“Have you ever seen such brutality?”

One great thing about Derek Raymond’s hard-boiled cockney crime novel He Died With His Eyes Open, is all the CULTURAL REFERENCES ~

“I’m a man that likes a charver if ever there was one, but my life, that put me right off — I couldn’t've got it up that time, not if she’d bin Clordia Cardinal.”

Clordia Cardinal.

– and –

“‘What’ll it be?’ he yelled above the Joan Armatrading.”

At times, Derek Raymond’s two-fisted existentialism reminds me of the old BRUTE! books — “Classified Pulp Nasties” from a little later in the eighties, which parodied Spillane-style hard man stuff by pumping the sex and violence to nauseatingly hilarious heights of depravity ~

“It was violent. It was brutal. It was nasty, vicious and inhuman. But it was fair.”

“I felt my floodgates open and a pint of hot stuff gushed out.”

“Before he croaked I gave him the works. Gun. Fist. Foot. Bollocks. The lot.”

“Just then a bloke erupted into the snug with a fiver. The music stopped. Jaws dropped, and darts hung in mid-air. ‘DRINKS ALL ROUND!’ he roared. ‘FOR ME!’”

“Afterwards, we both lay there and stank.”

“Dick Champion ran a bath and got in it. ‘WASH!’ he roared to himself.”

Horrible, homophobic, homoerotic and homo neanderthalis, BRUTE! was the thing of its day, the ne plus ultra reductio ad absurdum of Thatcherite values. It can be experienced in clean, non-flammable digital form HERE.