Backlisted - A State of Denmark by Derek Raymond

Episode Date: December 27, 2016

In a bid to get our fear and creeping dread about the state of the world in early for 2017, author Travis Elborough (A Walk in The Park, The Bus We Loved, and The Long Player Goodbye) joins us to discuss A State of Denmark, the dystopian vision of England by Derek Raymond (a/k/a Robin Cook). Worst. Happy New Year. Programme. Ever. Enjoy!Timings: (may differ due to adverts)3'00 - Food For All Seasons by Oliver Rowe9'30 - Good Evening, Mrs.Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes18'44 - A State of Denmark by Derek Raymond* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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would be peculiar was she cremated or not? she was I don't know how I know that but I do know that you know that she was cremated I do when I get into a

very large I really get into it a slim volume of were they embalmed or something? I'd like to find out away we go I do. When I get into a very large, I really get into them. A slim volume of... Are they embalmed or something? I'd like to find out. Away we go. Are we?

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that blows the dust off those old tomes at the back of the bookshelf. Once more, we're gathered around the kitchen table of the Scandi-styled Islington office of our sponsors Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to make great books. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. I'm Andy Miller, author of the Year of Reading Dangerously and joining us today is Travis Elber. Travis has written books and films about London, London buses, the London Bridge, LP records, the seaside, municipal parks. In fact you've written two books this year haven't you you've published two books this year a walk in the park which i interviewed you about a thing and also an atlas of improbable places indeed expanding the horizons from the london bus

your london obsession exactly yeah capital punishment were. Oh, capital punishment, yes. And you, Travis Elbrough, with your London obsession, have chosen a book for us today called A State of Denmark by one of the great London writers, I suppose. And figures, I suppose. Figures, I suppose, yeah. Legend. 50, 60 years, Derek Raymond. Robin Cook.

Robin Cook. We'll get on to that this was published I'm presuming as a Robin Cook it was published in 1970 he's kind of wrote to Damascus I'm going to reinvent myself as the great exponent of

English Noir but we should also issue a warning to you if you're listening to this after Christmas looking back at the historic year 2016 with all the joys that it's brought to us all this is quite a bleak

book about quite a topical subject so we'll come on to that in a minute Is that sort of warning if you're feeling at all delicate or slightly troubled about the future, this book is not going to help. Even though it was written in the 1970s. It's a warning from history.

Before we get on to that, John, what have you been reading this week? I thought, given that we're going to do something noir, noir, noir, I thought I would, a book that I've been enjoying a lot, and I have to say a lot this year, I'm not really an inveterate reader of new cookbooks. I find, like most people, there are just too many of them, and most of them are sort of form over content, style over substance. But there's one that I've really enjoyed this year by Oliver Rowe

called Food for All Seasons. And, of course, it's that hoariest of old chestnuts now, the seasonal cookbook. But actually, why I like it is that it is lightly, as they say, illustrated. It's a beautiful bit of design. Is it favour? It's favour. It's a beautiful bit of design. Is it Faber? It's Faber. It's a beautiful bit of a design,

designed by Here Design, Kaz Hildebrand's team, who did Letters of Note. It's very, for a cookbook, really, really, really well written. It's like an actual book. I can see it from here. So it's like an actual book.

There's no photography and it's mostly text, right? And Oliver is really interesting. He is a chef. He trained at the River Cafe, and he had a restaurant. In fact, he had two restaurants, a restaurant and a cafe called Constam, which was named after his, I'm going to have to forget which, but I think it was his grandfather.

It was in King's Cross, and he tried to source as much of his ingredients as he could within the M25. tried to source as much of his ingredients as he could within the M25. And threaded throughout the seasonal recipes is the story of how that restaurant was opened and then eventually closed. I don't know why I want elegiac in my cookbook, but there is a sort of... And it's very, very frank. It's lots of good stories about running a restaurant. But the stuff that I enjoy is just he's really, really good at know if you want to know how to cook japanese knotweed for example and let's

be honest who of us has not looked at japanese knotweed and wondered whether there isn't a something more useful than we can do than calling the council and getting them to yeah incinerate it with paraffin then there are there are ways of cooking it in this in this book such as well ah sorry sorry as as i asked you the question steamed and steamed in with a little a little bit of steamed in with aioli i think is it was one of the suggestions no not at all poisonous i'm i'm trying to find it wild garlic aioli that's another thing that i i saw there was a recipe which i thought ms jean rees would approve of which was cherries poached in perno that looked very nice

