He Died with His Eyes Open Read online

  The right of Derek Raymond to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 1984 Estate of Robin William Arthur Cook Introduction copyright © James Sallis 2006

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First published in 1984

  ISBN 978 1 85242 796 2

  For Fiona

  'One eye was shut where he knocked it on leaving the tomb

  But the other is staring from behind the cornflakes

  On middle-class dining-room sideboards.'

  Robin Cook The Edencourt, 1952

  Introduction

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  Introduction

  by James Sallis

  Five or six times in a life you come across a book that sends electric shocks skittering and scorching through the whole of you and radically alters the way in which you perceive the world. There's a great deal of talk about books changing lives. The mass of people are as likely to have their lives changed by a doughnut as by a book. But it does occur.

  In 1990, as usual, I was reviewing for a number of periodicals; books arrived daily by the boxful. It became my habit, as I headed out for afternoon coffee, to select a book at random from the stack and take it along.

  One day I happened to pick up the unprepossessing trade paperback of a thriller by Derek Raymond titled I Was Dora Suarez.

  And for three or four hours, I was. Not only youthful Dora Suarez, who lived and died horribly. I was also taken deeply into the mind of the nameless detective from 'the Factory' who, reading Suarez's journal and following her trail through tangled London streets, sets out first to solve, then to avenge her murder. And from the first page I was plunged into the mind—terrifyingly into the mind—of the murderer himself. His thoughts and feelings became as real to me as the chair upon which I sit now, writing this.

  I put down the book stunned. I was sitting outside and, suddenly, quite ordinary traffic along Camp Bowie Boulevard seemed fraught with meaning. Streetlamps came on, dim and trembling in early twilight. I realized that this novel on the bistro table beside coffee, saucer and keys had carved its way into me the way relentless pain etches itself indelibly upon the body.

  Soon enough then, mapless but undaunted, I was haunting bookstores old and new on the prowl for other Derek Raymond novels.

  They were, and remain, strange things when caught, grotesqueries really, unremittingly bleak, brimming with gruesome physical detail, awash with despair. In between books—not quite what you'd want to call literary perhaps, but then, not quite crime novels either.

  In the novel you now hold, the nameless detective from London Metropolitan Polices Department of Unexplained Deaths ('the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service') barely investigates the crime. His fascination lies with trying to understand the victim, an agenda that in turn, on the author's part, and especially in I Was Dora Suarez, carries you fall force into the criminal mind. None of the niceties of civilized banter from this detective, brash and strident with fellow officers, superiors, and the populace alike—and nothing of civilized reserve or restraint in these novels. Body and soul, you are scooped from your world, given momentary flight, then dropped on to the hard ground of a world quite different. You stand, and when you do, you enter the minds of criminals and victims; you become prey and predator.

  Often, penetration into those minds yields up a marvellously brutal and strangely gentle kind of poetry, as in this passage from well along in He Died with His Eyes Open:

  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.

  Or here, as a friend of the detective in youth, a sculptor, speaks of his art:

  'What I'm always trying to capture,' he explained, 'is the light, the vision inside a man, and the conviction which that light lends his action, his whole body. Haven't you noticed how the planes of a man's body alter when he's in the grip of a belief? The ex-bank clerk acquires the stature of an athlete as he throws a grenade—or, it might be, I recollect the instant where an artilleryman in an attack, a worker with a rifle, is stopped by a bullet: I try to reconstruct in stone the tragedy of a free man passing from life to death, from will to nothingness. I try to capture the second in which he disintegrates.'

  Derek Raymond was the pseudonym adopted by Robin Cook, a well-born Englishman who spent a great portion of his life in France. Turning his back on Eton and all his birth class implied, he worked for years at whatever menial jobs or scams came to him, writing all the while, learning the secret life of London the way a taxi driver must learn its streets. Soon enough he embraced the crime novel, taking as his subject the dispossessed and faceless, society's rejects: alcoholics, abused women, prostitutes, petty criminals swarming like pilot fish in the wake of sharks. His life's work culminated in the four Factory novels now seen as clear landmarks in British fiction: He Died with His Eyes Open, The Devil's Home on Leave, How the Dead Live, I Was Dora Suarez.

  It seems to me that Derek Raymond occupies much the same position in England as does Jean-Patrick Manchette in France. Manchette salvaged the French crime novel from the bog of police procedurals and colourful tales of Pigalle lowlife into which it had sunk. 'The crime novel,' Manchette claimed, 'is the great moral literature of our time.' For Manchette and his followers the crime novel became not mere entertainment, but a means to strip bare and underscore society's failures. Derek Raymond, godfather of the new UK crime novel, who despite his many years in the French language always spoke of the noir novel as the black novel, was in full accord. The black novel, he said, shows that the world is something quite different and much harder than what we in ignorance and denial go on insisting it is.

