How the Dead Live

Can you murder for love?

In the third novel of Derek Raymond's acclaimed Factory Series, the nameless detective visits a decrepit country house to look into the case of a disappeared woman.

It is, as always for the Detective Sergeant, a deeply unsettling investigation of love and damnation. The woman's husband seems to love her entirely. And yet he seems reluctant to find her, preferring to hide in a house that resembles the set of a horror film. Meanwhile other cops are getting in the way of the Sergeant and he's making new enemies on the force.

With growing desperation and his trademark sense of enraged compassion, the Sergeant fights to uncover a murderer not by following analytical procedure, but by doing the most idfficult thing of all: understanding why crimes are committed.

Derek Raymond was the pseudonym of British writer Robert Cook, who was born in London in 1931. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton and rejected a life of privilege for a life of adventure. He traveled the world, living in Paris at the Beat Hotel and on New York’s seedy Lower East Side, smuggled artworks into Amsterdam, and spent time in a Spanish prison for publicly making fun of Franco. Finally, he landed back in London, working in the lower echelons of the Kray Brothers’ crime syndicate laundering money, organizing illegal gambling, and setting up insurance scams. He eventually took to writing—first as a pornographer, but then as an increasingly serious novelist, writing about the desperate characters and experiences he’d known in London’s underground. His work culminated in the Factory novels, landmarks that have led many to consider? him the founding father of British noir. He died in London in 1993.