He Died with His Eyes Open: A Novel - Softcover

Raymond, Derek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345342895 ISBN 13: 9780345342898

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 1987

Synopsis

“A unique crime writer whose fictional world was brutal, realistic and harrowing in the extreme.”—Guardian
 
In the three police procedurals that comprise the Factory Series, Derek Raymond has created a narrator who threatens to become a cult figure while preserving his anonymity. A loner and cynic, undervalued and underpaid, our hero is a nameless detective sergeant in the Department of Unexplained Deaths, a catch-all unit that investigates low-life crimes and is shunned by the blokes in the Serious Crimes Division of the Metropolitan Police.
 
But our narrator, working out of the Factory, named by the villains because it has a bad reputation for doing suspects over in the interrogation rooms, is fired by a real feeling for justice. He believes that an alcoholic, found obscenely battered to death in a seedy, down-and-out part of London, deserves as much official attention as, say, a dead politician. This “nobody” becomes a somebody—a kindred spirit who left behind a strange legacy. Our cop becomes obsessed by the case. But even he could not have imagined how vicious, evil, and perversely attractive his opponent will turn out to be.

About this title

About the Author

Derek Raymond was the pseudonym of British writer Robert Cook, who was born in London in 1931. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton and rejected a life of privilege for a life of adventure. He traveled the world, living in Paris at the Beat Hotel and on New York’s seedy Lower East Side, smuggled artworks into Amsterdam, and spent time in a Spanish prison for publicly making fun of Franco. Finally, he landed back in London, working in the lower echelons of the Kray Brothers’ crime syndicate laundering money, organizing illegal gambling, and setting up insurance scams. He eventually took to writing—first as a pornographer, but then as an increasingly serious novelist, writing about the desperate characters and experiences he’d known in London’s underground. His work culminated in the Factory novels, landmarks that have led many to consider  him the founding father of British noir. He died in London in 1993.

Review

Praise for Derek Raymond's Factory Series

"Unrelenting existentialist noir—as if the most brutal of crime fictions had been recast by Sartre, Camus, or Ionesco while retaining something of the intimate wise-guy tone of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett."
—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

"It’s one of the darkest and most surrealistically hard-boiled things I’ve ever read. The detective is at least as scary as the murderers he’s chasing."
—William Gibson, bestselling author of Neuromancer

"There remains no finer writing—crime or otherwise —about the state of Britain."
—David Peace, author of "The Red Riding Quartet."

"No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books."
—James Sallis, author of Drive

"The Factory novels are certainly the most viscerally imagined of their kind that I've ever read, or reread multiple times. Derek Raymond wrote in a supposedly escapist genre in a manner that precluded any hope of escape."
—Scott Phillips, bestselling author of The Ice Harvest

"I Was Dora Suarez blew me away—beyond hard boiled."
—Patton Oswalt

"More Chandleresque than Chandler... [Raymond] could write beautifully...and, more importantly, what he is writing about in this novel are nothing less than the important subjects any writer can deal with: mortality and death."
—Will Self

“A crackerjack of a crime novel, unafraid to face the reality of man’s and woman’s evil.”
—Evening Standard

"The beautiful, ruthless simplicity of the Factory novels is that Raymond rewrites the basic ethos of the classic detective novel."
—Charles Taylor, The Nation

"Hellishly bleak and moving."
—New Statesman

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345342895
• ISBN 13: 9780345342898
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240