Factory 1
This, the third novel in the Factory Series, sees Raymond's nameless detective leave London for a remote village called Thornhill, where he's meant to be looking into the disappearance of a local doctor's wife. How The Dead Live is a haunting, fan...
An axe-wielding psychopath carves young Dora Suarez into pieces and smashes the head of Suarez's friend, an elderly woman. On the same night, in the West End, a firearm blows the top off the head of Felix Roatta, part-owner of the seedy Parallel C...
?A crackerjack of a crime novel, unafraid to face the reality of man?s and woman?s evil? Evening Standard ?A mixture of thin-lipped Chandleresque backchat and of idioms more icily subversive? Observer A pioneer of British noir? No one has come near to matching his style or overwhelming sense of sadness? Raymond's world is uniformly sinister, his language strangely mannered. He does not strive for accuracy, but achieves an emotional truth all his own. -- Marcel Berlins The Times Cook's prose can make amazing stylistic leaps without once losing its balance? He anticipates James Ellroy and David Peace, among others, in this terrifying determination to disclose the skull beneath the skin? a supreme example of how nasty Britain actually is. -- Time Out ?Witty perceptive and well written? Big Issue
Derek Raymond was born Robin Cook in 1931. His novels include A State of Denmark, The Crust on its Uppers, I Was Dora Suarez and How the Dead Live, which was made into a film. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton aged sixteen and spent much of his early career among criminals and was employed at various times as a pornographer, organiser of illegal gambling, money launderer, pig-slaughterer and minicab driver. He died in London in 1994.