An odder entry in the kobek.com hierarchy is jarett.kobek.com, a page dedicated entirely to the great, late British noir writer Robin Cook, alias Derek Raymond. Cook’s bio can be found in richer detail on the aforementioned site, which links to more thorough discussions of the man and his work, but in brief: he was an upper class toff turned criminal who wrote novels of varying quality in the 60s and early 70s, disappeared (so to speak) for a while, and then reemerged in the 80s as Derek Raymond, and wrote 7 books before he died in 92.
Five of these constitute the so-called Factory Series, following an unnamed Police Detective investigating the deaths of the world’s destitute and abandoned in Thatcher-era London. Obviously some of the grimmest books ever written.
Anyway, I was doing one of my twice-yearly updates of the site, and I came across this review of He Died With His Eyes Open, which identifies me as an obsessively dedicated fan. At first I bristled at the suggestion that I– one of the world’s most important people– could ever be counted as another’s fan, but then I decided that what it really indicated was how useless the web has become as a resource for anything other than shopping & getting half-correct information off Wikipedia.
I put it up the Raymond page only because no one else had. Not even a legacy Geocities page. Someone else could do a far, far better job than me– I barely put in any effort, and I think Cook/Raymond deserves an online presence far more significant and informative than what I’ve got up. To be honest, I know very little about the man beyond having read his books (including his peculiarly uninformative autobiography, The Hidden Files.)
I’m also sure there must be someone out there who is a much bigger aficionado of his work. I’ve read every book the man ever wrote, and I’m conflicted about much of it– including the Factory Series, which is his best work. At their height, they are some of the finest English (both as a country and a language) writing of the last 30 years. But they have some very dodgy moments. The plot resolution of How The Dead Live has to be one of the worst things done by a great writer, and as much as I think I Was Dora Suarez is a kind of masterpiece, it’s significantly marred by certain plot points (revealed in the autopsy) that reveal an ignorance of reality on Raymond’s part, and his inclusion of these details says, unfortunately, a lot about his willingness to believe the worst of people. Dead Man Upright is just… bizarre. It’s neither bad nor good. It’s barely a novel, in truth.
But that does leave us with the first two books: He Died With His Eyes Open and The Devil’s Home On Leave, both of which I recommend with a full throat.
Anyway, Serpent’s Tail is finally putting out the whole series (along with other books by Cook/Raymond) and so all should be in print shortly.
Hopefully this’ll inspire someone else to do a better page.
