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.

Last week’s New Yorker featured a review by Adam Gopnik of the Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick’s 60s novels; I read it with much fascination– say what you will about Gopnik’s longer, personal essays, there’s little doubt that he stands (and has stood for some while) as one of the most insightful working critics of books and literary matters. Amongst his many insights is an another attempt to wrestle with what has been one of the overarching concern and bugbears of Dickean studies: yes, there’s something brilliant here, but what is it and is it Literature?

Gopnik’s answer is a tacit yes, with reservations, and done in the best style: he suggests that if any of Dick’s work is to be counted as Literature, then first we must count VALIS. This is the only time I’ve seen, in print, an analysis of VALIS identifying it as a work of profoundly wounded emotion. Yes, there’s a lot of weirdness about pop stars and David Bowie surrogates, but an honest and engaged read turns up the terrible pain of the Horselover Fat/Phil Dick split, with an attempt to wrestle with the consequences of death and sex in a mature, if mad, style.

In a word, Literature.

I’d add A Scanner Darkly (thankfully I’ve not seen the movie) and the dark horse candidate of We Can Build You. (We might also throw in “Faith of Our Fathers,” a novella which first appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by uh… Harlan Ellison.) The former is pretty self-explanatory; the latter I have found consistently more human and aware than almost all of Dick’s other work. I am probably alone in this: I recall an essay by Jonathan Letham in which he dismisses the novel as not doing Dick’s reputation any favors.

Que sera sera, pal.

Whenever questions of Literature or Good Writing arise, I think back to the American 19th Century. By this late date, there’s hardly any argument that its four greatest writers were Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. (”What about Hawthorne!” cries Arafat Kazi.) Yet at the end of the 19th century, only Twain had been anything like a success– Melville would not be rediscovered until the 1920s, Dickinson’s body of work was effectively a trunk full of papers, and as demonstrated in David S. Reynolds’s excellent book, Whitman was known but had few readers.

This suggests that the only real judge of Literature is time, and that Good Writing and Literature are furthermore hugely expansive ideals. Despite the four being a product of the social ferment of the 1850s and its consequences in the 60s, these writers are so dissimilar it’s hard to figure out how any concept could be wide enough to encompass them.

I think about this a lot– especially in relationship to Phil Dick– because if I were to give an assessment of my favorite 20th Century American writers, at least three would come from the pulp/pop world. These are: Dick, Dashiell Hammett, and the long and dread spectre of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Hammett’s status as a Great Writer was decided almost as soon as he started publishing– the similarity of his hard boiled writing served as a presumedly unintellectual and effortless shadow to the muscularities (so-called) of Hemingway and the modernists. On the other hand, Lovecraft, like Dick, has been subject to a large number of inquiries and weighed many times on the scales of Literature, and most times found lacking.

While it’s pretty egotistical to suggest that My Favorites from the pulp world will end up enshrined in some imaginary Canon of the future, I do think it’s likely to happen– and I think it will happen on their own terms. Every writer creates not only his or her predecessors, but also his or her heirs. There will be a time, say 50 years from now, when the mad world of Philip K Dick is so culturally ingrained that what we now find to be his excesses are going to be common tongue.

And the common tongue is merely a way of describing a universality. And that, kids, is how you end up as Literature.

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.