing to that of Graham Greene
, Eric Ambler
, and Joseph Conrad
. A BBC
drama series based on the Factory novels and to be produced by Kenith Trodd, plus a third French film adaptation of How the Dead Live, directed by Claude Chabrol
and starring Philippe Noiret
, were rumored to be in the works, but never materialized. The first four Factory novels are set to be reissued by Serpent’s Tail starting in early 2006.
—Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87
Then we sat in silence, watching the scenery whirring past us in the improving light. I was lighting us both a cigarette when he turned to me and said: ‘Sorry if I got cross, morrie.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
‘Bit on edge, I suppose.’
It was all very kosher and British.
‘Not surprising,’ I said. ‘It’s been an angstful sort of night.’
—Crust on Its Uppers, pp. 180–181
By the word existence I mean the one contract valid for mankind; I define it as the general contract. In it are the clauses of human life; its uses, responsibilities, limitations, its inevitable eclipse. This contract is the basis of the black novel, whose loathing of violence, which it describes as precisely as possible in order to remind people how disgusting it is, causes it to rise up against death forced on any person before his time, and that is where it becomes a novel in mourning. Each contract is to be terminated in the way that its clauses are set out; but it is not to be destroyed by any contract-holder. That possibility is contained in no contract. To break his contract is either to invite the breaker’s destruction, or else it is evidence that the act of destruction has been carried out by a signatory who has already been destroyed, such as a killer — and that is why my detective picks up Suarez’ battered head and kisses it.
I will go further. What is remarkable about I Was Dora Suarez has nothing to do with literature at all; what is remarkable about it is that in its own way and by its own route it struggles after the same message as Christ. I am not the kind of person that anyone would expect to say such a thing, for although I believe firmly in the invisible, I am not religious. But in writing the book I definitely underwent an experience that I can only describe as cathartic; the writing of Suarez, though plunging me into evil, became the cause of my seeking to purge what was evil in myself. It was only after I had finished the book that I realized this; I was far too deeply involved in the battle with evil that the book became to think any further than that at the time […]
Suarez was my atonement for fifty years’ indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others.
—The Hidden Files, pp. 98–99
Existence is sometimes what a forward artillery observer sees of enemy lines through field glasses. A distant and troubling view brought suddenly into focus with a wealth of obscene detail.
—The Hidden Files, p. 121
The black novel seeks to present as forcibly as it can the terminal psychic situation that occurs in people who have arrived at a point where they have no hope, no motive, and no longer even the desire to conceal anything from themselves; the black novel intervenes at the moment where a human being approaches his last moment: ‘The first night of death must seem so strange’. A special mood is necessary to make language plastic enough to convey such experience exactly; experience so devastatingly simple that, like love, it verges on the indescribable. Nearly every attempt to convey it can really only be described as another in a seemingly endless series of attempts since we cannot describe what we are not yet in a position to know — and yet it is the black novel’s absolute duty to express it. T. S. Eliot
, I think, got closest to describing the nature of this challenge when he wrote (I paraphrase): It is not necessary to die in order to describe death.
—The Hidden Files, p. 144
The bore is the human cuckoo. He will take over anything, usurp any nest. His one outstanding feature is that he has no features. He has nothing whatever to offer society, not the least germ of an original or positive idea — and yet the rest of us somehow find ourselves moving up to make room for him, just as the body makes itself hos to a destructive virus. Bores would take the entire world over if they could; sometimes they do. Here is an extract from the diary of one who did: ‘I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess…’ (Heinrich Himmler
, November 1921).
—The Hidden Files, p. 148
Nothing else much matters once you have achieved the hardest thing, which is to act out of conviction. 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. I recognise that I am a minor writer; but this does not affect the depth of my convictions.
—The Hidden Files, p. 287
‘You’re not very good at it, are you?’ said Gust, ‘they ought to have sent heavies in.’ He thought the man very likely could have got a job playing Hess in this new TV series they were doing on the war, and he would have had a word with a few directors he knew in Soho if he had been a mate of his. But, as he wasn’t, Gust kicked him in the stomach as he tried to drag himself up on one leg with the help of the bar-rail, then turned back to the other man.
‘You all right?’ he said. ‘How are you feeling now? Chipper?’ He took one of the man’s ears in his thumb and forefinger; the ear was tiny, considering the size of his head, and it had little hairs inside it. Gust picked up a cocktail stick out of a dirty glass on the bar and jabbed it down into the eardrum as far as he could; when he pulled it out the stick was half-way red, and there was some grey stuff in it as well. He shouted down his ear: ‘I think I just broke your foot!’ but the man wasn’t making sense any more; he was wailing with his hand clapped to the side of his head, swaying up and down from the waist like a bereaved widow, or else perhaps he just didn’t hear, or maybe the music was too loud. Gust realised then that he had pushed the stick in too far and that the man would probably die.
Dirty cocktail-stick in the brain? What a bleeding way to go! Now the man with the broken leg tried another naughty stroke; although he only had one hand free because he was using the other one to hold onto the rail, he still managed to smash a glass and try putting it in Gust’s face.
