 Saucer
eyed, with a black beret clamped firmly over his head, he beckoned
to me from the corner of a Soho pub one rainy afternoon in 1993.
As I went to shake his hand, memories of a dead girl swirled around
my head: Dora Suarez, black-haired and beautiful, butchered brutally
in an ice-cold Kensington flat just as she was trying to make her
peace with the world.
‘All I know about Suarez was that it devastated me to write
it,’ said Derek Raymond in that distinctive voice he described
as resembling an iron parrot.
‘I don’t know whether I controlled it as well as I should
have done. But as soon as I wrote it, I couldn’t bear to go
over it again. I couldn’t face any more.’
He was known to the rest of the reprobates in London’s most
celebrated watering hole as Robin Cook, the son of a wealthy textile
magnate who had turned his back on the upper class to pursue a life
of crime in the Soho streets around us. His early books, the 1960s
success de scandales The Crust on its Uppers and Private
Parts in a Public Place dealt in detail with his loathing of
the English class system and all its hypocrisy. Years after, one
scam too many to safely stay in London, Robin was exiled in France’s
Massif Centrale, working as a labourer in his own vineyard. When
one of his neighbours pointed out that that was how he looked set
to end his days, Robin pulled on his beret, turned again to those
distant London streets and was born again as Derek Raymond.
The ‘Factory’ series of books that he began in the late
Eighties and inevitably led him back to the saloons of Soho, stand
as a benchmark in modern crime fiction. Brimming with violence and
disgust, laced with an in-depth knowledge of the language of the
street and fired with a fervent compassion for the fate of the victim,
they turned the cosy, crossword puzzle confines of the traditional
potboiler on their head. He Died With His Eyes Open, The Devil’s
Home on Leave, How The Dead Live, I Was Dora Suarez, Dead Man Upright
and Not Till The Red Fog Rises comprised a body of work
that asked all the really hard questions. Why are we here? What
is the point of all this suffering? Beneath the civilised veneer
of our society, why do we continue to be so brutal?
Narrated by a nameless Detective Sergeant, the Factory novels stalk
the bleakest corners of a vividly-rendered London ‘scoured
by vile psychic weather’. An ex-army psycho chops up and boils
his victims, leaving them all neatly stapled up in plastic bags.
A broken ex-BBC writer drinks with his lover who is plotting to
kill him with the help of a maniacal mummy’s boy. And poor
Dora invites her own doom over the threshold and into her bed. After
I entered Derek Raymond’s world, nothing would ever be the
same again. He opened a door into a different world and I willingly
followed him down there. Twelve years later, I have written my own
first novel, The Not Knowing, where my own black-haired
heroine walks the same London streets, unwittingly encouraging a
familiar type of damaged man to follow her.
Dora Suarez opened up the possibilities of what the crime novel
could be to me. As I searched around for more books to stoke the
fires of possibility it sparked in my head, I soon came to realise
Derek Raymond’s voice, though marginalised and misunderstood,
was not a lone howl in the wilderness.
Patrick Hamilton knew better than most the dark corners of the unhinged
mind. Like Raymond, Hamilton was an alcoholic who struggled with
the legacy of his cruel and distant father, and set out his stall
under the comforting glow of the optics; where better to observe
the theatre of lowlife. He had their eye for the minutiae of the
murderous mind; the crushing callousness of the pub bore. Many of
his most awful characters are familiars of his father, who was described
by Michael Holroyd as, ‘a comedian equipped with a monacle
but no sense of humour, a chameleon-like figure given to self-dramatisation,
who nevertheless drank to be rid of himself’.
In his centenary year, Hamilton has at last been resurrected, with
a poignant BBC dramatisation of his devastatingly autobiographical
between-the-Wars trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The
Sky. But my own favourite is often reviled by Hamilton enthusiasts
as the work of a middle-aged man now diseased by drink and disappointment.
Perhaps it is because it demonstrates all-too clearly Hamilton’s
own darkest places. The Gorse Trilogy follows the downwards trajectory
of an upwardly-mobile young sadist. We meet Ernest Ralph Gorse as
a junior De Sade in 1951’s The West Pier, where he
idly bullies his school chums and stalks his first victim, the naïve
Esther Downes through the glamorous façades of Brighton seafront.
Having delivered her of all her money and dreams, he reappears three
years later in Mrs Stimpson and Mr Gorse, playing more
advanced confidence tricks on a Hyacinth Bucket-esque Reading matron.
His mania burns itself to crescendo in 1955’s Unknown
Assailant, where he vents his increasing insanity on the unfortunate
Barton family — meek barmaid Ivy and her vain, preening father,
an undisguised portrait of Bernard Hamilton painted in vicious strokes
of loathing. As Gorse perfects his dark arts, his mind becomes steadily
more unhinged, his brutal, misogynist  appetites
ever harder to contain. I have met a few Gorses in my time and Hamilton
has him down to perfection. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about
The Gorse Trilogy is that it mirrors Hamilton’s own descent
from hopeful Brighton beginnings to nihilistically bleak coda on
Worthing seafront. That ‘cross between Bertie Wooster and
Satan’ that he describes is most probably the author himself.
Extracted from a much longer article also
covering the crime writers Jim Thompson, David Peace and Ken Bruen,
which appeared in Nude issue 7 (Winter 2005). Photograph of Cathi
Unsworth by John Rankin
Cathi Unsworth’s own novel The Not Knowing (Serpent’s
Tail/ £7.99) is available from good bookshops.
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