Product details
Biographical note
Derek Raymond was born Robin Cook in 1931. His novels include A State of Denmark, The Crust on its Uppers, I Was Dora Suarez and How the Dead Live, which was made into a film. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton aged sixteen and spent much of his early career among criminals and was employed at various times as a pornographer, organiser of illegal gambling, money launderer, pig-slaughterer and minicab driver. He died in London in 1994.A sulphurous mixture of ferocious violence and high-flown philosophy.
Prospect
A mixture of thin-lipped Chandleresque backchat and of idioms more icily subversive.
Observer
Deadbeat, downbeat but thoroughly believable, and evoked with the scary precision of a scalpel slicing through flesh... extreme, but like nothing else you'll ever read
- Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times
I cannot think of another writer so obsessed with the skull beneath the skin.
The Times
Raymond writes with a stomach-churning exactness about murder, madness and mutilation.
The Times
If you think of the act of writing as a game of chicken between the author and his talent, then Derek Raymond is one author who achieves his ecstasy by sailing off cliffs. Everything about I Was Dora Suarez shrieks of the joy and pain of going too far.
New York Times