"He Died With His Eyes Open" by Derek Raymond

I haven't posted a book review since July? Is it possible that I haven't finished a novel since then? Hmm. Well, anyway. About this one. For Christmas, Rudolph, Elf #1, Elf #2, Santa and Mrs. Claus, with the help of Meredith, filled my stocking with Derek Raymond's five Factory series novels. I had put them on my Amazon wishlist after hearing about them at a crime fiction conference. Derek Raymond is the pseudonym of British author Robin Cook. This novel was first published in 1984 and tells about an investigation led by a detective sergeant in the Department of Unexplained Deaths. This is the department that deals with all the "unimportant" deaths of lowly little people. I think the department is purely fictional as well as my British friend has never heard of such a thing. One of the notable things about this series is that the first person detective sergeant narrator remains nameless throughout. The other characters are identified by name, but he never is. In this first investigation, he is trying to solve the murder of a man who turns out to be an aspiring writer and who has recorded many of his thoughts on cassette tapes. The transcripts of these recordings are quoted extensively throughout the text. So much so that at times it can be easy to confuse the thoughts of the two men. This seems to be the author's intention and as the novel proceeds, the detective gets more and more drawn into the deceased man's world and mindset. One line of the deceased's that amused me is: "Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap" (168). As in a typical hard-boiled thriller, a significant amount of slang is employed. The catch is that as it's British slang, it's occasionally opaque to the American that I am. I have, however, figured out that a "grass" is a snitch. I'm looking forward to expanding my vocabulary further as I continue with the series which is a welcome distraction from my "serious" work reading.