is that one of those recipes like poached peris in perno, those throw away cherries drink perno I'm going to nail that I'm going to nail that listen to this, this is quite good for a cookbook, this is the opening of the November creeps, dark comes early But listen to this, this is quite good for a cookbook, this is the opening

of the... November creeps, dark comes early and melancholy catches up with us desolate and vagrant cold settles in like a squatter unwanted and unwelcome undercover, winter slides near etching itself on the landscape a cloud passing the sun

bright days punctuate the gloom to deceive us, making us believe that all is crisp and well, but all the while the leaf mould thickens, slowly rotting down in the edges of the garden, slippery on flagstones and harbouring decay. I like the look and feel in the mouth of the word November and have always felt it should be held in respect. It ushers in the winter, a stark transitional month, the business end of autumn. The key events in November, Bonfire Night and Remembrance Day, set a maudlin tone.

In Mexico, the second is the Day of the Dead, so we're not alone in feeling its morbidity. It's quite good in the cookbook, isn't it? One is fun, it ain't. What does it say for January? Because most people listening to this are going to listen in January, aren't they? In January, well pointed out there, Andy. Let's look.

January, I think, is good. What have we got here that we've got? Cocktails. Excellent. Of course. Spirits, beer, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, Seville oranges, of course. Marmalade-making Matt is nodding in approval. Seville oranges, beetroot chocolate, Somerset brandy,

swede, haggis, persimmons, and cauliflower. So it's quite eclectic. I'm just doing a check on... He's got some very good... He has a really good Negroni recipe in here. One we sourced with an independent local gin. Good on Bloody Marys. It's just... I just find it's one of those things,

if one is the sort of person who has books piled next to one's toilet... LAUGHTER What? ..as I do. Here's the Japanese rotweed, it's in March. I'm going to find, I'm going to nail this now. I feel bad.

Do you think that this kind of trend or liking for books like this that go through the seasons came from Nigel Slater and the Kitchen Diaries, or was it before that? I think, to be honest, to go back to those... Jane Grigson did things like this, didn't she? Yeah, and there's a book by Sibyl Kapoor called Seasonal, which is at least 20 years old. I mean, to be honest, any good chef has always cooked seasonal

because you use the best produce. And the stuff in here I like, been, I mean, to be honest, any good chef has always cooked seasoned. Because you use the best produce. And the stuff in here I like, like, you know, if you're going to eat herring, eat herring now when it's fat and at its best, you know. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff. I just think it's, what I like about it is it's just a little bit more, he goes a little bit further and he's got interesting recipes for things that, you know, a lot of seasonal cookbooks, as it were, your Jamie or even your Nigella, don't have. So, yeah, I suppose it's well written and it's slightly melancholy.

Which I find, perhaps as I get older, well, maybe it's the gout. Obviously, I've been looking off the boo been obviously I've been looking I've been off the booze and I've been looking searching backwards and forwards for interesting things to do if I walked into a shop

and I saw a cookbook a nicely produced cookbook on a table and there was a quote on the front that said well written and slightly melancholy

I'd buy that that's fine it is possibly that it's just maybe made for you and me. I think so, yeah. That might be the thing. Past the knotweed. Cooking with no friends. One is inevitable.

While you're... Perhaps we should... Shall I move on to what I've been reading? While you read... Will I try and find the fucking killer passage on the Japanese not-wee? What, Andy, have you been reading this week? John, I have been reading a brilliant collection of short stories, which was suggested to me by our former guest, Lissa Evans.

And then when I said that I was reading it on Twitter, our former guest, Lloyd Shepard, popped up and said, that is the book that I wanted to do if I hadn't done The Riddle of the Sands. To which you said... To which I said nothing, John. Was it good, Lord?

Dang, Navid. It's called Good Evening, Mrs Craven by a writer called Molly Pantadowns, published by Persephone. She must have had a hellish score chart. Indeed. Indeed, because she wrote for the New Yorker for 50 years. Really? For 50 years, she filed some incredible number of pieces,

and she's most famous in the States for writing for, I'm going to say, 40 years or something, the Letter from London. That was her column. So sort of like an Alistair Cooke kind of reverse. And she wrote that all the way through the war years and post-war and into the 1980s. She goes as far as the 1980s, I think.

