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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Derek Raymond

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:24 / 13.01.03

Finally got a copy of "I Was Dora Suarez" today, having wanted to read it ever since the Gallon Drunk album which consisted of readings of excerpts over music.

I'm now about 20 pages from the end, and undecided. The prose is wonderful, and even the unpleasant cop main characters sympathetically drawn (think of the Uber-Sweeney). I've deliberately posted this before finishing the book, so I'm still ambiguous as to the whole point of the story.

A great book (so far) however. Anyone read any of his other stuff (apparently he was something of a legend on the UK crime fiction scene, but seeing as how that's not really a genre I'm particularly familiar with, any pointers would be much appreciated)?

at the scarwash

21:06 / 13.01.03

I've read The Crust on its Uppers (witten as Robin Cook), and really enjoyed it. I didn't get in to How the Dead Live. A little too self -consciously broody.

20:02 / 22.08.08

I’ve not read a great deal of crime fiction – all Serpent’s Tail stuff: some David Peace, some Manchette translations + plenty of Raymond – but I get a fair sense that he was exploring a universe of his own, one peopled with nameless, foul-mouthed detectives and tragic victims bent on recording their final, desperate moments before being finally wiped from existence.

His weird, Londoncentric take on the conventional noir has a distinctly existential atmosphere, and while the self-conscious poetics can perhaps get a little heavy, what wins through for me is the passion and respect he obviously carried for the perpetually beaten down. Life’s losers get a pitying eye from him: Like Patrick Hamilton before him, he sees the great struggles of good and evil recast in petty squabbles and flashes of banal suburban violence.

Crime is always a case of the abuser and the abused and the killer is no verbose Lectre-a-like, but a dead eyed bore with a terminal dose of self regard.

There’s been a lot of Raymond activity lately, partly as his writing is being steadily reprinted by wise souls. To my mind The Factory novels are his best work. Crust and the earlier novels read for exactly what they are: cocky, street level depictions of 60s criminal life. The later books are tempered by grit and regret, the sense that Raymond had seen the worst the world could offer and risen above it.

I realise this is all getting a tad elegiac, but it’s hard not too slip into a similar mode. A writer like this demands a little, um, poetry.

02:04 / 23.08.08

'How The Dead Live' is his best, I think. It's to the police proceedural what a particular, erm, psychedelic (for want of a better way of putting it; I'd hate to say surreal - 'The Unlimited Dream Company', 'Vermillion Sands' 'The Drought', that sort of thing) strand of JG Ballard's material is to sci fi.

Hard-edged London cop descends into a Jungian, as opposed to Freudian, countryside dreamscape in East Anglia, or related. And is forced into a state of moral terror by what he finds - No 'League Of Gentlemen', this. Plus nine out of ten for a clipped, addictive, literary prose style.

I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I'm guessing you'd enjoy, Mr S.

frenchfilmblurred

19:50 / 28.08.08

Remembering this place existed and,looking around and seeing that it seems to be a bit in decline, I'm thinking that it's a shame I never signed up. Then, reading an old crime fiction thread, a post by 'frenchfilmblurred' about Derek Raymond sounds so uncannily like me it's positively scary, doppelganger stuff. Then I realised it was me...

So, er, Derek Raymond. Since my last post in 2004 his 'lost' novel, Nightmare In The Street, has been published over here. The first chapter of it appeared in a Time Out anthology years ago, but as far as I knew the only complete version of it was in French.

Don't know if Stoatie or anyone else has read it. I liked it a lot, but like all of his stuff it's probably an acquired taste. The protagonist spends most of the book wandering the streets of Paris, haunted by the spectral remains of his murdered lover, rended into blood and bones by an explosion - as always with Raymond exploring the 'skull beneath the skin' will mean literally that to some extent. It's a strange book, even by his standards, and has a lot more of the poetic, non-realistic elements that mix with straighter gritty police procedure in the Factory novels. Not the best place to start, but Raymond converts will probably enjoy it.