‘This is just self-defence after all,’ Gust said to himself. He stamped on the man’s feet again; this time he definitely felt bones go and the man screamed, dropped the glass and let go of the rail; but instead of letting him fall Gust took him round the waist, ripped his fly open and searched inside his pants till he found his testicles, which he yanked right out into his hand. Their owner can’t have been much into baths because they smelled like something tepid from a canteen counter. Gust wrung them like the devil having a go at a set of wedding bells with all the grip he had, until the man was shrieking on the same D minor as the music.
‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Gust, ‘but I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn to fuck all over again.’ He wiped the blood off the man’s prick down his face, then pulled the face towards him and drove his nose into his brain with his head. The music boosted into E major on a key change, and the man doubled up under a bar-stool, leaving a lot of blood behind him while Gust receded into the half darkness towards the black drapes on the walls.
—Brand New Dead, pp. 86–87
Ken Bruen
frequently incorporates tributes to Derek Raymond into his hard-boiled fiction.
Rob Humphreys includes this listing in The Rough Guide to London, Rough Guides, 2003, pp. 663–664:
English people
The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...
crime writer, credited with being the founder of English noir.
Early life
The eldest son of a textileTextile
A textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, or other material to produce long strands...
magnate, Cook spent his early years at the family’s London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
house, off Baker Street
Baker Street
Baker Street is a street in the Marylebone district of the City of Westminster in London. It is named after builder William Baker, who laid the street out in the 18th century. The street is most famous for its connection to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who lived at a fictional 221B...
, tormenting a series of nannies. In 1937, in anticipation of the Second World War, the family retreated to the countryside, to a house near their Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
ish castle. In 1944 Cook went to Eton
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
, which he later characterized as a “hotbed of buggery
Buggery
The British English term buggery is very close in meaning to the term sodomy, and is often used interchangeably in law and popular speech. It may be, also, a specific common law offence, encompassing both sodomy and bestiality.-In law:...
” and “an excellent preparation for vice
Vice
Vice is a practice or a behavior or habit considered immoral, depraved, or degrading in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a defect, an infirmity, or merely a bad habit. Synonyms for vice include fault, depravity, sin, iniquity, wickedness, and corruption...
of any kind”. He dropped out at the age of 17. During his National Service
National service
National service is a common name for mandatory government service programmes . The term became common British usage during and for some years following the Second World War. Many young people spent one or more years in such programmes...
, Cook attained the rank of corporal
Corporal
Corporal is a rank in use in some form by most militaries and by some police forces or other uniformed organizations. It is usually equivalent to NATO Rank Code OR-4....
(latrines). After a brief stint working for the family business, selling lingerie in a department store in Neath
Neath
Neath is a town and community situated in the principal area of Neath Port Talbot, Wales, UK with a population of approximately 45,898 in 2001...
, Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, he spent most of the Fifties abroad. He lived in the Beat Hotel
Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century -Overview:...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, rubbing shoulders with his neighbours William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, and danced at fashionable left bank
Rive Gauche
La Rive Gauche is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. Here the river flows roughly westward, cutting the city in two: looking downstream, the southern bank is to the left, and the northern bank is to the right....
boîtes
Nightclub
A nightclub is an entertainment venue which usually operates late into the night...
with the likes of Juliette Greco
Juliette Gréco
Juliette Gréco, — also Michelle – is a French actress and popular chanson singer.-Early life and family:Juliette Gréco was born in Montpellier to a Corsican father and a mother who became active in the Résistance, in the Hérault département of southern France. She was raised by her maternal...
. In New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
he resided on the Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
and was married to an heiress
Beneficiary
A beneficiary in the broadest sense is a natural person or other legal entity who receives money or other benefits from a benefactor. For example: The beneficiary of a life insurance policy, is the person who receives the payment of the amount of insurance after the death of the insured...
from New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
for all of sixty-five days. He claimed that he was sick of the dead-on-its-feet upper crust he was born into, that he didn’t believe in and didn’t want, whose values were meaningless. He was seeking to carve his way out — “Crime was the only chisel I could find.” Cook smuggled oil paintings to Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
, drove fast cars into Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
from Gibraltar
Gibraltar
Gibraltar is a British overseas territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean. A peninsula with an area of , it has a northern border with Andalusia, Spain. The Rock of Gibraltar is the major landmark of the region...
, and consummated his downward mobility
Social mobility
Social mobility refers to the movement of people in a population from one social class or economic level to another. It typically refers to vertical mobility -- movement of individuals or groups up from one socio-economic level to another, often by changing jobs or marrying; but can also refer to...
by spending time in a Spanish jail for sounding off about Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
in his local bar.
