How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Read online

  Praise for Derek Raymond’s

  Factory Series

  “No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books.”

  —JAMES SALLIS

  “A pioneer of British noir … No one has come near to matching his style or overwhelming sense of madness … he does not strive for accuracy, but achieves an emotional truth all his own.”

  —THE TIMES (LONDON)

  “The beautiful, ruthless simplicity of the Factory novels is that Raymond rewrites the basic ethos of the classic detective novel.”

  —CHARLES TAYLOR, THE NATION

  “A sulphurous mixture of ferocious violence and high-flown philosophy.”

  —PROSPECT

  “A mixture of thin-lipped Chandleresque backchat and of idioms more icily subversive.”

  —OBSERVER

  “Hellishly bleak and moving.”

  —NEW STATESMAN

  “He writes beautifully, and his sincerity cannot be faulted.”

  —EVENING STANDARD

  “Raw-edged, strong and disturbing stuff.”

  —THE SCOTSMAN

  DEREK RAYMOND was the pseudonym of British writer Robert “Robin” Cook, who was born in London in 1931. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton and rejected a life of privilege for a life of adventure. He traveled the world, living in Paris at the Beat Hotel and on New York’s seedy Lower East Side, smuggled artworks into Amsterdam, and spent time in a Spanish prison for publicly making fun of Franco. Finally, he landed back in London, working in the lower echelons of the Kray Brothers’ crime syndicate laundering money, organizing illegal gambling, and setting up insurance scams. He eventually took to writing—first as a pornographer, but then as an increasingly serious novelist, writing about the desperate characters and experiences he’d known in London’s underground. His work culminated in the Factory novels, landmarks that have led many to consider him the founding father of British noir. He died in London in 1994.

  How the Dead Live

  First published in 1986 in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg

  © 1986 Estate of Robin William Arthur Cook

  This edition published by arrangement with Serpent’s Tail

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-015-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011932391

  v3.1

  To Jean-Paul Kauffmann

  Christopher Moorsom

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: By Will Self

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth

  All death will he annul, all tears assuage?

  … Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,

  Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.

  Lt Wilfred Owen, the Sambre, Nov 10th, 1918

  Introduction

  by Will Self

  ‘Bad writers,’ Auden remarked, ‘borrow. Good ones steal.’ I like to think I’m a good enough writer to thieve – and do so blatantly. I ripped off Robin Cook’s (aka Derek Raymond) title How the Dead Live quite shamelessly, and gave it to one of my own novels. He was dead, so he couldn’t do anything about it. Some Raymond acolyte thought this was a bit much and wrote me an irate letter. Big deal. Besides, I don’t think Cook would’ve given a toss – he was enough of a Wildean to know flattery when it was staring him in the face.

  In truth, I never read Cook’s How the Dead Live until it came time to write this introduction to it – that’s how any literary blagger justifies a bit of work: he doesn’t empathise with his victim – he goes in with the sawn-off pen cocked. True, I’d dabbled in a couple of his other Factory novels, the legendarily emetic I Was Dora Suarez and He Died with His Eyes Open, but it wasn’t until preparing to write this piece that I gave Cook’s work any serious consideration.

  Some say that the so-called ‘Godfather of English noir fiction’ is quite distinct from his American progenitors; that whereas the books of Hammett, Chandler, MacDonald et al are characterised by lonely heroes who are committed to righting the perceived injustices of society, Cook took the detective procedural far further – down the road to full blown existentialist horror.

  The nameless protagonist of the Factory novels has no truck with what he perceives as the seedy moral equivocations of the duly constituted authorities; his is a quest for perfect moments of human connection. If this means that he’s condemned to a lurid shadow dance, battling with the shades of good and evil, then so be it. His is a disillusionment of not only tragic – but epic – proportions. In other words: he’s exactly the same as any other middle- aged male cynic, stamping his foot because the world’s gone sour on him, yet unwilling to imagine what his own mouth tastes like.

  So, I say Cook was remarkably faithful to the hardboiled genre. If anything How the Dead Live is more Chandleresque than Chandler, right down to the incongruous quotations from Shakespeare, Spenser and Mrs Gaskell (!), and an allusion to Socrates that has to be oddly obscured in order to make it plausible mental content for a sergeant in the Met.

  Then there’s the lexicon of Cockney geezer slang, terms recondite even when Cook was writing in the mid-1980s. With his darlings, loves, shtucks, bunny rabbits, artists, berks and wooden-tops, Cook hearkens back to an earlier era, when ‘the code’ prevailed, and there was a difference between good, honest, working crims, and dirty little toe rags, an aristocracy – believe it or not – of crime, the upper reaches of which his solitary jaundiced hero feels a certain affinity with.

