Derek Raymond_The Factory Series #1-5 (Hardboiled; Brit. Noir)RE-UP_REQUEST

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 a founder of British noir.

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 Cook, 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:

‘Christ, it’s you,’ he said. You still on that Staniland case?’
‘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. Foxtrot they call me. That’s why I’m still a sergeant while you’re shaping up for superintendent 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 villain.’
—Ibid., p. 146

The detective displays similar manners whilst intimidating villains who pop up as witnesses in his investigation:

‘Oh, sorry. Yes, that one. Yes, I get you now.’
‘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

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:

The next tape of Staniland’s I played started:

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 quoins 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 reredos, 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 sacred relationship between the dreamer’s body and the cathedral finds its immediate complement in the profane preoccupations of his waking life.

The passage that I was listening to now ran:

Unhook 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 maggot?
What greater passion than a heart in formaldehyde?
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

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 persona 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 Road; 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 Cathar. 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 war. He had fought at Madrid (University Buildings), and later at Huesca and Teruel 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 council studio I understood why. His figures reminded me of Ingres crossed with early Henry Moore; 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 1930s. ‘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 Spain; 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

The traditional detective hero of American noir 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 1980s, Derek Raymond began to gather momentum in the Anglosphere.



A man’s corpse is discovered in a London warehouse, bundled into five shopping bags. Our nameless narrator from the Unexplained Deaths division of the Met is put on the case. As he probes a world of horror in South London, a terrible secret from his own past emerges, and he uncovers much more than the murderer.

Derek Raymond is the father of British noir and much admired by a new generation of crime writers. He died in 1994.



“A sulphurous mixture of ferocious violence and high-fl own philosophy.”—Prospect

The third novel in the acclaimed Factory crime series sees Derek Raymond’s nameless detective leave London for a remote village, where he’s meant to be investigating the disappearance of a local doctor’s wife.

A fitting successor to classic noir writers such as Jim Thompson and David Goodis, with an introduction by Will Self. High-profile fans include Ian Rankin and James Sallis.

Robin Cook was born in 1931. He reinvented himself as Derek Raymond and died in London in 1994.



One of the most shocking crime novels of all time

In what may be Derek Raymond’s most talked-about novel—indeed, in what may be one of the most talked about crime novels ever—the reader is immediately plunged into the horrific mind of one of the most brutally damaged and murderous killers the unnamed Sergeant has ever faced.

But why the gentle Dora Suarez was murdered at all becomes the Sergeant’s obsession. As it turns out, she was already dying of AIDS. So why kill her?

As the shocking details pile up, the fourth book in the series becomes a riveting and moving study of vile human exploitation and institutional corruption, and the valiant effort to persist against it.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Raymond's ( How the Dead Live ) nightmarish and compelling tale, the fourth in his Factory series, explores London's sordid underbelly, where the law enforcers have to be as brutal as the criminals they hunt. As the novel opens, an ax-wielding psychopath carves young Dora Suarez into pieces and smashes the head of Suarez's friend, an elderly woman. On the same night, in the West End, a firearm blows the top off the head of Felix