Odd books and irregular jobs
Cook returned to London in 1960. He soon frontedFront organization
A front organization is any entity set up by and controlled by another organization, such as intelligence agencies, organized crime groups, banned organizations, religious or political groups, advocacy groups, or corporations...
a property company for Charlie Da Silva, an associate of the Krays. After undergoing interrogation by the Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
police force in connection with an insurance scam related to the apparent theft of a Rembrandt painting, Cook claimed to have given up a life of actual crime for good in favor of a life of writing about it. Published under the name of Robin Cook, his study of one man’s deliberate descent into the milieu
Social environment
The social environment of an individual, also called social context or milieu, is the culture that s/he was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts....
of London lowlifes, The Crust on its Uppers (1962) was an immediate succès de scandale
Succès de scandale
Succès de scandale is French for "success from scandal", i.e. when a success derives from a scandal.It might seem contradictory that any kind of success might follow from scandal: but scandal attracts attention, and this attention is sometimes the beginning of notoriety and/or other successes...
upon publication. Lexicographers
Lexicography
Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....
mined it for authentic usage of Cockney rhyming slang
Cockney rhyming slang
Rhyming slang is a form of phrase construction in the English language and is especially prevalent in dialectal British English from the East End of London; hence the alternative name, Cockney rhyming slang...
and thieves’ cant
Thieves' cant
Thieves' cant or Rogues' cant was a secret language which was formerly used by thieves, beggars and hustlers of various kinds in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries...
. But glowing reviews failed to produce great riches. Cook was unfazed by this disparity, commenting later: “I’ve watched people like Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
, struggling to get on the up escalator, while I had the down escalator all to myself.” He supported his second wife, Eugene, and first child, Sebastian, by combining further novel-writing with stints as a Soho
Soho
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...
pornographer in St Anne's Court or running gambling parties. In conducting these affairs, Cook soon found himself inspired to depart from England. He spent much of the Sixties in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
. The Tuscan
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
village in which he settled declared itself an independent anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
state, and appointed Cook in a dual capacity of its foreign minister and minister of finance.
By the end of 1970, Cook had a third wife, Rose, a stepson, Nicholas, an infant daughter, Zoe, a house in Holland Park
Holland Park
Holland Park is a district and a public park in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in west central London, England.Holland Park has a reputation as an affluent and fashionable area, known for attractive large Victorian townhouses, and high-class shopping and restaurants...
, and a job as a taxi-driver. His books earned no royalties, his third marriage was in shambles, and he lost his London house. Cook relocated to France and bought a derelict 15th-century fortified tower in Aveyron
Aveyron
Aveyron is a département in southern France named after the Aveyron River.- History :Aveyron is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790....
, to the north of Montpellier
Montpellier
-Neighbourhoods:Since 2001, Montpellier has been divided into seven official neighbourhoods, themselves divided into sub-neighbourhoods. Each of them possesses a neighbourhood council....
. He abandoned writing through all of the Seventies, working as a vineyard laborer with occasional sidelines in roofing, driving, and livestock slaughter. His family rejoined him for a while, but by 1979 the marriage had broken up for good. Nearing 50, Cook eased himself back into literature with a potboiler
Potboiler
Potboiler or pot-boiler is a term used to describe a poor quality novel, play, opera, or film, or other creative work that was created quickly to make money to pay for the creator's daily expenses . Authors who create potboiler novels or screenplays are sometimes called hack writers...
that was published only in a French translation. He returned to London, got married to his fourth wife, Fiona, then divorced again. He worked as a minicab-driver on the night shift. He was collecting the material for the first of his “black novels”.
Black novels
Cook published He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) under the pen name of Derek Raymond. He adopted his new pseudonym because he did not want to be confused with the other Robin CookRobin Cook (novelist)
Dr. Robin Cook is an American physician and novelist who writes about medicine and topics affecting public health....
, best-selling author of Coma, “nor with the bloody shadow minister for health
Robin Cook
Robert Finlayson Cook was a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Livingston from 1983 until his death, and notably served in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001....
, come to that”. In France, his books kept being published under his real name, generating some confusion with the American novelist.
The book inaugurated the Factory series, nominal police procedurals narrated by the unnamed protagonist, a sergeant
Sergeant
Sergeant is a rank used in some form by most militaries, police forces, and other uniformed organizations around the world. Its origins are the Latin serviens, "one who serves", through the French term Sergent....
at London Metropolitan Police
Metropolitan police
Metropolitan Police is a generic title for the municipal police force for a major metropolitan area, and it may be part of the official title of the force...
’s Department of Unexplained Deaths, also known as A14. A14 handles the crummy lowlife murders, in contrast with attention-grabbing homicides handled by the prestigious Serious Crimes Division, better known as Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
. It is “by far the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service” (He Died With His Eyes Open, p. 6). As befits his lowly professional standing and departmental affiliation, the detective is surly, sarcastic, and insubordinate. His first case in the series is an inquiry into the murder of one Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland, an unemployed writer aged fifty-one, of upper class
Upper class
In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :...
breeding but apparently down on his luck. He appears to be making little headway in an investigation that his departmental betters would be expected to treat as trivial. His ensuing relations with authorities proceed along the lines of this conversation with Inspector
Inspector
Inspector is both a police rank and an administrative position, both used in a number of contexts. However, it is not an equivalent rank in each police force.- Australia :...
Bowman:
‘Christ, it’s you,’ he said. You still on that Staniland case?’The detective displays similar manners whilst intimidating villains who pop up as witnesses in his investigation:
‘Still?’ I said. ‘I’ve only been on it four days.’
‘Four days? You should have had the geezer in half the time. You’ll be working weekends if you don’t pull your finger out.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘If you solved them that fast, they’d start stripping you down for the microchips to find out how you did it.’