  And then there are the lacunae with which these books proceed: the frontal lobe discombobulating occasioned by intoxication. For Hammett it was usually opiates – for Chandler, liquor. Cook’s characters swim in the stuff. In How the Dead Live the drinking begins at 9.30 or 10.00 in the morning and pours on unabated. There’s also coke, smack and dope, but you can sample this boozy stream as if it were a contaminated river running through the text: Kronenburg, vodka martinis and plenty of Bells (or ring-a-ding as our man jocularly refers to it), sherry, more whisky. When the bent copper is cornered he tries to buy his way out of it with a single malt, when the villain’s catamite comes out shooting his hand is unsteadied by a tumbler of whisky. When the tragic Dr Mardy’s guerrilla surgery fails, his patient is numbed by morphine ‘on a whisky base’.

  This view from the bar of the French House in Soho is compounded by Cook’s strangely foreshortened perception of England (or ‘Britain’ as he quaintly refers to it). Absent in the 1960s and 1970s, Cook’s Britain is all façade and hinterland with no mid-ground: he simply isn’t aware of the social context within which things happen: there a
re ‘blacks’ and ‘Africans’ serving in junk food places and pubs. In the shires, bumptious pseudo-squires drive five-door Mercedes, yet the saloon bar is still full of men with military titles, who bang on about evacuating from Dunkirk under fire, while in the public bar, a Falstaffian chorus of drinkers guys the town’s bigwig. This is an un-time, where everything seems anachronistic – whether it’s a computer, an electricity strike – or festering stately pile.

  The action of How the Dead Live proceeds through the agency of snarling verbal jousts between the Nameless One and various hated fellow cops, debased stooges, disgusting crims and vilely ugly, whoreish women, alternating with oddly impassioned soliloquies. The only characters he has any sympathy for are his wronged sister, a ten-year-old girl beggar, a suicidal junkie he had an affair with – and, of course, the murderer. His wife went mad, his father and mother became ossified by disease, his straight-copper mates have all been savagely maimed in the line of duty.

  Put like this How the Dead Live sounds like a ridiculous gallimaufry – and it would be, were it not for two factors: Cook could write beautifully, when he had cause to; and, more importantly, what he is writing about in this novel are nothing less than the most important subjects any writer can deal with: morality and death.

  Like Chandler, Cook’s very weaknesses as a writer are also his strengths – the tipsy sentimentality, the jaded eye, the poetic riff – these, when yoked to an imagination that insists on the most visceral stripping of skin from skull, produce prose of exquisite intensity.

  Even Cook’s weird historical perspective – sheered off like the bonnet of a bubble car – comes into its own in this novel: How the Dead Live, first published in 1986, teeters on a chronological cliff: its principal characters are all irretrievably maimed by the experience of the war, and the wholesale death they witnessed. The shades of these dead haunt them, and percolate into the scuzzy atmosphere. It is this profound and now vanished era, when the dead lived among the living of grubby old England, that is Cook’s true subject – the seeming police procedural is just that – and he deals with it masterfully.

  As the insane Dr Mardy draws us into his mouldering fantasy and his mildewed madness, we experience a true horripilation, a rising of the hackles that indicates we are in the presence of the human mind pushed beyond the brink. Cook makes us see, that while we may cavort in the sunny uplands of life, the shades are always among us, flitting back and forth, seemingly without purpose, and yet slowly, insidiously, relentlessly, herding us towards the grave.

  1

  ‘The most extraordinary feature that psychopaths present,’ the Home Office lecturer was saying, ‘is the painstaking effort they make to copy normal people.’ He looked happily at us. ‘They make a close study of us – you realize that.’

  We shuffled our feet.

  ‘Yet the patient is unremittingly aware of his emptiness, and sees existence as an emptiness around him. He takes a scientific view of infinity. He continues to do so until he cracks; there’s no slack in insanity at all. This enables us to define the patient’s state. He insists on an explanation for living, and kills because he can’t find one.’ Absently he picked up his glass of water, gazed into it, and took a sip.

  ‘The rest of us ride the wave of life as a swimmer does, but the psychopath can’t do that. He’s obliged to think everything out first, because he can’t feel. He understands, from his close intellectual study of others, that he ought to be able to feel, but he doesn’t know what feeling or emotion means. He can’t feel feeling, he can only think, and this makes him clumsy compared to the general tide of life – to think you are swimming is not the same as to do it.

  ‘He is usually highly intelligent in a formal sense and because of his emotional inferiority is violently competitive.’