  'The black novel... describes men and women whom circumstances have pushed too far, people whom existence has bent and deformed. It deals with the question of turning a small, frightened battle with oneself into a much greater struggle - the universal human struggle against the general contract, whose terms are unfillable, and where defeat is certain.'

  The black novelist's characters forever step from rented rooms and wretched tenements 'into the vile psychic weather outside their front doors where everything and everyone has been flattened by a pitiless rain that falls from the souls of the people out there.'

  In another passage from his autobiography The Hidden Files, Derek Raymond wrote about his struggle with the raw stuff of his books. He was writing specifically of I Was Dora Suarez here but had in mind, I am certain, all the late novels.

  'What is remarkable about I Was Dora Suarez has nothing to do with literature at
all; what is remarkable about it is that in its own way and by its own route it struggles after the same message as Christ.' It was, he professed, 'my atonement for fifty years' indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others'.

  What is most remarkable to me is the way in which books like Derek Raymond's—strong stuff, graphic, unsettling, even repugnant-—can bring us in one hand that "pitiless rain" and in the other a shelter against it. No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of the human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books.

  Certainly our highest literature is free to deal with a young woman's decision to marry, with a young academic's coming of age, or with four decades in a car dealer's life. But just as certainly it must deal—as do these books, directly and unflinchingly—with what a guard is said to have remarked at Auschwitz: Hier ist kein Warum. There is no why here.

  1

  He was found in the shrubbery in front of the Word of God House in Albatross Road, West Five. It was the thirtieth of March, during the evening rush-hour. It was bloody cold; and an office worker had tripped over the body when he was caught short going home. I don't know if you know Albatross Road where it runs into Hanger Lane, but if you do you'll appreciate what a ghastly lonely area it is, with the surface-level tube-station on one side of the street, and dank, blind buildings, weeping with damp, on the other. That evening there was yet another go-slow on, and when I arrived at seven there were people still massing to get down the tube stairs to the trains, which were running very rare.

  It was pelting with rain on an east wind when I got there. I found Bowman from Serious Crimes standing over the corpse with a torch, talking to the two coppers off the beat who had been called by the man who had stumbled on him. Water ran off the brim of Bowman's trilby and dribbled down the helmets of the wooden-tops to end up in their collars.

  Bowman handed me the torch without a word and I bent over the dead man. His eyes were open—one only just—the surfaces peppered with the grit that an east wind hurls at you off London streets. He was wearing a cheap grey suit with cigarette burns down the front and a tatty raincoat. He was medium height, with thin hair turning grey and a boozer's nose, aged between fifty and sixty. Both his arms were broken, and one leg; the bone poked out blue through the trouser cloth. His head had been battered in below the hairline and brains had slopped down his left cheek into the mud. I got the impression, though, that despite his injuries he hadn't died at once. In the dull eyes there was still a flicker of some memory that he meant to take with him wherever he was going.

  When I had finished I stepped back with a last glance at his face. They had left some of it, I will say, whoever they were. It wasn't a strong face, but one that had seen everything and then not understood it until it was too late. I've seen plenty of violent deaths, but never anything worse than this one. His wounds were multiple, but not random. They weren't consistent with a hit-and-run or even a casual robbery (who would trouble to rob him, though?). No, he had been systematically beaten by one, or more likely two practitioners who knew exactly how to do it. Specialists, you might almost say. Villains, you might almost say.

  'What do you think?' said Bowman.

  'I think they weren't joking.'

  'They?'

  'There must have been more than one. No one man could have done all this. And wherever it was done, it wasn't here— there's hardly any blood under the body.'

  'Oh, I'd noticed that,' said one of the size nines in a tone of exaggerated patience. Like all these clever coppers who wanted to make detective-constable but never did, he had been moving around sussing things out. 'For my money he was done in a motor, then he was dragged out here—you can see the marks in the ground—then dumped to make him look like a derelict hit-and-run, see?'

  'You're a murderer,' said Bowman coldly. 'You're one of the special kind, a killer that don't want to get caught. You beat a bloke to death in a motor—blood all over the fucking place. Next, I'm you. I come round to your place an I say, can I have a look at your motor, please? Routine inquiry, sir. Blood everywhere, you berk.'

  'I hadn't thought of it like that, sir.'

  'I know,' said Bowman, 'so just draw your pay as a police-constable and try leaving it to us, son. Unless,' he added, 'you'd like to use your crystal ball once more and give us the motive?'

  'No, sir.'

  'Anyway,' I said, 'you can't beat a man to death in a motor, there isn't room.'

  'It could've been done in a truck, maybe,' said the other copper. Nobody took any notice of him.

  'Has the pathologist been?' I said.

  'All the mob,' said Bowman. 'Been and gone. We was just waiting for you, and you took your time an all.'

  The nosy copper that Bowman had put down smiled with mirth in the dark. Bowman turned to him and said: 'If you've something to say, lad, say it out loud and in English so's I can give you the answer—you mightn't find it all on your own.' He said to me: 'What do you think he was killed for? Money?'

