Robert William Arthur Cook (12 June 1931 – 30 July 1994), better known since the 1980s by his pen name Derek Raymond, was an English crime writer, credited with being a founder of British noir.
Early life Cook was born 12 June 1931 in London, as the eldest son of a textile magnate. In 1937, in anticipation of the Second World War, the family retreated to the countryside, to a house near their Kentish castle. In 1944, Cook went to Eton, which he later characterised as a "hotbed of buggery" and "an excellent preparation for vice of any kind". He dropped out at the age of 17.
Career After Eton, Cook worked as "a front for a gangster's real-estate companies".
"De retour en Angleterre en 1960, Robin Cook accepte d'être l'homme de paille de la mafia locale, dirigée par les frères Krays, dans des entreprises concernant les travaux publics et le bâtiment. Son nom apparaît alors en première page, à propos du vol d'un Rubens."(Returning to England in 1960, Robin Cook agreed to be the local mafia's straw man, run by the Kray brothers, in companies related to public works and construction. His name then appears on the front page, about the theft of a Rubens.) - Encyclopædia Universalis
During his National Service, Cook attained the rank of corporal (latrines). He worked for a brief period selling lingerie in a department store, for the family business, in Neath, Wales. He spent most of the 1950s abroad, in Paris at the Beat Hotel around William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, returning to London in 1960, described in his first, semi-autobiographical, novel The Crust on its Uppers (1962), from 1957 on enjoying a long affair with Hazel Whittington the deserted wife of Victor WillingMills, John, Which Yet Survive. Impressions of Friends, Family and Encounters, Quartet Books, London, 2017 By the early 1970s, "his criminal activities had attracted notice, making it impossible for him to remain safely in the U.K." In 1973, Cook went to the south of France and stayed there for 18 years. Later, he lived in New York on the Lower East Side with junkies and the jazz musicians, marrying an heiress from New England, in Spain in poverty and in jail,
Personal life Cook's five marriages ended in divorce.
Novels The Crust on its Uppers (1962) was published under the name Robin Cook (not to be confused with Robin Cook, the American novelist).
Black novels
Cook published He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) under the pen name of Derek Raymond. He adopted his new pseudonym because he did not want to be confused with the American writer known as Robin Cook, "nor with the bloody shadow minister for health, come to that". In France, his books kept being published under his real name, generating some confusion with the American novelist.
The book inaugurated the Factory series, nominal police procedurals narrated by the unnamed protagonist, a sergeant at London Metropolitan Police’s Department of Unexplained Deaths, also known as A14. A14 handles the crummy lowlife murders, in contrast with attention-grabbing homicides handled by the prestigious Serious Crimes Division, better known as Scotland Yard. It is "by far the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service" (He Died With His Eyes Open, p. 6). As befits his lowly professional standing and departmental affiliation, the detective is surly, sarcastic, and insubordinate. His first case in the series is an inquiry into the murder of one Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland, an unemployed writer aged fifty-one, of upper class breeding but apparently down on his luck. He appears to be making little headway in an investigation that his departmental betters would be expected to treat as trivial. His ensuing relations with authorities proceed along the lines of this conversation with Inspector Bowman:'Christ, it’s you,’ he said. You still on that Staniland case?''Still?' I said. 'I’ve only been on it four days.' 'Four days? You should have had the geezer in half the time. You’ll be working weekends if you don't pull your finger out.' 'Don’t be silly,' I said. 'If you solved them that fast, they’d start stripping you down for the microchips to find out how you did it.' 'How are you getting on with it, anyhow?''I can’t get my proof,' I said. 'You know me — slow, quick, quick, slow, Mr. Foxtrot they call me. That's why I’m still a sergeant while you’re shaping up for superintendent on the Vice Squad. All I can say is, when it happens, don't get done for looking at dirty pictures on the taxpayer's time.' 'You really make me laugh, you do,' Bowman said. 'You come out with better jokes than a villain.' —He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) , p. 146The detective displays similar manners whilst intimidating villains who pop up as witnesses in his investigation:'Oh, sorry. Yes, that one. Yes, I get you now.''Do you?' I said. 'Lucky for you. Because you could find yourself in a bit of bother if you didn’t look out. I might decide I wanted to wind you right up tight if you misled me, just to see what would happen. And do you know what would happen, fatty? You’d go off pop! Like that.''Okay, okay,' he said. —He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) , p. 33Such social shortcomings find their counterpart in a nearly psychotic identification with the mutilated bodies of murder victims whom the hero relentlessly avenges. The detective finds Staniland's recorded journals. He listens to the voice of the murder victim ruminate on his sense of being trapped in his body and the possibility of release through death. The tapes convey a poetic diction infected with haunted sensibilities:The next tape of Staniland’s I played started:I dreamed I was walking through the door of a cathedral. Someone I couldn’t distinguish warned me: 'Don’t go in there, it’s haunted.' However, I went straight in and glided up the nave to the altar. The roof of the building was too high to see; the quoins were lost in a dark fog through which the votive lamps glowed