  Nobody in the room said anything and the lecturer pleaded: ‘I’m trying to condense five to seven years’ study and experience into an hour and a half. Do ask questions.’ When there were no questions he said: ‘The psychopath cannot afford to accept defeat; his superiority, expressed in the number of deaths he has caused, is his one defence against the void inside, and therefore outside himself. The competitive effort that the sick individual makes is his sickness. Simultaneously, though, it’s a despairing cry to be rescued from it. Therefore a killer will knife or save, protect or murder, apparently on a whim – but of course there is no such thing as a whim for anyone in his condition, only a trigger. Without being metaphysical – not the fashion in this country – he kills in the role of god or devil, driven by impulses that he can neither understand nor control. That is why his judgments are far more easily and swiftly arrived at than ours; the emotion must come out somewhere, explode sometime, usually in a fugue. The results are spectacular.’

  A detective-sergeant behind me muttered to his neighbour: ‘Yes, and I wonder when the old geezer last found himself alone with one.’

  I turned round and looked at the rows of sullen faces pointed upwards at the lecturer’s dais.

  ‘An absurd condition,’ said the lecturer, ’can only yield absurd results. Let’s consider the Nilsen case. He boasts of having murdered fifteen young men, cutting them up, forcing pieces of them down the lavatory in his flat, or else burning and burying them in the waste ground behind the building. He’s not concerned at having been caught. On the contrary, in his mind it was necessary for him to be caught and tried, so that he could explain to the nation from the dock how clever he had been. There was also the hunting instinct, because he had had sex with them all first. But then love means death to the psychopath. A whimsical touch, he had access to these penniless young men looking for work through his job with the DHSS. Recently, in jail, he was set upon and systematically beaten up by his fellow prisoners – but his nagging complaint to the authorities was not that he had had his face cut open, but that blood had got over his jeans that he had just washed and dried in time to go in punctually to tea.

  ‘I’m afraid that even those of us who have never committed murder are nevertheless guilty of it because we enjoy death at second hand, just as we enjoy watching a thriller on television. After all, what’s the use of a newspaper to the general public if there’s not a single good murder in it? Of course,’ said the lecturer, ‘it must never happen to any of us.’

  I knew what he meant all right. He was a pompous bore who couldn’t hold a gun straight or run up a flight of stairs with an armed lunatic waiting for him at the top, but he had done some thinking.

  ‘Or take Paolacci,’ said the lecturer. ‘A serious man, Fred always was serious, sharp to work at Ford’s; he’s now developed religious ideas and sits in his cell reading the Bible all day. Only a mediocre intelligence for a psychopath, though; I know, I’ve examined him. A good-looking man, he couldn’t abandon women because they fancied him. Nor could he stand the sight of them – he’s a homosexual. But he didn’t see how he could tell his workmates that; like all psychopaths, the greatest terror he could imagine was ridicule. This condition led to three female deaths, his wife, his mistress and his daughter aged ten; he ripped them up and ejaculated in their entrails, a psychotic gesture of despair which he was unable to explain then or since.’

  I sat up when Paolacci was mentioned, because it was I who had made the arrest. He had told me, after his confession, that he was much more frightened of what his mates would think than he was of killing.

  Lord Longford was having a patient and unctuous time with Fred, and might get him paroled some day so that he could start up all over again.

  Who has the least humour or common sense, a killer or a prison visitor? It’s such a close race that I’ve never been able to decide on the loser.

  ‘The psychopath,’ said the lecturer, ‘is someone who has been murdered in his feeling, or still-born, only he’s not died. That’s why his major problem is continuing to live. He is on a precipice, and determined that everyone should join him there so that the entire human race can fall with him. He has no sense of home, no sense of love
. With the psychopath the death of the other affords him the same satisfaction that our possession of a living person would do.’ I remembered my own murdering wife.

  ‘Murder gives the patient both relief and satisfaction; he avoids both shame and guilt through his conviction that he is either God or Satan; killing is his own upside-down version of being in love. His hatred, where love should be, also accounts for his contempt; the patient cannot understand, cannot conceive, why people should be sad about the dead. He takes it as a weakness to be incapable of taking human life; his own tendency is to boast, even moralize over his victims, and why not? since the difference between good and evil is invisible to him.’

  The forty-odd detectives that were his audience looked at each other and one of them said: ‘I’d make it fucking plain to the cunt over at the Factory.’

  The lecturer coughed over the interruption and told us what we all knew the hard way: ‘You can tell these people’s illness, even when they’re not on trigger—’

  (‘It’s not an illness,’ said the same detective half aloud, ‘these people are straight maniacs even if they’re sober; the treatment for any kind of nut is a boot to crack it with, it’s him or you.’)