Derek Raymond

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.

The eldest son of a textile magnate, Cook spent his early years at the family's London house, off Baker Street, tormenting a series of nannies.

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.

During his National Service, Cook attained the rank of corporal (latrines).

After a brief period working for the family business, selling lingerie in a department store in Neath, Wales, he spent most of the 1950s leading the life of a Chelsea layabout which he describes 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 Willing At some time he is said to have lived in the Beat Hotel in Paris, rubbing shoulders with his neighbours William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and danced at fashionable left bank boîtes with the likes of Juliette Gréco.

In New York City he resided on the Lower East Side and was married to an heiress from New England for all of sixty-five days.

He claimed that he was sick of the dead-on-its-feet upper crust he was born into, that he didn't believe in and didn't want, whose values were meaningless.

He was seeking to carve his way out — "Crime was the only chisel I could find."

Cook smuggled oil paintings to Amsterdam, drove fast cars into Spain from Gibraltar, and consummated his downward mobility by spending time in a Spanish jail for sounding off about Francisco Franco in his local bar.

Cook returned to London in 1960.

He soon fronted a property company for Charlie Da Silva, an associate of the Krays.

After undergoing interrogation by the Dutch police force in connection with an insurance scam related to the apparent theft of a painting by Rembrandt, Cook claimed to have given up a life of actual crime for good in favour of a life of writing about it.

Cook was unfazed by this disparity, commenting later: “I’ve watched people like Kingsley Amis, struggling to get on the up escalator, while I had the down escalator all to myself." He supported his second wife, Eugene, and first child, Sebastian, by combining further novel-writing with stints as a Soho pornographer in St Anne's Court or running gambling parties. In conducting these affairs, Cook soon found himself inspired to depart from England. He spent much of the 1960s in Italy. The Tuscan village in which he settled declared itself an independent anarchist state, and appointed Cook in a dual capacity of its foreign minister and minister of finance.

Published under the name of Robin Cook (not to be confused with the American novelist), his study of one man's deliberate descent into the milieu of London lowlifes, The Crust on its Uppers (1962) was an immediate succès de scandale upon publication.

Lexicographers mined it for authentic usage of Cockney rhyming slang and thieves’ cant.

But glowing reviews failed to produce great riches.

By the end of 1970, Cook had a third wife, Rose, a stepson, Nicholas, an infant daughter, Zoe, a house in Holland Park, and a job as a taxi-driver.

His books earned no royalties, his third marriage was in shambles, and he lost his London house.

He abandoned writing through all of the 1970s, working as a vineyard labourer with occasional sidelines in roofing, driving, and livestock slaughter.

His family rejoined him for a while, but by 1979 the marriage had disintegrated.

Nearing 50, Cook eased himself back into literature with a potboiler that was published only in a French translation.

He returned to London, married his fourth wife, Fiona, then divorced again.

He worked as a minicab-driver on the night shift.

He was collecting the material for the first of his "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.'

Cook relocated to France and bought a derelict 15th-century fortified tower in Aveyron, to the north of Montpellier.