This is the land of knee-tremblers and wee bastards

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'Oh, do let's have sex and stop all this dreary nonsense.'

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It was evening in the Do Re Mi coffee-bar in Old Compton Street. In the corner stood a juke-box which emitted red and purple rays like a horror-strip monster; on top of it stood a screen showing three Italian youths and a girl singing and dancing to the record playing underneath them. The youths leered over their guitars and the girl took this as her due, it seemed, wobbling her hips at them. Outside the window the rain splashed steadily down and rows of teenage legs, plastic mackintoshes and grotesque hairdos scurried for shelter. Round a table at the back of the cafe three old friends were judiciously sipping frothy coffees out of transparent beakers.

"it's a club, so there are no last orders or anything boring like that."

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'Oh for goodness' sake, Sybil,' said Lady Eylau crossly, 'I know I'm not well up in the affairs of the young, but you are really getting quite divorced from reality. You know, or ought to know, that no nice girls have any money any more; and the ones that should have been nice all sit around listening to incomprehensible gramophone records and smoke disgusting cigarettes called "joints". A peculiar brand name, isn't it, but they're all the rage. I went into Fortnum's only the other day to get a hundred in for the little sherry party I'm giving next month, as they seem to be so popular, only to be told that they didn't stock them. It was probably just as well. Old General Gracenote was telling me that his youngest girl smokes them all day, and they seem to make her even stupider than she normally is. And they smell so nasty, like burning grass. Whatever can they put in them?'

"Oh Christ, come on, baby! It's a free, swinging, wide-open city! "

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The man hung about by the door the way Mendip knew well, trying for that bit of extra nerve to push him across the threshold. Out in the alleyway, the rain fell dark, sweeping across the facade of the Swedish woman's apartment who advertised bondage exercises opposite, gathering on the bonnet of the man's Rolls-Royce. Big business, probably. But you get no credit for it in here. Come on in or fuck off out of it, I don't care which you do. We take three ton a week here whether you buy or go fishing. Now another customer arrived, peeping grimly round the hatchway. Mendip knew him well - a tiny spender on spanky kink. An old hand, he went straight to that box and burrowed his head in it. He had a few wisps of dirty hair. His nails were long: cracked and bent. He looked like a labouring man got up in odds and sods of grimy grot and tat, an old navy-blue coat, single-breasted, pinched at the hips and staggering eyebrows arched in with a Woolworth's make-up pencil, and the black Chaplin moustache above the lip, disdainful of all reality, had been helped along a bit with that too. He seemed to know, and resent, that he was de trop even in the shop, everywhere. God knew what he did for a living. He could just have got by behind a ticket-window at Victoria in the rush-hour, and probably did. Eyeing him, Mendip thought he was on the edge of being turned out of his bedsitter because he was for ever spending all the cash he had on this. He had had his needle stuck in the groove of his seventh year; but most of him was nearly sixty.

everything from sadists to arse-lickers and grasses

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A major function of art is that bores should consider it to be mad; indeed, the challenge in art is that it should remain beyond the control of bores. In other words, art should depict bores as insane - in exactly that way that the controlling bore, by definition, cannot afford to see himself.
The killer effectively shrouds his identity from everybody, including himself - for those who feel blindly that they have something to hide, because they cannot identify what it is, have to create events that they have to hide. Writers of crime fiction spotted this vaguely from time to time; the trouble was that none of it (because there was commerce to be considered, how much would the public take?) went far enough into the killer's mind, so that authors preferred to dramatise his sensationalist exterior, which also excused them from having to analyse it - an error which persists. This has understandably given crime fiction a bad name as far as the serious reader is concerned, in spite of the efforts of certain authors (Thompson, Goodis, Chandler, Himes and Ellroy) to rescue it from this error. To be more exact, the black novel does not rescue crime fiction, but replaces it.

the whole room is screaming with Elias and his Zigzag Jive Flutes

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'Tell you what it is - only you probably wouldn't understand, being a stuck-up ponce and a Chelsea baron - it's all down to Glad having to have it off with ice-creams all the time down to wages when she doesn't want it. You know what it is. Glad and me, we're caught up in this endless grind of her charvering an' me deviating, and she's not so young now, thirty-four. You don't know what it's like, havin' to go on the batter day in an' day out and havin' to open up for 'em all - big ones, thin ones, malts, spades, bubbles, and the queans that beat 'er black an' blue. It's one thing when you're a kid of sixteen but glad, she's a big girl now. Mind, it wasn't like that all the time; time was when she 'ad a right little gaff an' she was the madam an' it was all down to beatin' punters or she'd get bird in from outside to take the wacks for a tenner. But then she got nicked for a carpet and when she got out, of course, the old clients 'ad all scarpered, you know how it is. And that's not all; just the other day she gets nicked along Piccy day before she's due to go in for cat's meat, an' under the new Act that's a pony and she's only got five more days to pay and I don't know where it's going to come from, morrie, and that's straight up and down I don't. And she's twenty-two carat, Glad is; you should've seen how she used to come an' slip me snout when I was over at the ville.'

quite often at snap parties you get this sort of thing happening - after you've had, say, five ampoules and you feel your head swelling like a balloon glass and your heart going like the hammers - you lamp someone, maybe it's a stranger, and you get the feeling you've got to laugh so strong that it's ludicrous and you just let it out because you'd burst otherwise, which is the whole point about snap, I suppose: you just don't give a damn. And laughter like that spreads at snap parties till the gaff's filled with the roar of voices and drinking and glasses breaking and ampoules snapping and over it all this insane laughter, and presently some geezer starts undressing or a fat man goes off on a transvestite kick and comes down wearing Mrs Marengo's floppy hat and doing a Spanish dance on greasy old scotches. But if there's a person there who hasn't been taking it you can get a nasty situation and you want to watch out, when and if you get snapped up for the first time, that you don't hand out too much aggravation and get yourself well thumped. 

This is not the world of loveable rogues

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I just thought that crime novels were crap, you know like Colin Dexter, like crossword puzzles, that I found quite pompous and suddenly there was this book . . . the first thing that hit me was it was so compassionate for this woman who was killed. You know, they’re not normally like that, and such a brilliant description of the fucking bleakness of London and such a strong voice, I was amazed and had had loads of weird nightmares.  And I just never met such a brilliant person before. Derek Raymond. He was so fantastic. So intelligent and, for a man in his sixties, so young. Such an enquiring mind. Raged up . . . almost like Johnny Rotten, actually, that rage that fuelled him and the way articulated it. Almost exactly. They almost used the same phrase, the mistreatment of peoples, what made them fucking angry.  -C. Unsworth

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Noir crime fiction is seen by some as a form of populist agitprop for existentialism. While Camus and Sartre took over the left bank, it was the Noir writers who were on sale in every news-agent. It is only natural to read Raymond’s book as a continuation of this de facto intellectual alliance, but I would argue that Raymond’s take on existentialism is almost diametrically opposed to that of Sartre, Camus, Kafka or Marcel.-Ruthless Culture

new zip of Raymond titles: 
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