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A review by guiltyfeat
He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond, James Sallis
3.0
He Died With His Eyes Open is the first of what became known as the Factory series of detective novels where the Factory is the ugly grey police station in London that houses the anonymous narrator.
The book starts, like all good detective stories, with the discovery of a body. It's 1984 and London is an unforgiving landscape of unemployment and violence. Our detective is physically sickened by the amount of violence that has been perpetrated against this particular victim who appears to have endured it all without closing his eyes.
The case is not a promising one and several times the detective is mocked by his superior, Inspector Bowman, for not wrapping things up quickly and seeking promotion with easy to solve headline cases.
Instead the detective devotes hours to a set of recordings left behind by the murdered Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland. The recordings tell of a disappointing man who has been abandoned by his wife and child and left to drink too much and seek love and companionship in places he had better left undiscovered.
The detective chases down all the available leads and immerses himself deeper into Staniland's life that is healthy. Rather than being solved the crime seems to fester like an untreated boil until lanced.
Throughout the telling there is an oppressive sense of despair, futility and menace which rings true from my own memories of the 80s. In this week of the death of Margaret Thatcher, I have been trying to out into words the sense of hopelessness that she presided over. This grim novel written contemporaneously perfectly captures the spirit of the time.
It's a hard book to like. It's frequently foulmouthed and brutally frank about sex. The violence is appalling and simultaneously detached. I think it's a great snapshot of its time and I may well dig up the subsequent Factory books just to see where the no-name detective goes from here.
The book starts, like all good detective stories, with the discovery of a body. It's 1984 and London is an unforgiving landscape of unemployment and violence. Our detective is physically sickened by the amount of violence that has been perpetrated against this particular victim who appears to have endured it all without closing his eyes.
The case is not a promising one and several times the detective is mocked by his superior, Inspector Bowman, for not wrapping things up quickly and seeking promotion with easy to solve headline cases.
Instead the detective devotes hours to a set of recordings left behind by the murdered Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland. The recordings tell of a disappointing man who has been abandoned by his wife and child and left to drink too much and seek love and companionship in places he had better left undiscovered.
The detective chases down all the available leads and immerses himself deeper into Staniland's life that is healthy. Rather than being solved the crime seems to fester like an untreated boil until lanced.
Throughout the telling there is an oppressive sense of despair, futility and menace which rings true from my own memories of the 80s. In this week of the death of Margaret Thatcher, I have been trying to out into words the sense of hopelessness that she presided over. This grim novel written contemporaneously perfectly captures the spirit of the time.
It's a hard book to like. It's frequently foulmouthed and brutally frank about sex. The violence is appalling and simultaneously detached. I think it's a great snapshot of its time and I may well dig up the subsequent Factory books just to see where the no-name detective goes from here.