Derek Raymond (1931–1994)

The dissonance between the fine writing and a bleak mid-1980s London setting of dank streets, dark bars, and broken people gave me the kind of psychic tingle I read for.

A man is found beaten to death on the side of the road, and his sordid story is revealed through a cache of cassette tapes recovered from a dingy boarding-house room. The copper investigating the crime develops a begrudging affinity for the dead man and his eloquent desolation. By the end, I was reading the title show more idiomatically, as in “He Died with a Grim Comprehension Roughly Acquired.”

From the tapes: What I suffer isn’t self-pity; it is my coming up against the absolute. The ordeal the writer sets himself is to track down existence and then, both stripped naked, fight it out. Everyone experiences this in the end, somehow or other. But often the contest is short and sharp—the last seconds of a motor crash, a fall from a roof, a heart attack, being rolled and beaten to death in a dark street.
But I wonder if the agony of unreturned love that becomes the sick, eating sweetness of jealousy isn't by far the worst?

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Derek Raymond's A state of Denmark is split into two distinctive halves, both set in an imagined 1970s, one in a small town in Italy, the other in a totalitarian England.

Unfortunately only one half convinces. While the story is set in Italy Raymond is brilliant. His depiction of small town life avoids all the glossy romanticism that characterises most non-Italian writing about the country, and has a sharp insight into Italian post-war politics. That is to say he portrays the struggle to deal show more with a fascist past perfectly.

His juxtaposition of Italy and his imagined totalitarian England is also a master-stroke. Now, as when the novel was first published (in the 1960s), placing England as a likely victim of totalitarianism rather than Italy shocks the reader, turning on its head various assumptions about democracy.

The novel falls though when actually examining this totalitarian regime. Its rise to power is credible - based on media manipulation and exploitation of public fears (long before Tony Blair) - but the main character's confrontation with the state rings hollow. Place it up against the obvious comparison of Orwell's [book:1984] and it falls flat.

Well worth reading nonetheless. show less

Remarkable. One of the darkest, saddest, and yet funniest books I have ever read. In the third book of the Factory series, Raymond's Nameless Detective is more relentless than ever in his no-compromises pursuit of justice as he travels to a town outside London to investigate the disappearance of a woman after the local police have failed to do so. There is a compelling mystery at the heart of the book, and it has all the noir trappings a reader could ask for, but that isn't the point. The show more most important parts of the book take place in the Nameless Detective's head as he spins soliloquies about life, death, loss, and redemption and in the long quotations from the husband of the missing woman. The Detective's basic methodology for resolving the case is to hilariously insult everybody he meets--with a few notable exceptions--and to reject the help of anyone, except for his trusted reporter friend who shows up halfway through the book. He is like Hammett's Continental Op in his ability to stir a whole town up for his own purposes.

But this book doesn't take place in the real world at all. It is just as fantastic an atmosphere as Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, which it closely resembles in many ways. The descriptions of the decaying mansion at the center of the book, and, just as fantastically, the way the Detective stares down death at the hands of a rifle toting mother or a hired killer, are something out of a fever dream. On top of the noir and the Poe, there is also the poetry--poems, songs, and prose--that runs throughout the book, often as part of dreams the Detective, as first-person narrator, recounts. So the equation here might best be described as Dashiell Hammett + Edgar Allan Poe + Thomas Wolfe = Derek Raymond. But even that can't do justice to what Raymond has achieved here. For all of its influences, it emerges as a unique, visionary argument that, in the midst of corruption and chaos, one man's unalterable quest for justice can still mean something.

If you try to read this as a regular mystery or piece of detective fiction, you are doomed to miss the point. And if you fall into sync with Raymond's and the Nameless Detective's way of thinking? Then maybe you are just plain doomed. But we don't have to go down without breaking a jaw or two. show less

In a word: brilliant. The narrative is compelling, the prose like poetry. Raymond wrote as well as Dostoevsky about the criminal mind, the pathos of the victim, and the frustrations of the law enforcer.