Death at One’s Elbow: Derek Raymond’s Factory Novels
Their stories are baroque, bizarre, even repellent. The characters inhabit the outer limits of the fringe of those who can be thought of as society’s victims, and yet the extremity of their tales marks them as doomed messiahs, their suffering meant to stand for, if not absolve, the suffering of all victims. And while the books end with the cases solved, the evildoers either dead or destroyed, there is no sense of triumph, no illusion that justice has been restored.
Apple is not worthy of having Derek Raymond grace its App Store in eBook form:
Writing about I Was Dora Suarez presents the temptation to play at the critical form of hard-boiled braggadocio, saying in effect to the reader, “I was tough enough to take it. Are you?”
I’m not sure I am.
Reading the book made me nauseous. Rereading it for this piece, I found it necessary to restrict my time with it to daylight hours. Reading it after dark gave me nightmares. Nor do I want to play at listing the specifics of the book, thereby feeding the kind of interest that will send people to it for a kick, the way they go see the latest piece of horror-movie torture porn. I don’t know if I Was Dora Suarez can be called literature at all. If it’s possible for a book to be utterly repugnant and deeply compassionate at the same time, then I Was Dora Suarez is.
Emphasis added by me.
I Was Dora Suarez is one of the grimmest, unrelentingly bleak books you will ever read — and possibly that has ever been written.
And where the writer of the article isn’t sure, I am: It is Art.
But if it were all to do over again, I would do it all over again; I know my hands are clean.
I felt like going outside for a minute, so walked down to the bottom of Palmyra Square, where long ago I had been sent down to see into the deaths of a young couple who had lived in the top flat at number eight. There had been no point in my going, really, because they were both dead, and there was nothing I could find out or add to what the Brighton police already knew, that they had been credit-card ripping and it was catching up with them –had caught up. They had a great lunch at Wheelers, where they had invited people over to their table for brandies, after which they walked hand in hand down the pebble beach where I had just been standing and then on out to sea. The sea did for them what they had asked it to do and then afterwards brought them back to the beach in its own time, wet as fish and green with weed, their faces greyish white and their arms still half trailing round each other, and I don’t know why, but when I saw them like that in Brighton morgue, I was convulsed with what I felt in myself to be a rightful fury.
I looked out to sea again. It was the end of February, the twenty-sixth, and all at once the short afternoon had had enough; it scattered its way off towards the night chased by short, dirty clouds. I remember I got home to my wife Edie in the end at about two in the morning and she said: ‘You look dreadful, what was it?’
‘A double suicide at Brighton, boy and girl. Banks, credit cards. They asked the Factory to send someone down.’
‘Why get in a state?’ said Edie. ‘It happens all the time, you’ve only to open a paper.’
‘I know it does,’ I said, ‘and I always want to know why.’
‘Well, that’s what they pay you for, to find out, if you call that pay, what you draw.’
‘That’s what I’ve just been doing,’ I said, ‘and it isn’t that, it’s a question of two deaths down to a square of fucking plastic.’
‘The pubic has to be protected,’ she said.
I said: ‘They were the public, you stupid woman.’
‘They tried to get their hands into the till and it didn’t work,’ said Edie severely. That was always one of the troubles with my wife Edie. For her and for her father the low-grade police was beneath her socially; she wasn’t the daughter of a big wheel in the fruiterer’s trade for nothing, apples by the ton up from Kent. ‘Scratch my back for me, will you?’ I remember she said then. ‘I’ve got an itch between my shoulder blades where I can’t reach it.’
We went to bed and I said: ‘I’ve seen them.’
‘Seen what? Look, just settle, will you? Why won’t you settle?’
‘Seen their bodies,’ I said.
‘So?’
‘The sea had turned them surprisingly fucking little,’ I said.
‘Oh?’ she said. She added: ‘I do wish you wouldn’t swear.’
‘You just can’t help it in my job, Edie. Don’t you see, the words sometimes take the place of tears.’
‘I wish you’d just go to sleep,’ she said, ‘it’s nearly four.’
‘I can’t, Edie,’ I said. ‘Oh, why can’t you just be a wife to me for once, just hold me quietly for a while and don’t say anything more just now.’
But she said: ‘I think you really ought to know it, and Dad agrees with me, you’re a dreadful load on me at times — all this perturbed thinking of yours and you nothing but a detective sergeant who’ll never go up in rank because you insist it isn’t rank that matters.’ She sat bolt upright in the bed, pointed to her stomach and screamed: ‘Well, all right, then, if that’s the way you want it, look at the load I’m carrying thanks to you, Mr Police Officer with the Lofty Ideas — I think you’re altogether too sensitive for the police sometimes, I really do, and now there’s the child due in May with all the expenses it’ll bring, and a fat lot you care! She’s due on the twentieth, the doc says, and I tell you I am near the point when I don’t want to know.’
But presently she lay down again and her voice faded; I was glad of that. That night I realised that I had married Edie for her fatal, extraordinary body, not her opinions. I understood that no body could ever be enough if it held opinions in dead opposition to my own. I already knew that I wanted the coming child, who was, for nine short years, to be my daughter Dahlia, far more than Edie did; I loved Dahlia even before she was born, which may have been why Edie always hated her, who knows, and my love for the child meant that I would always find a means of tolerating Edie on account of Dahlia; I would find some means of growing deaf. All I had wanted that night was to hold Edie against me in my vulnerable hour after that day in Brighton. It was her primitive security that I needed; just a fraction of what Edie’s body was giving to the child she bore. That was all I needed to recover and so, through being reassured, feel enabled to get into perspective that greenish couple still in their trailing decomposed embrace, their swollen, expressionless faces nibbled by fish — what I needed from Edie then was her kisses, her comfort, just for a few minutes, and so prove to me that love can banish the frozen, lazy rottenness of eyes that have been eight days underwater.
We all have our weak moments.
— I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond; pgs. 34-36
But those eejits at the Apple App Store would deny you this.
I’d like the bluenoses at the Apple App Store to read I Was Dora Suarez. Maybe it would encourage them to suicide and thus improve the human species. At any rate, it’d get rid of them.
Hey, Apple App Store eejits, this applies to you lot:
[. . . ] Disinformation is invariably one of the most powerful weapons available to any regime whose members know perfectly well that they should never have been allowed to occupy the positions they do.
— The Hidden Files by Derek Raymond; pg. 143
Emphasis added by me.
In other words, Apple, get some real fucking book editors in there to do eBooks.
Supplemental:
Derek Raymond tribute site
Previously here:
Writer Derek Raymond Tribute
Writer Derek Raymond
At the old blog:
Derek Raymond: He Makes All Others Look Like Shit
Mike Cane 2008 
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