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)

A Peak District Mystery: 'Saraband for Conquerors' by Phyllis Carroll

From the city of Sheffield in the southernmost tip of Yorkshire there is a minor railway line, an unexpected survival, which makes its way through small village stations and halts, into the rugged terrain of the Peak District in Derbyshire. I would sometimes take this route to visit a friend who lives in that region, and at the ticket office I would ask for a return to Hope. Wouldn’t we all like that, I used to think, but it was the name of the village nearest to him with a station.       

The official description was in fact Hope (Derbyshire): there are two opportunities to find Hope on Britain’s railways, the other being Hope (Flintshire) in North Wales. The trains to Hope (Derbyshire) were never very full: there might be a dozen passengers at the hours I travelled.  Some of the waiting rooms and old station-master’s offices had white scalloped woodwork like 17^th century lace collars, but mostly there were only platforms.

So when I came upon a book that begins with a journey on this very line, going out from the un-named but obvious city into the empty country, it at once aroused my interest. It was grandly named Saraband for Conquerors by Phyllis Carroll (1950: the title is a quotation from Conrad): and I see from the pencilled price that I paid £1 for it. The author had also written Quintessence of Dust, five years earlier in 1945, but there are no other books by her, at least under this name. I have not been able to find a copy of this earlier book or any information about her.

The torn dustwrapper was loosely enclosed inside, and it announced, ‘A tense drama set in the Peak District’, with a picture of an improbable grey crag with a Gothic castle perched on top of it and a silver river rushing below. This was a somewhat romantic depiction of the real Peveril Castle, a Norman fortress which does indeed stand high above the village of Castleton, where the heroine goes to stay.

I like stories that begin with train journeys, and I like stories where a stranger goes to remote country they do not know and encounters mystery there (I have written a few myself). Sometimes they have been told to have a break or a change of scene or a rest by a wise old doctor or colleague. Usually the stranger is a writer, a scholar, or a dedicated public official, and I find them agreeable company. This book was on the face of it in that sort of vein, but with a difference.

The young woman protagonist in the novel, Linda, is a poet and an essayist and she has indeed been advised to get away from it all by her doctor, to forestall a nervous breakdown: but she leaves behind, not the study or the common room or the Whitehall office, but a placid husband, infant daughter and interfering mother-in-law.

The poet alights at Hope, and makes her way to an old inn where she is to stay. The young rustic chambermaid who takes her up to her room tells her: ‘there’s some rum goings-on in these out-of-the-way places’ (I am very glad to hear this) and adds that out-of-season, once the cheery hikers and beer-drinkers of summer have gone, ‘only the queer ones is left’. Everyone at the hotel, she avers, is either crazy or shady, and she is not sure which is worse.

As a blandishment for the establishment, her remarks might be thought somewhat lacking in allure, and scarcely reassuring for a convalescent with nerves, but they at least offer the reader some possibilities of ominous doings.

One of those doubtless labelled by the chambermaid as a ‘queer’ one is a bitter, abrasive young man, who still suffers nightmares from his service in the Second World War. T E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is quoted, about how the old in charge after the war betrayed the young men who fought it (the First World War, in his case). The poet is sympathetic. We seem to be moving towards the ‘holiday romance’ genre. There is also a rather chilly woman artist who seems to have an enigmatic background.

But the protagonist also soon encounters rough types and villainous activities in the hills and begins to wonder which of her fellow guests are implicated. There are seemingly uncanny dimensions involving strange lights and noises too. It’s all a rather bold melee, mingling the romance and thriller genres with snippets of psychology and literary and artistic dimensions too. In the main, without giving too much away, this is closest to those crime thrillers which make use of the darkly mysterious but without fully committing to the supernatural, similarly to some of the work of Gladys Mitchell. I had hoped for more supernatural aspects given the Gothic set-up, and the ending is rather conventional: but it’s a hectic, crammed sort of book, well-realised in its craggy setting and with plenty of eerie, vivid scenes. 

(Mark Valentine)

Erik Satie Starts His Own Church: A New Study by Sam Kunkel

Sam Kunkel, scholar of Symbolist literature and editor of Faunus, the journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen, has just announced pre-orders for his study Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything—Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor (First to Knock Books & Records), due to be published in October.

In fin-de-siecle Paris, the 26 year old Satie, feeling his highly original, prismatic piano work unappreciated, decided to launch his own autocephalous church instead. Announcing his bohemian apartment was now an abbey, Satie issued proclamations and hurled maledictions on his artistic and magical rivals, in a campaign bizarrely mingling the spiritual and the satirical. This remarkable episode in Satie’s career was a prophetic precursor of Surrealism and its rituals and banishings.  

Sam Kunkel told me what had drawn him to this subject:  

'I suppose what appealed to me first an foremost about the project was the humour of it. Satie’s letters and writing are incredibly funny, but it’s a very wry, nearly impenetrable sort of humor that could pass for sincerity. When I looked into it further, I saw that his acerbic letters of excommunication, despite their ludicrous framing, rested upon a bedrock of sincerity due to what he perceived as a lack of recognition. I thought it would be interesting to not only present them, but to flesh out the context at the same time, to show both sides of the coin rather than simply presenting the letters as isolated objects where they could be simply passed off as the scribbling of an eccentric pianist.' 

 The publisher notes: ‘Drawing upon a multitude of firsthand sources—including documents held in the Erik Satie archives in Caen—the book includes new English translations of all known Church publications and correspondence by Satie as the Parcener. Facsimilie translations of Satie’s Church publications are reproduced herein as well, capturing, for the first time in English, the design and typography of the original productions.’

For orders from the publisher's website only, the book is accompanied by a limited-edition flexi-disc recording of Satie’s Leit-motiv du Panthée performed, as intended, as an accompaniment to a reading of Joséphin Péladan’s Le Panthée. 

(Mark Valentine)