‘How are you getting on with it, anyhow?’
‘I can’t get my proof,’ I said. ‘You know me — slow, quick, quick, slow, Mr. FoxtrotFoxtrot (Dance)The foxtrot is a smooth progressive dance characterized by long, continuous flowing movements across the dance floor. It is danced to big band music, and the feeling is one of elegance and sophistication...
they call me. That’s why I’m still a sergeant while you’re shaping up for superintendentSuperintendent (police)Superintendent , often shortened to "super", is a rank in British police services and in most English-speaking Commonwealth nations. In many Commonwealth countries the full version is superintendent of police...
on the Vice Squad. All I can say is, when it happens, don’t get done for looking at dirty pictures on the taxpayer’s time.’
‘You really make me laugh, you do,’ Bowman said. ‘You come out with better jokes than a villainVillainA villain is an "evil" character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist, the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters...
.’
—Ibid., p. 146
‘Oh, sorry. Yes, that one. Yes, I get you now.’Such social shortcomings find their counterpart in a nearly psychotic identification with the mutilated bodies of murder victims whom the hero relentlessly avenges. The detective finds Staniland’s recorded journals. He listens to the voice of the murder victim ruminate on his sense of being trapped in his body and the possibility of release through death. The tapes convey a poetic diction infected with haunted sensibilities:
‘Do you?’ I said. ‘Lucky for you. Because you could find yourself in a bit of bother if you didn’t look out. I might decide I wanted to wind you right up tight if you misled me, just to see what would happen. And do you know what would happen, fatty? You’d go off pop! Like that.’
‘Okay, okay,’ he said.
—Ibid., p. 33
The next tape of Staniland’s I played started:The sacred relationship between the dreamer’s body and the cathedral finds its immediate complement in the profane preoccupations of his waking life.I dreamed I was walking through the door of a cathedral. Someone I couldn’t distinguish warned me: ‘Don’t go in there, it’s haunted.’ However, I went straight in and glided up the nave to the altar. The roof of the building was too high to see; the quoinsQuoin (architecture)Quoins are the cornerstones of brick or stone walls. Quoins may be either structural or decorative. Architects and builders use quoins to give the impression of strength and firmness to the outline of a building...
were lost in a dark fog through which the votive lamps glowed orange. The only light came through the diamond-shaped clear panes in the windows; it was faint and cold. This neglected mass was attached to a sprawl of vaulted ruins; I had been in them all night; I had wandered through them for centuries. They had once been my home; burned-out rafters jutted like human ribs above empty, freezing galleries, and great doors gave onto suites soaked by pitiless rain. Angry spectres, staggering with the faint steps of the insane, paraded arm in arm through the wrecked masonry, sneering as I passed: ‘The Stanilands have no money? Good! Excellent!’
In the cathedral there were no pews or chairs, just people standing around, waiting. No service was in progress. Knots of men and women from another century stood about, talking in low voices to bishops who moved in and out of the crowd, trailing their tarnished vestments.
I realized with a paralyzing horror that the place really was haunted. The people kept looking upwards, as though waiting for an event. I managed to overcome my fear and went on up the nave towards the altar. As I passed, groups of people crossed themselves and said nervously: ‘Don’t do that!’ I took no notice, but opened the gate in the rails and went and stood in front of the altar. Behind it, instead of a reredosReredosthumb|300px|right|An altar and reredos from [[St. Josaphat's Roman Catholic Church|St. Josaphat Catholic Church]] in [[Detroit]], [[Michigan]]. This would be called a [[retable]] in many other languages and countries....
, hung a tapestry with a strange, curling design in dark red; the tapestry was so high that it lost itself in the roof. As I watched, it began to undulate, to flow and ripple, gradually and sensuously at first, then more and more ardently, until it was rearing and thundering against the wall like an angry sea. I heard people behind me groan and mutter, praying in their anguish and fear. Then my waist was held by invisible hands and I was raised from the floor; at the height of the roof I was turned slowly parallel with the ground and then released so that I floated, immobile and face downwards, far above the people whose faces I could make out in the half-dark as a grey blur, staring up at me. After I had floated the length and breadth of the building I descended quietly, of my own accord, and landed lightly on the spot from where I had been taken, whereupon I walked directly out of the building without looking back. As I walked swiftly away down a gravel path someone like Barbara came running towards me in a white coat, approaching from a thick hedge that surrounded the graveyard.
‘Quick,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘don’t let him get out!’
But I walked straight into a wood that confronted me without a qualm; no one had any power over me now.
—Ibid., pp. 188–190
The passage that I was listening to now ran:Earlier on, the detective heard Staniland’s detailed account of his participation in the slaughter of a hog, which recapitulates one among many menial occupations of his creator (Ibid., pp. 102–103). His systematic inversion of vitality drains his favorite characters of life’s essence or its principal characteristics, even as it imbues their environment with ominous animation, after the manner of French Symbolists. Uncharacteristically for a writer of crime fiction, Cook expressly and primarily identifies his authorial personaUnhook the delicate, crazy lace of flesh, detach the heart with a single cut, unmask the tissue behind the skin, unhinge the ribs, disclose the spine, take down the long dress of muscle from the bones where it hangs erect. A pause to boil the knives — then take a bold but cunning curve, sweeping into the skull you had trepanned, into the brain, and extract its art if you can. But you will have blood on your hands unless you transfused it into bottles first, and cure the whole art of the dead you may, but in brine — a dish to fatten you for your own turn.
