Book Review: The Factory Series
I was never shocked by Derek Raymond’s The Factory series. Surprised, yes, but never shocked. It reminded me of a Shelby Steele quote: “On some level you already knew it, so that when the awareness comes, there is more recognition than surprise. Yes, of course things have changed.” I wasn’t shocked by the obscenities nor by the graphic violence. I’ve listened to The Last Podcast on the Left. I know “the evils that men do.” I just didn’t expect to see them in a book by a mid-century Eton drop-out.
The Eton drop-out being Derek Raymond, né Robin Cook, son of a textile magnate. After leaving Eton, he spent much of his life as, among other things, a car thief, pornographer, smuggler, money-launderer, and low-level associate of the Kray Twins. His scumbag credentials are beyond reproach. After the failure of his fourth marriage due to his drinking, he began writing his black novels: the Factory books.
If I were to compare The Factory series to anything, I’d describe it as having the filthiness of Chester Himes, the brutality of Jim Thompson, and yet the humanity of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. I’d compare it to the first time the wind gets knocked out of you. Truly, if you’re easily sick, leave these books alone. Raymond’s own publisher vomited onto his desk after reading I Was Dora Suarez. It’s some of the darkest stuff I’ve read in my life, and I’m on Reddit. If you really are curious, the Factory series is: He Died with His Eyes Open (1984), The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985), How the Dead Live (1986), I Was Dora Suarez (1990), and, last and least, Dead Man Upright (1993).
Our narrator is an unnamed Sergeant of police out of A14, the (nonexistent) Unexplained Deaths division of the London Metropolitan Police. Unexplained Deaths being where all the deaths go that aren’t important enough for Serious Crimes. What’s unique about the series is the voice the victims have. It goes beyond obsession or Laura. He has the curse of empathy, of getting into the minds of victims, and their killers. I Was Dora Suarez almost applied to the Sergeant. In each book, he finds the words of the victim, whether in cassette tapes or a diary, and is tormented by them. It’s what makes him the best in his department, but it came at a cost: he’s a shell of a man still trying to understand why his wife killed their daughter ten years before.
“You know me — slow, quick, quick, slow, Mr. Foxtrot they call me. That’s why I’m still a sergeant while you’re shaping up for superintendent on the Vice Squad” (The Sergeant to his rival, He Died with His Eyes Open)
The Sergeant investigates the deaths of the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the drunks, the insane, when he’s not being used as a blunt instrument against corruption by his superiors. You see, the man has a double portion of Marlowe’s “rating very highly on insubordination.” It’s necessary to solve his cases, but it keeps him low on the totem pole.
“We work on obscure, unimportant, apparently irrelevant deaths of people who don’t matter and who never did…unlike some policemen, we never make excuses about being undermanned; nor do we care if the case we’re investigating never gets into the papers…” (The Sergeant, He Died with His Eyes Open)
He fluently speaks the ancient language of the streets: taunts and threats. He has no respect for persons. If the Queen stood in his way, he’d curse her like he would a fellow policeman. Indeed, he switches between vulgar and poetic in the same breath, spouting off the worst things I’ve ever read next to the most beautiful. He’s like an English Catullus. He’s timeless, too. He speaks Raymond’s own dialect: the thieves’ cant of the sixties, the Krays’ fenya. It moves the atmosphere, though it’s set in the nineties, to somewhere unreachable to me, unreachable to my parents. I was shocked when I read that the Sergeant was listening to a cassette. I thought it was a contemporary of Chester Himes.
I’ve read three out of the five Factory novels: He Died with His Eyes Open, How the Dead Live, and I Was Dora Suarez. The first book begins with the Sergeant arriving to a brutal murder and gets worse from there. The victim is Charles Staniland, a fifty-something alcoholic. Our sergeant follows Staniland’s descent into his personal hell of alcoholism, poverty, and the loss of his family (like the Sergeant) through tapes that Staniland made just before he died. But Staniland’s hell was his own; someone else’s killed him.
I can’t describe the series any better than Raymond himself did, in The Devil’s Home on Leave, when the Sergeant is talking to his rival, the epitome of a heartless policeman:
“…you’ll always get the shitty end of the stick.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think that’s the end where the truth is.”