But she had an exclusivity deal with the new yorker which meant that she was only published in the new yorker was rarely published in british magazines with the result that she's extremely well known in the states for writing about britain but very little known over here and good evening mrs craven is a book of short stories that she wrote for the New Yorker. And anyone who listens to this podcast regularly will know people who wrote short stories for the New Yorker feature here a lot. She wrote stories for the New Yorker which are similar in some ways to Sylvia Townsend Warner or Elizabeth Taylor. There are 20 in this collection and they have been edited and arranged chronologically with the effect that although you can dip into it as a book of short stories

if you read it from cover to cover it's like reading a brilliant sort of episodic novel about the story of the home front during the Second World War. God, how brilliant. And it was republished by Persephone in 1999, since which time it has sold steadily. And I'm just going to read you the opening of one of the late stories called The Danger, which will give you a flavour of it. It's sort of that brilliant mixture of stoicism and humour. So this is The Danger, first published 8th July 1944. Mrs Dudley's evacuees had gone at last

and an almost supernatural hush had seemed to descend upon the house and garden the moment they left. As joyfully as cats plunging back into a dustbin, they had returned to London, without expressing gratitude or regret, without giving a shadow of a sign that four years of living in the midst of what Mrs Dudley called Beauty, with a capital B, had made the slightest impression on them. The ruds had remained sturdily impervious to beauty right up to the last. On a

morning when Mrs Dudley's magnolias were bursting wide in the sunshine and patches of frosty alpine blues and yellows were beginning to dapple the rockery, where Mr Dudley's terrible old gardening hat could be seen slowly moving, Mrs Rudd had stood gazing out of the window with an eye only too clearly nostalgic for a good Woolworths. Ever so quiet, isn't it, she had said, staring contemptuously at a gentian. Might be miles and miles from everything, really, instead of only ten minutes' walk from the village. That's what we like

about the house, Mrs Dudley had replied, to which Mrs Rudd had said forgivingly, well, everyone to his taste, of course, and flung the lipstick stub of her cigarette out into Beauty's face before getting on with her lackadaisical pushing of a mop over the hall parquet. It had been part of the agreement when the Rudds arrived that Mrs Rudd, besides keeping their own quarters clean, should assist about the house. Both these clauses, Mrs Dudley had speedily discovered, were mere light-hearted figures of speech, for Mrs Rudd was a slut. The words seemed to have been invented for her. Now that the Rudds had gone,

now that the beautiful, incredible silence had settled down over a house empty of strangers again, the full horror of Mrs Rudd could be relished, like the details of an appalling illness mercifully passed. I mean, it's so beautifully

written. And so, the other thing to say about this book, Good Evening Mrs Craven, The Wartime Stories of Molly Panther Downs, is that I bought it from the Persephone Bookshop in Lamb's Conduit Street, here in London, where I had never been before. Have you ever been there? Yeah, it's so strange. Isn't it great?

Well, I've never been to the Persephone Bookshop before, and I absolutely loved it. As I said on Twitter, it's like the happiest shopping experience I've had for years. It's great. I mean, everyone in there is, first of all, utterly charming. Yeah. They're very interested in what they sell,

and because everyone around this table has at one point or another been a bookseller, I believe. You know, they're so on top of the stock... Not mad, apparently. They have 120 books that they need to know about. And, like, a few more that they sell on top of that. And I had a chat with... Persephone was founded by Nicola Bowman. Nicola Bowman was sitting in the shop...