  'He doesn't look like the kind of ice cream who ever had much on him,' I said. 'Do we know who he was, by the way?'

  'Of course we do,' said Bowman, 'we found his papers in his pocket. Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland, aged fifty-one.'

  'I don't think I'd kill a man for fifty quid,' I said.

  'Oh, I don't know,' said Bowman, 'some of these kids are desperate nowadays. Anyway, you can get going on it now—it's your case. And don't get in my hair at all, will you?'

  'You haven't any,' I said, looking at his bald head in the torchlight.

  There was no love in the look he gave me. He was a chief inspector at thirty-two, only recently bumped up to his rank; he was cheerful, brutal and clever, cheeky and cocksure. 'It's a derelict death after all,' he said with dismissive contempt that implied he had bigger fish to fry over at Serious Crimes. 'We get lots of them.' He looked at his watch. 'Christ, I've got to get back by eight o'clock. I'll be off, then.' He started to walk back to the road, where the squad car with its revolving blue lamp and chattering radio waited at the entrance to the tangled garden. 'The ambulance'll be down to take him away sometime, only as you know—'

  'Union's having a go-slow again.'

  'In any case,' he said, 'I'm sick of being pissed on by all this rain.'

  He didn't care about the rain at all. What he meant was that Staniland was a case with no promotion in it; he would cheerfully have stood under a cold shower for twenty-four hours fully dressed if there had been. The local law notified him of these cases, and as often as he could work it, he turned them over to us to pick up the bits.

  At the gateway he turned to me and stood with his legs apart, at ease, his hands clasped behind his back. We faced each other. As I say, we didn't get on, so it was a good thing we were in different departments and didn't see too much of each other.

  'You really want to stay a sergeant, don't you?' he said.

  'I like to see justice.'

  'Justice? You're a berk,' said Bowman. 'You're forty, you're a sergeant, and you actually despise promotion.'

  'I'm not on my way upstairs like you are,' I said. 'Not with cases like this one.'

  'It won't even be reported.'

  'No, I know,' I said. 'And that sort of thing matters to you.'

  'Of course it does.'

  'But the trouble with you is, it shows.'

  'Have it your own way' said Bowman. 'You can stay on at Unexplained Deaths till you rot, for all I care. Anyway, I'm going. I'm late already.' He dug his chin into the collar of his mac and gestured to his driver to pull up closer. As he was about to get into the car, he turned and said: 'By the way, you'd better call the Factory and I'll have his property sent over to you. There's plenty of it.'

  'You've been over his place already?'

  'I've had it done. I'll give you the address.'

  Well, he was efficien
t—but I knew that.

  'You can leave me your torch while I wait for the ambulance anyway,' I said. 'You won't need it back at the Factory. Not with all that strip lighting.'

  He gave it to me without enthusiasm. 'I don't like your manner,' he said. 'You're only a sergeant, but you're cheeky. You reckon yourself, you do. You think you're fast.' He was in the back of the car now, with the window half up against the rain.

  'Working where I do makes me feel independent.'

  'Don't carry it too far,' he said.

  'You can turn your back on me if you like,' I said. 'I wouldn't shoot you with your own torch.'

  I just wanted him to leave.

  When he finally had, with the blue lamp flaring in the rain and a smazz of pistons and exhaust from the red-striped and white Rover, I sent the two turnips back to the gate and squatted down by the dead man's face again with the torch on. I wanted to see if I could get some line on why the man might have died and how he had got here before the people who knew it all started to try and tell me.

  After a while I began to reflect on the withering remarks Bowman had passed on Unexplained Deaths. The fact that A14 is by far the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service only goes to show that, to my way of thinking, it should have been created years ago. Trendy Lefties in and out of politics or just on the edges don't like us—but somebody has to do the job, they won't. The uniformed people don't like us; nor does the Criminal Investigation Department, nor does the Special Intelligence Branch. We work on obscure, unimportant, apparently irrelevant deaths of people who don't matter and who never did. We have the lowest budget, we're last in line for allocations, and promotion is so slow that most of us never get past the rank of sergeant. Some of us transfer to other branches out of desperation, but not many; and of those who do transfer, most do it sooner rather than later. We can solve a murder with as much skill as any of the Bowmans, whatever our rank, pay and pension—the difference is in our attitude. Just like Bowman, we spend our time looking into dead men's faces, round their rooms, into the motives of their friends, if any, lovers and enemies. But unlike some policemen, we never make excuses about being undermanned; nor do we care if the case we're investigating never gets into the papers, nor becomes a national manhunt—and when my friend Sergeant Macintosh was killed by the man he had trapped in a bedsitter off Edith Grove last year, there was no posthumous George Medal for him. No murder is casual to us, and no murder is unimportant, even though murder happens the whole time in a city like this.