orange. The only light came through the diamond-shaped clear panes in the windows; it was faint and cold. This neglected mass was attached to a sprawl of vaulted ruins; I had been in them all night; I had wandered through them for centuries. They had once been my home; burned-out rafters jutted like human ribs above empty, freezing galleries, and great doors gave onto suites soaked by pitiless rain. Angry spectres, staggering with the faint steps of the insane, paraded arm in arm through the wrecked masonry, sneering as I passed: ‘The Stanilands have no money? Good! Excellent!' In the cathedral there were no pews or chairs, just people standing around, waiting. No service was in progress. Knots of men and women from another century stood about, talking in low voices to bishops who moved in and out of the crowd, trailing their tarnished vestments. I realised with a paralysing horror that the place really was haunted. The people kept looking upwards, as though waiting for an event. I managed to overcome my fear and went on up the nave towards the altar. As I passed, groups of people crossed themselves and said nervously: 'Don't do that!' I took no notice, but opened the gate in the rails and went and stood in front of the altar. Behind it, instead of a reredos, hung a tapestry with a strange, curling design in dark red; the tapestry was so high that it lost itself in the roof. As I watched, it began to undulate, to flow and ripple, gradually and sensuously at first, then more and more ardently, until it was rearing and thundering against the wall like an angry sea. I heard people behind me groan and mutter, praying in their anguish and fear. Then my waist was held by invisible hands and I was raised from the floor; at the height of the roof I was turned slowly parallel with the ground and then released so that I floated, immobile and face downwards, far above the people whose faces I could make out in the half-dark as a grey blur, staring up at me. After I had floated the length and breadth of the building I descended quietly, of my own accord, and landed lightly on the spot from where I had been taken, whereupon I walked directly out of the building without looking back. As I walked swiftly away down a gravel path someone like Barbara came running towards me in a white coat, approaching from a thick hedge that surrounded the graveyard.Quick, she said over her shoulder, don't let him get out! But I walked straight into a wood that confronted me without a qualm; no one had any power over me now. —He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) , pp. 188–190The sacred relationship between the dreamer's body and the cathedral finds its immediate complement in the profane preoccupations of his waking life.The passage that I was listening to now ran:Unhook the delicate, crazy lace of flesh, detach the heart with a single cut, unmask the tissue behind the skin, unhinge the ribs, disclose the spine, take down the long dress of muscle from the bones where it hangs erect. A pause to boil the knives — then take a bold but cunning curve, sweeping into the skull you had trepanned, into the brain, and extract its art if you can. But you will have blood on your hands unless you transfused it into bottles first, and cure the whole art of the dead you may, but in brine — a dish to fatten you for your own turn. What better surgeon than a maggot? What greater passion than a heart in formaldehyde? Ash drops from the morgue assistant's cigarette into the dead mouth; they will have taken forensic X-rays of the smashed bones before putting him back into the fridge with a bang; there he will wait until the order for burial from the coroner arrives. Those responsible for the end of his mysterious being will escape or, at best, being proved mad, get a suspended sentence under Section Sixty. —He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) , pp. 191–192Earlier on, the detective heard Staniland's detailed account of his participation in the slaughter of a hog, which recapitulates one among many menial occupations of his creator (He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) , pp. 102–103). His systematic inversion of vitality drains his favourite characters of life's essence or its principal characteristics, even as it imbues their environment with ominous animation, after the manner of French Symbolists. Uncharacteristically for a writer of crime fiction, Cook expressly and primarily identifies his authorial persona with the murder victim. Accordingly, his detective plays the part of the difficult reader favoured by the Symbolists. In response to Staniland's taped lesson in forensic pathology, he recalls another underappreciated artist:I switched the player off and began thinking for no apparent reason about a friend I had once when I was a young man. He was a sculptor who used my local pub in the Fulham Road; his studio was just opposite. He wore sandals but no socks, whatever the weather, and was always powdered with stone dust; this gave him a grey appearance and got under his nails. He wore his white hair long and straight over his ears. He was a Communist, and he didn't care who knew it, though he only said so if people asked. They didn't bother often. He was a Communist as an act of faith, like a Cathar. He accepted the doctrine straight, as Communists used to before they won and everything turned sour. But he rarely spoke to anyone about politics; there were so many other things to talk about. He and I used to stand at the bar together and drink beer and talk about them. But few people talked to him. That suited him. Most people couldn't be bothered because he was stone deaf and could only lip-read you. He was deaf because he had fought for the Republic with the XIIth Brigade in the Spanish war. He had fought at Madrid (University Buildings), and later at Huesca and Teruel with the XVth. But at Teruel he had had both eardrums shattered when a shell exploded too close to him. 'It was worth it.' 'No regrets?' 'No, of course not.'