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How the Dead Live

Factory Series Book 3

Part of Melville International Crime

”More Chandleresque than Chandler… [Raymond] could write beautifully…and, more importantly, what he is writing about in this novel are nothing less than the important subjects any writer can deal with: mortality and death.” —Will Self

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 difficult thing of all: understanding why crimes are committed.

DEREK RAYMOND was the pseudonym adopted by Robin Cook, a well-born Englishman who spent a great portion of his life in France. Turning his back on Eton and all his birth class implied, he worked for years at whatever menial jobs or scams came to him, writing all the while, learning the secret life of London the way a cab driver must learn its streets. His life’s work culminated in the Factory novels, now seen as clear landmarks in British fiction.

Praise for Derek Raymond’s Factory Series

“[The Factory series is ] majestically gloomy.” —Richard Price, New York Times Book Review

“Unrelenting existentialist noir—as if the most brutal of crime fictions had been recast by Sartre, Camus, or Ionesco while retaining something of the intimate wise-guy tone of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“It’s one of the darkest and most surrealistically hard-boiled things I’ve ever read. The detective is at least as scary as the murderers he’s chasing.” —William Gibson, bestselling author of Neuromancer

“No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books.” —James Sallis, author of Drive

“The Factory novels are certainly the most viscerally imagined of their kind that I’ve ever read, or reread multiple times.  Derek Raymond wrote in a supposedly escapist genre in a manner that precluded any hope of escape.” —Scott Phillips, bestselling author of The Ice Harvest

“There remains no finer writing – crime or otherwise – about the state of Britain.”  —David Peace, author of ”The Red Riding Quartet.”

“Carve Derek Raymond’s name into the literary pantheon. He is one of the rare authors who seek to understand evil, ferret out the darkness in human nature, and blast Noir fiction out of the genre ghetto and into Literature. His nameless detective’s quest through the bleak streets gets under your skin. Amazing, painful and brilliant.” —Cara Black, bestselling author of Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

“Beyond hard boiled.” —Patton Oswalt

“Hellishly bleak and moving.” —New Statesman

“Powerful and mesmerizing…. With spare, often lyrical prose, Raymond digs beneath society’s civilized veneer…” —Publishers Weekly

“A crackerjack of a crime novel, unafraid to face the reality of man’s and woman’s evil.” —Evening Standard

“The beautiful, ruthless simplicity of the Factory novels is that Raymond rewrites the basic ethos of the classic detective novel.” —Charles Taylor, The Nation

“A bizarre mixture of Chandleresque elegance… and naked brutality” —The Daily Telegraph

“I cannot think of another writer so obsessed with the skull beneath the skin.” —The Times (London)

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