“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.
May 3, 2008 at 3:59 am
AAAAHHH now THAT’S what I was looking for!
I’ve tried to explain BRUTE! to people, but CAN’T
You have FEEL IT, rammed down your LARYNX!
I wish I still had my GET YOUR FARTING GEAR AROUND THIS! T-shirt.
I think I wore it to death.
May 3, 2008 at 9:06 am
You shd read some Derek Raymond, he’s like the same thing only SERIOUS and THOUGHTFUL. Hard to imagien, but true. Having now read the first and third of his Factory books I get the sense that they start trashier and end up deeper. Anyhow he’s worth a look.
January 7, 2009 at 1:23 am
I’ve just finished reading his semi-memoir, The Hidden Files, which is infuriatingly great in parts, then meanders off into interminable discussions of ‘the black novel’ (the self-invented genre he saw his work as part of, along with Stendahl, Jack London, Celine, Uncle Tom Cobley and all). There are parts of it that are as great as any memoir I’ve ever read, but you get the sense that writing about his life (born rich to massively dysfunctional, unhappy aristocrats, threw it all away to become a poet, survived in sixties Soho as a con-man and thief, eventually became a farm labourer in France and found happiness and the ability to write) bored him to tears. I truly wish it hadn’t, because nobody else will ever be able to write a story like that, now that he’s kicked the effin’ bucket, an’ all.
January 7, 2009 at 12:08 pm
There’s also the problem that his mind seems to be disintegrating even in Dora Suarez, where there are weird continuity problems. So the later works must have been a huge effort, and he probably didn’t have it in him to produce something consistent.
There’s actually interest in filming DR’s novels, but it seems to centre on The Crust on its Uppers, which is kind of a stupid idea — another London gangster thriller? I know it would be different from the usual cockney cliche, but not half as different as one of the Factory novels…