I first read of Derek Raymond in 2002 while camping in Glastonbury, burning through Iain Sinclair’s endlessly rewarding Lights Out For the Territory. It was raining. I couldn’t get over my jetlag. There was nothing to do but read and go for soggy, half-awake walks up the Tor. Sinclair’s book convinced me that once I returned home, I must read Raymond. This is exactly what I did. Having procured an Internet copy of He Died With His Eyes Open, I cracked it open and it blew me away.
A few weeks ago, back in RI, life determined fit to remind me of the incredible distance between now and 2002. Since then, my opinion of Raymond had taken a beating. The last three novels of the Factory series, including the praised & reviled I Was Dora Suarez, are significantly flawed. I was curious if my judgment would hold– so I broke out the books of yesteryear and re-read He Died With His Eyes Open and The Devil’s Home on Leave, respectively the first and second books in the series. I’ll write about the first.
So, in short, yes. He Died With His Eyes Open is still great. I’m not going to give a huge amount of plot summary, but basically: each of the Factory books is told in the first person by an unnamed Detective working out of a police building, the Factory, in the Department of Unexplained Deaths, or A14. The setting is the bleakest time in recent English history: London in the years of Thatcher. The protagonist catches cases of murders with no Fleet-street potential– killings of the dispossessed, the poor and the apparently meaningless. But the protagonist is dogged in his job and in his devotion to the dead, an attitude with confuses his colleagues. This sounds like standard GOOD COP IN A BAD DEPARTMENT cliche, but Raymond confers a strange, almost Messianic quality on his protagonist who comes across as a near-annointed avenger of the city’s forgotten and broken-down, an unstoppable force cobbling together a form of inadequate justice. All five of the books feel like they’re happening in another world and the whole series can be summed up thusly: there is no worthless person, there are no meaningless lives.
Although the Factory series was initially, and continues to be, sold as Detective/Mystery Fiction, a feature of the first two books (and possibly the rest but my memory for plots is spotty) are their complete lack of a Mystery. I’m not giving anything away by saying that you know who’s committed each book’s murder(s) by 40 pages in; what the Detective investigates is the identity, and life story, of the murdered, and, to a lesser extent, the murderers. It’s an inversion of the genre– rather than tracking clues and trying to solve a crime where the victim is a plot device, each Factory book is an investigation of the dead. Of who they were, what they done and how they suffered.
In He Died With His Eyes Open, the murdered man, a failed writer who once lived in France, has left behind a series of autobiographical audiotapes recorded on very dark nights of his soul. Throughout the narrative, these tapes are used by the protagonist as his guide through the underworld into which he has descended. Parallels with Dante and Virgil, anyone?
What I missed in 2002, having no real knowledge of the book’s author, is the similarity between the murdered man and Derek Raymond himself. Raymond eventually published a strange autobiography, The Hidden Files, but I don’t wonder if the story isn’t found here in the transcripted audiotapes.
Some word must be written about the quality of writing, which is top notch and above and beyond what is usually found in any novel, let alone genre work. Raymond seems to have ended up a crime novelist almost by default. Under the name Robin Cook, he had a career in the 60s and 70s as a mainstream novelist, but I suspect exiling one’s self to mainland Europe and coming back an alcoholic is not the best way to stay in the upper echelon. Of course, Cook was born upper class and threw it away to become a Chelsea morrie, so who knows if being in the genre ghetto wasn’t what he had long desired.
In summary: this is a novel in which the Protagonist, a nameless, quasi-religious figure bent on avenging the hopeless dead, spends about 50% of the narrative trying to piece together a vaguely-fictional version of the author’s life. Another way of describing this is: True Art.
October 15th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
[...] jarett kobek wrote an interesting post today on REVIEW: He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek RaymondHere’s a quick excerptRaymond seems to have ended up a crime novelist almost by default; as Robin Cook, he had an early career in the 60s and 70s as a mainstream novelist, but I suspect exiling one’s self to mainland Europe and coming back an alcoholic is … [...]