What better surgeon than a maggotMaggotIn everyday speech the word maggot means the larva of a fly ; it is applied in particular to the larvae of Brachyceran flies, such as houseflies, cheese flies, and blowflies, rather than larvae of the Nematocera, such as mosquitoes and Crane flies...
?
What greater passion than a heart in formaldehydeFormaldehydeFormaldehyde is an organic compound with the formula CH2O. It is the simplest aldehyde, hence its systematic name methanal.Formaldehyde is a colorless gas with a characteristic pungent odor. It is an important precursor to many other chemical compounds, especially for polymers...
?
Ash drops from the morgue assistant’s cigarette into the dead mouth; they will have taken forensic X-rays of the smashed bones before putting him back into the fridge with a bang; there he will wait until the order for burial from the coroner arrives.
Those responsible for the end of his mysterious being will escape or, at best, being proved mad, get a suspended sentence under Section Sixty.
—Ibid., pp. 191–192
Persona
A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον...
with the murder victim. Accordingly, his detective plays the part of the difficult reader favored by the Symbolists. In response to Staniland’s taped lesson in forensic pathology, he recalls another underappreciated artist:
I switched the player off and began thinking for no apparent reason about a friend I had once when I was a young man. He was a sculptor who used my local pub in the Fulham RoadThe traditional detective hero of American noirFulham RoadFulham Road is a street in London, England, that runs from the A219 road in right in the centre of Fulham, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, through Chelsea to Brompton Road Knightsbridge and the A4 in Brompton, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.Fulham Road runs parallel...
; his studio was just opposite. He wore sandals but no socks, whatever the weather, and was always powdered with stone dust; this gave him a grey appearance and got under his nails. He wore his white hair long and straight over his ears. He was a Communist, and he didn’t care who knew it, though he only said so if people asked. They didn’t bother often. He was a Communist as an act of faith, like a CatharCatharCatharism was a name given to a Christian religious sect with dualistic and gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries...
. He accepted the doctrine straight, as Communists used to before they won and everything turned sour. But he rarely spoke to anyone about politics; there were so many other things to talk about. He and I used to stand at the bar together and drink beer and talk about them. But few people talked to him. That suited him. Most people couldn’t be bothered because he was stone deaf and could only lip-read you. He was deaf because he had fought for the Republic with the XIIth Brigade in the Spanish warSpanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
. He had fought at MadridMadridMadrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
(University Buildings), and later at HuescaHuescaHuesca is a city in north-eastern Spain, within the autonomous community of Aragon. It is also the capital of the Spanish province of the same name and the comarca of Hoya de Huesca....
and TeruelTeruelTeruel is a town in Aragon, eastern Spain, and the capital of Teruel Province. It has a population of 34,240 in 2006 making it one of the least populated provincial capitals in the country...
with the XVth. But at Teruel he had had both eardrums shattered when a shell exploded too close to him.
‘It was worth it.’
‘No regrets?’
‘No, of course not.’
One of the greatest forms of courage is accepting your fate, and I admired him for living with his affliction without blaming anyone for it. His name was Ransome, and he was sixty-five when I first knew him. He got his old-age pension and no more; governments don’t give you any money for fighting in foreign political wars. People like that are treated like nurses — expected to go unseen and unrewarded. So Ransome had to live in a very spare, austere way, living on porridge and crackers, drinking tea, and getting on with his sculpture. It suited him, luckily. He had always lived like that.
Nobody who mattered liked his sculpture; when I went over to his councilMunicipal servicesMunicipal services or city services refer to basic services that residents of a city expect the city government to provide in exchange for the taxes which citizens pay. Basic city services may include sanitation , water, streets, schools, food inspection fire department, police, ambulance, and...
studio I understood why. His figures reminded me of IngresJean Auguste Dominique IngresJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...
crossed with early Henry MooreHenry MooreHenry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
; they were extraordinarily graceful, and far too honest to mean anything whatever to current trendy taste. There was a quality in them that no artist nowadays can seize anymore; they expressed virtues — toughness, idealism, determination — that went out of style with a vanished Britain that I barely remembered. I asked him why, with his talent, he didn’t progress to a more modern attitude, but he said it was no use; he was still struggling to represent the essence of what he had experienced in the thirties. ‘What I’m always trying to capture,’ he explained, ‘is the light, the vision inside a man, and the conviction which that light lends his action, his whole body. Haven’t you noticed how the planes of a man’s body alter when he’s in the grip of a belief? The ex-bank-clerk acquires the stature of an athlete as he throws a grenade — or, it might be, I recollect the instant where an infantryman in an attack, a worker with a rifle, is stopped by a bullet: I try to reconstruct in stone the tragedy of a free man passing from life to death, from will to nothingness: I try to capture the second in which he disintegrates. It’s an objective that won’t let me go,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want it to.’ He had been full of promise before he went to SpainSpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
; he grubbed about and found me some of his old press-cuttings. In one of them he was quoted as saying: ‘A sculptor’s task is to convey the meaning of his time in terms of its overriding idea. If he doesn’t transmit the idea he’s worth nothing, no matter how much fame he acquires or money he makes. The idea is everything.’
