Derek Raymond and 'The Black Novel': A Guest Post by Fogus

The British crime writer Derek Raymond, best known for his bleak "Factory" novels, coined the term "Black Novel" in his autobiography The Hidden Files (1999) which describes a challenging strain of fiction. For Raymond, Black Novels are not instances of crime fiction (though many are) but instead a mode of story-telling fusing depictions of systemic rot and brutality with social critique. At their core, they necessarily immerse the reader in the dark side of humanity, and serve as lenses to view the human condition. Black Novels are almost always brutal, but are always compassionate and insist on an empathetic stance towards characters who live outside of the margins of respectability.

The attributes of the Black Novel are four-fold:

- A street-level focus capturing life's raw texture

- Characters' inner depths brought to the forefront

- Social critique woven into depictions of crime, poverty, and oppression

- Written in the language of the street

Raymond places his own works alongside a Black Novel lineage that, despite their strict definition, offer a surprising amount of room for nuance in the way that they focus their societal lenses.

Unsurprisingly, the Factory series fulfills the Black Novel ethos but reader beware, the novels are not for the squeamish. Set against the backdrop of Thatcher-era Britain, they follow an unnamed Detective Sergeant who prowls Fisher-esque dank locales. Violence is ever-present and treated as the stark reality of lives beset by poverty, addiction, and abuse. Through the detective’s grim investigations, Raymond captures the language of the street in all its rawness, giving voice to the disaffected while maintaining a grim and bitter dark-humor throughout. Despite the brutality, the Detective leverages a talent for seeing victims and perpetrators as fully human to administer a meager portion of justice. Raymond crafts a pitiless but empathetic record of social collapse, showing how crime fiction can confront systemic rot while plumbing the depths of empathy. Raymond's Factory series is the purest and most intense examples of the Black Novel, and while I enjoyed them, I now find his expanded list more fascinating still.

The Black Novels listed in Raymond's autobiography form a constellation of works that fulfill the attributes he outlined in vastly different ways. First, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) introduces the wisecracking detective Marlowe in a Los Angeles populated by despicable characters who cross and double-cross each other at every turn. The Big Sleep is probably the most congruous ancestor to the Factory series and is clearly a huge influence on Raymond. Moreover, George Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970) captures the fatalism of working-class criminals that ritualistically engage in power-plays for fleeting gain. The character Eddie Coyle is as Factory-like a criminal as could be written, and his analogue is found throughout the Factory novels. 

Similarly, Charles Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) attempts to explore the gothic underside of Victorian respectability in its unfinished form. While it's unclear how the novel would have progressed had Dickens lived to complete it, it's clear that John Jasper would have felt at home in a Factory novel. The last pure Factory-esque precursor is the titular character in Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1866). The novel explores bourgeois respectability tainted by infidelity and betrayal, and inevitably spirals toward a ruthlessly macabre ending. While the novel lacks any supernatural elements, some ghastly hallucinations are used to great effect in the story and adopted by Raymond in his posthumously published pre-Factory novel Nightmare in the Street.

Moving further afield, George Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1939) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) both dissect the grinding effects of class, money, futility, and thwarted aspiration. Bitter, acerbic humor saturates both novels and hons a sharp edge to the former's theme of nostalgia and the latter's 1930's prefiguration of "turn on, tune in, drop out." On the other hand, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Albert Camus' The Stranger both depict violence in an uncannily poetic, detached fashion. This detachment is used to great effect in Raymond's Factory novels, albeit ratcheted up to even more extremes. 

Next, Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust (1939) follows a young artist as he navigates a Depression-era Hollywood steeped in affectation and spectacle. While Raymond's novels use street denizens as its tools of social critique, West's novel targets the "American Dream" by focusing its lens onto the Hollywood fringe. Finally, Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) absurdly depicts the crushing banality of bureaucratic inscrutability. Kafka (I would add Borges and Ligotti also) was a master of what I would call contraptional fiction which is a technique where a writer builds an absurd conceptual machine in their stories, and runs their characters through it in a way that adheres to the machine's internal logic. The Factory novels operate in a similar way by building a grotesque meat-grinder for its poor characters.

Since finding Raymond's description of the Black Novel I've tried to find other examples of the sub-genre that Raymond didn't list, but have met with little success. However, one that stands out so far is Horace McCoy's novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935). The story follows an economically strapped couple participating in a Depression-era dance marathon. The sardonic closing line echoed in the book's title left me breathless and would have fit hand in glove with Factory novel dialogue. The search for more Black Novels continues, but if Derek Raymond was right the world will always provide the raw material for them. Indubitably there are more out there waiting to be found and more waiting to be written.

(Fogus)