How the Dead Live (Abacus Books) - Softcover

Derek Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349100152 ISBN 13: 9780349100159

Publisher: Abacus, 1988

Synopsis

Can you murder for love?

In the third novel of Derek Raymond's acclaimed Factory Series, the nameless detective visits a decrepit country house to look into the case of a disappeared woman.

It is, as always for the Detective Sergeant, a deeply unsettling investigation of love and damnation. The woman's husband seems to love her entirely. And yet he seems reluctant to find her, preferring to hide in a house that resembles the set of a horror film. Meanwhile other cops are getting in the way of the Sergeant and he's making new enemies on the force.

With growing desperation and his trademark sense of enraged compassion, the Sergeant fights to uncover a murderer not by following analytical procedure, but by doing the most idfficult thing of all: understanding why crimes are committed.

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

"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."
—from the Introduction by Will Self

"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

"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

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

"Carve Derek Raymond’s name into the literary pantheon. He is one of the rare authors who seek to understand evil, ferret out the darkness in human nature, and blast Noir fiction out of the genre ghetto and into Literature. His nameless detective's quest through the bleak streets gets under your skin. Amazing, painful and brilliant."
—Cara Black, bestselling author of Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

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

“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

"A bizarre mixture of Chandleresque elegance... and naked brutality"
—The Daily Telegraph

"I cannot think of another writer so obsessed with the skull beneath the skin."
—The Times (London)

"Hellishly bleak and moving."
—New Statesman

“Powerful and mesmerizing.... With spare, often lyrical prose, Raymond digs beneath society’s civilized veneer...”
—Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0349100152
• ISBN 13: 9780349100159
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 203