—Ibid., pp. 192-194
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
fiction exemplified toughness, idealism, and determination in his private pursuit of justice unattainable by official means. Stripped of idealism by postwar disillusionment, his English counterpart transmutes his toughness and determination into an obsessive pursuit of an inexorable existential conundrum. The victimized pretext of this pursuit was readily identifiable with the implied author
Implied author
The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a literary work is written, which may differ considerably from the author's true...
of the narrative in his physiological and metaphysical anguish. In his definitive statement of literary convictions, Cook postulated that the black novel “describes men and women whom circumstances have pushed too far, people whom existence has bent and deformed. It deals with the question of turning a small, frightened battle with oneself into a much greater struggle — the universal human struggle against the general contract, whose terms are unfillable, and where defeat is certain.” (The Hidden Files) By the general contract, the writer understood human life at its most exigent. The idea was everything.
His first black novel soon made Cook’s new nom de plume
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
famous in France. It was filmed in 1985 as On ne meurt que 2 fois, with Charlotte Rampling
Charlotte Rampling
Charlotte Rampling, OBE is an English actress. Her career spans four decades in English-language as well as French and Italian cinema.- Early life :...
and Michel Serrault
Michel Serrault
Michel Serrault was a celebrated French actor who appeared in over 150 films.-Biography :...
in the lead roles. Its successor, The Devil’s Home On Leave (1985), featured an informer turning up in five posh supermarket bags as boiled meat, and provided greater insight into the motives of its unnamed protagonist. It was also filmed in France in 1987 as Les Mois d’avril sont meurtriers. How the Dead Live (1986) had its detective sent away from London to a remote village called Thornhill, looking into the disappearance of a local doctor’s wife and gleaning unique insights into consensual justification of homicide. Cook, in his trademark black jeans, black leather jacket and black beret, became a star act on the Continental
Continental Europe
Continental Europe, also referred to as mainland Europe or simply the Continent, is the continent of Europe, explicitly excluding European islands....
literary circuit. When his Factory novels were reprinted in paperback
Paperback
Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...
in the late Eighties, Derek Raymond began to gather momentum in the Anglosphere
Anglosphere
Anglosphere is a neologism which refers to those nations with English as the most common language. The term can be used more specifically to refer to those nations which share certain characteristics within their cultures based on a linguistic heritage, through being former British colonies...
.
Popular acclaim
Cook’s notoriety crested following the 1990 publication of what many consider his best — and most repulsive — work: the tortured, redemptive tale of a masochistic serial killer, I Was Dora Suarez. As the fourth novel in the Factory series opens, young prostitute Dora Suarez is axed into pieces. The killer then smashes the head of her friend, an 86-year-old widow. On the same night, a mile away in the West EndWest End of London
The West End of London is an area of central London, containing many of the city's major tourist attractions, shops, businesses, government buildings, and entertainment . Use of the term began in the early 19th century to describe fashionable areas to the west of Charing Cross...
, a shotgun blows the top off the head of Felix Roatta, part-owner of the seedy Parallel Club. As the detective obsesses with the young woman whose murder he investigates, he discovers that her death is even more bizarre than he had suspected: the murderer ate bits of flesh from Suarez’s corpse and ejaculated against her thigh. Autopsy results accrue the revulsion as they compound the puzzle: Suarez was dying of AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
, but the pathologist is unable to determine how she had contracted HIV
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...
. Then a photo, supplied by a former Parallel hostess, links Suarez to Roatta, and inquiries at the nightclub reveal her vile and inhuman exploitation.
To Cook’s delight, the ensuing novel caused Dan Franklin, the publisher of its three predecessors, to vomit over his desk. As a result of this reader response, Secker & Warburg told the author to take his nauseating wares elsewhere. Scribner
Charles Scribner's Sons
Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...
took over the fourth novel in the factory series. Writing for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Marilyn Stasio
Marilyn Stasio
Marilyn Stasio is a New York City area author, writer and literary critic. She has been the "Crime Columnist" for The New York Times Book Review since about 1988, having written over 650 reviews as of January 2009. She says she reads "a few" crime books a year professionally and many more for...
proclaimed: “Everything about I Was Dora Suarez […] shrieks of the joy and pain of going too far.” Filmmaker Chris Petit described it in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
as “a book full of coagulating disgust and compassion for the world’s contamination, disease and mutilation, all dwelt on with a feverish, metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
intensity that recalls Donne
John Donne
John Donne 31 March 1631), English poet, satirist, lawyer, and priest, is now considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are notable for their strong and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs,...
and the Jacobeans more than any of Raymond’s contemporaries.” Showing up its surfeit of intestinal fortitude, the French government named its author a Chevalier of Arts and Letters
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres is an Order of France, established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture, and confirmed as part of the Ordre national du Mérite by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963...
in 1991.
