He Died with His Eyes Open

 
“A unique crime writer whose fictional world was brutal, realistic and harrowing in the extreme.”—Guardian
 
When a middle-aged alcoholic is found brutally battered to death on a roadside in West London, the case is assigned to a tough-talking cynic from the Department of Unexplained Deaths. Our narrator must piece together the history of his blighted existence and discover the agents of its cruel end. What he doesn’t expect is that digging for the truth will demand plenty of lying. The first volume in the Factory series, He Died with His Eyes Open is a gripping introduction to Raymond’s bleak, nihilistic world.

Raymond was born Robin Cook in 1931. He dropped out of Eton aged sixteen and spent much of his early career among criminals. The Factory series followed his early novels, The Crust on Its Uppers and A State of Denmark. His literary memoir The Hidden Files was published in 1992. He died in London in 1994.