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.

[1] 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.

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[2] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His figures reminded me of Ingres crossed with early Henry Moore; they were extraordinarily graceful, and far too honest to mean anything whatever to current trendy taste.

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 infantryman 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.

192–194The conventional detective hero of American noir fiction exemplified toughness, idealism, and determination in his private pursuit of justice unattainable by official means.

Stripped of idealism by postwar disillusionment, his English counterpart transmutes his toughness and determination into an obsessive pursuit of an inexorable existential conundrum.

In his definitive statement of literary convictions, Cook postulated that the black novel "describes men and women whom circumstances have pushed too far, people whom existence has bent and deformed.

His following black novel, The Devil's Home On Leave (1985), featured an informer turning up in five up-market supermarket bags as boiled meat, and provided greater insight into the motives of its unnamed protagonist.

In Cook's novel How the Dead Live (1986), its detective sent away from London to a remote village called Thornhill, looking into the disappearance of a local doctor's wife and gleaning unique insights into consensual justification of homicide.

Cook's career peaked following the 1990 publication of what many consider his best – and most repulsive – work: the tortured, redemptive tale of a masochistic serial killer, I Was Dora Suarez.

On the same night, a mile away in the West End, a shotgun severs the top off the head of Felix Roatta, part-owner of the seedy Parallel Club.

Filmmaker Chris Petit described it in The Times as "a book full of coagulating disgust and compassion for the world's contamination, disease and mutilation, all dwelt on with a feverish, metaphysical intensity that recalls Donne and the Jacobeans more than any of Raymond's contemporaries."

[clarification needed] Derek Raymond's fifth novel in the Factory series, Dead Man Upright, was brought out by Time Warner in 1993, regrettably failing to sustain the momentum of the preceding entries.

But its author demonstrated his versatile capacity by playing a sell-out gig at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank in the company of indie rock band Gallon Drunk, with whom he recorded a musical interpretation of I Was Dora Suarez.

In a review published in The Observer, Jane McLoughlin compared the quality of its writing to that of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and Joseph Conrad.

A BBC drama series based on the Factory novels and to be produced by Kenith Trodd, plus a third French film adaptation of How the Dead Live, directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Philippe Noiret, were rumoured to be in the works, but never materialised.

A book which "reeks with the pervasive stench of excrement" as Iain Sinclair […] put it, this is a lowlife spectacular set in the seediest sections of the capital.