Cook recognized I Was Dora Suarez as his greatest and most onerous achievement: “Writing Suarez broke me; I see that now. I don’t mean that it broke me physically or mentally, although it came near to doing both. But it changed me; it separated out for ever what was living and what was dead. I realised it was doing so at the time, but not fully, and not how, and not at once. […] I asked for it, though. If you go down into the darkness, you must expect it to leave traces on you coming up — if you do come up. It’s like working in a mine; you hope that hands you can’t see know what they’re doing and will pull you through. I know I wondered half way through Suarez if I would get through — I mean, if my reason would get through. For the trouble with an experience like Suarez is that you become what you’re writing, passing like Alice
Through the Looking-Glass
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a work of literature by Lewis Carroll . It is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
through the language into the situation.” (The Hidden Files, pp. 132–133.)
Endgame
Following the amicable breakup of his fifth marriage to Agnès, Cook returned to Britain in 1991. The publication of his literary memoir The Hidden Files (1992) precipitated numerous interviews. The Cardinal and the Corpse, a film made for Channel 4Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSL is a British writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.-Life and work:...
, about the search for a possibly non-existent rare book, featured Cook as himself, reunited with such Sixties “morries” (his term for notable characters) as Jewish anarchist writer Emanuel Litvinoff and Tony Lambrianou, an ex-convict corpse disposer for Reg and Ron Kray and alumnus of Mosleyite
Oswald Mosley
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, was an English politician, known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists...
Jew-baiting. Derek Raymond’s fifth novel in the Factory series, Dead Man Upright, was brought out by Time Warner
Time Warner
Time Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...
in 1993, regrettably failing to sustain the momentum of the preceding entries. But its author demonstrated his versatile capacity by playing a sell-out gig at the South Bank
South Bank
South Bank is an area of London, England located immediately adjacent to the south side of the River Thames. It forms a long and narrow section of riverside development that is within the London Borough of Lambeth to the border with the London Borough of Southwark and was formerly simply known as...
in the company of indie pop stars Gallon Drunk, with whom he recorded a musical interpretation of I Was Dora Suarez.
Robert William Arthur “Robin” Cook, also known as Derek Raymond, died peacefully at the age of 63. His cause of death was given as cancer. His literary executor is John Williams, the author of the novels Cardiff Dead, The Prince of Wales, and Temperance Town. Derek Raymond’s final novel,Not Till the Red Fog Rises, appeared posthumously in 1994. It served up a perverse and funny apotheosis of its protagonist Gust, on parole after serving 10 years for armed robbery. In a review published in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
, Jane McLoughlin compared the quality of its writing to that of Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
, Eric Ambler
Eric Ambler
Eric Clifford Ambler OBE was an influential British author of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre. Ambler also used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.-Life:...
, and Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
. A BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
drama series based on the Factory novels and to be produced by Kenith Trodd, plus a third French film adaptation of How the Dead Live, directed by Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol was a French film director, a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s...
and starring Philippe Noiret
Philippe Noiret
Philippe Noiret was a French film actor.-Biography:Noiret's father was in the clothes trade. Philippe was an indifferent scholar and attended several prestigious Paris schools, including the Lycée Janson de Sailly. He failed several times to pass his baccalauréat exams, so he decided to study...
, were rumored to be in the works, but never materialized. The first four Factory novels are set to be reissued by Serpent’s Tail starting in early 2006.
Selected quotations
It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don’t happen to like them all that much there’s nothing you can do about it — unless you’re prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I’m not the type.—Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87
Then we sat in silence, watching the scenery whirring past us in the improving light. I was lighting us both a cigarette when he turned to me and said: ‘Sorry if I got cross, morrie.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
‘Bit on edge, I suppose.’
It was all very kosher and British.
‘Not surprising,’ I said. ‘It’s been an angstful sort of night.’
—Crust on Its Uppers, pp. 180–181
By the word existence I mean the one contract valid for mankind; I define it as the general contract. In it are the clauses of human life; its uses, responsibilities, limitations, its inevitable eclipse. This contract is the basis of the black novel, whose loathing of violence, which it describes as precisely as possible in order to remind people how disgusting it is, causes it to rise up against death forced on any person before his time, and that is where it becomes a novel in mourning. Each contract is to be terminated in the way that its clauses are set out; but it is not to be destroyed by any contract-holder. That possibility is contained in no contract. To break his contract is either to invite the breaker’s destruction, or else it is evidence that the act of destruction has been carried out by a signatory who has already been destroyed, such as a killer — and that is why my detective picks up Suarez’ battered head and kisses it.
I will go further. What is remarkable about I Was Dora Suarez has nothing to do with literature at all; what is remarkable about it is that in its own way and by its own route it struggles after the same message as Christ. I am not the kind of person that anyone would expect to say such a thing, for although I believe firmly in the invisible, I am not religious. But in writing the book I definitely underwent an experience that I can only describe as cathartic; the writing of Suarez, though plunging me into evil, became the cause of my seeking to purge what was evil in myself. It was only after I had finished the book that I realized this; I was far too deeply involved in the battle with evil that the book became to think any further than that at the time […]
Suarez was my atonement for fifty years’ indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others.
—The Hidden Files, pp. 98–99
Existence is sometimes what a forward artillery observer sees of enemy lines through field glasses. A distant and troubling view brought suddenly into focus with a wealth of obscene detail.
—The Hidden Files, p. 121
The black novel seeks to present as forcibly as it can the terminal psychic situation that occurs in people who have arrived at a point where they have no hope, no motive, and no longer even the desire to conceal anything from themselves; the black novel intervenes at the moment where a human being approaches his last moment: ‘The first night of death must seem so strange’. A special mood is necessary to make language plastic enough to convey such experience exactly; experience so devastatingly simple that, like love, it verges on the indescribable. Nearly every attempt to convey it can really only be described as another in a seemingly endless series of attempts since we cannot describe what we are not yet in a position to know — and yet it is the black novel’s absolute duty to express it. T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, I think, got closest to describing the nature of this challenge when he wrote (I paraphrase): It is not necessary to die in order to describe death.
—The Hidden Files, p. 144
The bore is the human cuckoo. He will take over anything, usurp any nest. His one outstanding feature is that he has no features. He has nothing whatever to offer society, not the least germ of an original or positive idea — and yet the rest of us somehow find ourselves moving up to make room for him, just as the body makes itself hos to a destructive virus. Bores would take the entire world over if they could; sometimes they do. Here is an extract from the diary of one who did: ‘I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess…’ (Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
, November 1921).
—The Hidden Files, p. 148
Nothing else much matters once you have achieved the hardest thing, which is to act out of conviction. 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. I recognise that I am a minor writer; but this does not affect the depth of my convictions.
—The Hidden Files, p. 287
‘You’re not very good at it, are you?’ said Gust, ‘they ought to have sent heavies in.’ He thought the man very likely could have got a job playing Hess in this new TV series they were doing on the war, and he would have had a word with a few directors he knew in Soho if he had been a mate of his. But, as he wasn’t, Gust kicked him in the stomach as he tried to drag himself up on one leg with the help of the bar-rail, then turned back to the other man.
‘You all right?’ he said. ‘How are you feeling now? Chipper?’ He took one of the man’s ears in his thumb and forefinger; the ear was tiny, considering the size of his head, and it had little hairs inside it. Gust picked up a cocktail stick out of a dirty glass on the bar and jabbed it down into the eardrum as far as he could; when he pulled it out the stick was half-way red, and there was some grey stuff in it as well. He shouted down his ear: ‘I think I just broke your foot!’ but the man wasn’t making sense any more; he was wailing with his hand clapped to the side of his head, swaying up and down from the waist like a bereaved widow, or else perhaps he just didn’t hear, or maybe the music was too loud. Gust realised then that he had pushed the stick in too far and that the man would probably die.
Dirty cocktail-stick in the brain? What a bleeding way to go! Now the man with the broken leg tried another naughty stroke; although he only had one hand free because he was using the other one to hold onto the rail, he still managed to smash a glass and try putting it in Gust’s face.
‘This is just self-defence after all,’ Gust said to himself. He stamped on the man’s feet again; this time he definitely felt bones go and the man screamed, dropped the glass and let go of the rail; but instead of letting him fall Gust took him round the waist, ripped his fly open and searched inside his pants till he found his testicles, which he yanked right out into his hand. Their owner can’t have been much into baths because they smelled like something tepid from a canteen counter. Gust wrung them like the devil having a go at a set of wedding bells with all the grip he had, until the man was shrieking on the same D minor as the music.
‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Gust, ‘but I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn to fuck all over again.’ He wiped the blood off the man’s prick down his face, then pulled the face towards him and drove his nose into his brain with his head. The music boosted into E major on a key change, and the man doubled up under a bar-stool, leaving a lot of blood behind him while Gust receded into the half darkness towards the black drapes on the walls.
—Brand New Dead, pp. 86–87
Ken Bruen
Ken Bruen
Ken Bruen is an Irish writer of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction.He was born in Galway, and educated at Gormanston College, County Meath and later at Trinity College Dublin, where he earned a Ph.D. in metaphysics. He spent twenty-five years as an English teacher in Africa, Japan, S.E. Asia and...
frequently incorporates tributes to Derek Raymond into his hard-boiled fiction.
Rob Humphreys includes this listing in The Rough Guide to London, Rough Guides, 2003, pp. 663–664:
Derek Raymond, Not till the Red Fog Rises (Warner, UK). A book which “reeks with the pervasive stench of excrement” as Iain SinclairIain SinclairIain Sinclair FRSL is a British writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.-Life and work:...
[…] put it, this is a lowlife spectacular set in the seediest sections of the capital.
Discography
- Dora Suarez, Clawfist, 1993, Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) reads from his novel with background music by James Johnston and Terry EdwardsTerry EdwardsTerry Edwards is an English musician.Edwards gained a degree in music from the University of East Anglia in 1982, where he was also a founding member of The Higsons. He produced and played on the debut album by Yeah Jazz "Six Lane Ends"...
(from the band Gallon DrunkGallon DrunkGallon Drunk are an English band formed in London in 1988. Their swamp rock sound contains a variety of influences, from punk to jazz and the novels of Derek Raymond , and is noted for its dark subject matter.-Biography:...
)