Isn't that great? ..talking to a representative of a certain high street book chain about a certain missing invoice, which I listened I introduced myself to Nicola and I said the thing is I was listening to that conversation having thought many years ago I would have been the person on the other side of the line

receiving that justifiably indignant phone call but it made me think about what a brilliant exercise Persephone is as a publisher to have carved out a niche and rediscovered these writers like dorothy whipple and margarita lasky and winifred watson uh betty miller no relation uh they've done it they've produced beautiful books they've

got great taste and they've done it you know they haven't just sort of flounced in and flounced out like a lot of publishing initiatives sort of start with a they've really done it seriously and they i mean i think it takes a long time to build a to build a kind of a reputation for i mean they obviously when they launched their nickel is incredibly well connected and they've so they got a lot of there was a lot of publicity at the time but actually they've totally delivered on it i mean i think they're i think they're in i just think they're admirable i I know, you know, it's that thing, isn't it? Like I hoped back in the day you could have said about Harville, you know,

you may not have loved every book that they published, but you could see that every book that was being published was worth publishing and had a... And it was that thing we were talking about the other week where it's like, maybe it's me. If I'm not enjoying this book and it's published by Persephone, maybe it's my problem. Yeah.

And that's as good as you can get for an imprint, isn't it? Well, I can't believe that... This is probably one of my favourite books that I've read this year, and I can't believe, having read it, that it won't come up at some point in the year ahead, just in terms of I can totally see another potential guest recommending it and we'll get to talk about it at length. John, I think you haven't read it, have you?

I haven't read it, no. Even that little snippet there is just... Again, I think it's that rich seam of storytelling that's come out of the middle years of last century, often by women, that we again and again keep coming up on this podcast. Not today, I assume. It's a different kind of, a different scene.

But this is, I mean, so yeah, I think it would, it sounds like a, I know it's a bit early for us to say it sounds like a backlisted kind of book, but that's what it sounds like to me. Can I just, before we go on to Derek Roman, can I just kill the Japanese knotweed that you said? Japanese knotweed. Interestingly, as they say.

Japanese knotweed. Rhubarb is from the same family as Fallopia japonica, or Japanese knotweed, which can be cooked in almost in the same way as rhubarb. Oh. Note to Matt. In the past, I've made some pretty nice jams and compotes with it.

The flavour is less delicate and the texture isn't as refined. But whereas rhubarb is a welcome addition to any garden, Japanese knotweed is so difficult to get rid of and so pervasive it's illegal to dispose of it in normal garden waste. It's also flagged up on house surveys and has

a negative impact on property value. The more of it we eat the better. My bit of Japanese knotweed law is the reason it's so prevalent is it won the Royal Horticultural Society's gold medal in 1864 as the most fabulous plant. It had beautiful white blossom and it grew really quickly and it was architectural and structurally really useful. And so there were clippings all over, going at, you know, kind of black market clippings going all over the country.

Once again, you know, our imperfect understanding of the natural world. Time now for an advert. Summer's here and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Time now for an advert. Yes. A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details.

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that grows like wildfire, that then becomes very unwelcome. Yes, tending one's vineyard. Let's talk about Derek Roman's fascist dystopia. The state of Denmark. Travis. Yes. You. What the hell were you thinking, Travis?

You come here. You chose this book. I did. And I found a thing. This book is called The State of Denmark by Derek Raymond. It was written in the 1960s. Late 60s. Late 60s.

Published 1970. Yeah. It imagines Britain in 1980, I think I'm right in saying. It imagines Britain in 1980, I think I'm right in saying. But it imagines basically a dystopian Britain under the boot heel of a relatively avuncular and media-friendly fascist dictator. We felt it was very 2016, didn't we? But the key is it's a populist who kind of moves sideways into fascism.

Starts out in that sort of... Paternalistic, kind of benign idea. Then just slightly forgets to hold any more elections. The thing I wanted to say, to tie into what we were saying at the beginning about issuing the public warning about this, is that you recommended this

book to our former guest, Rachel Cook, who wrote about it in her Shelf Life column in The Observer. And she said, perfectly accurately, I can't in all honesty recommend it if you are desperately seeking to escape current events, but if you want to read something that seems now to have been chillingly prescient, this is just the thing.

When did you first encounter this book? Can you remember? I encountered this particular one via Cathy Unsworth, who knew Derekrick robin very well yeah and she did an event about it uh about maybe about seven or so years ago at bishopsgate institute um for some reason or other she picked this particular book and was talking about it i and i sort of bought it immediately after that and read it very rapidly then. But it's always kind of stayed with me. And with the Brexit vote, shall we say, somehow or other it just popped back into my head. So I kind of pulled it off the shelf and reread it.

And what did you think coming back to it now? Did you think this is... The thing about Derek Raymond in lots of respects is he's actually a very contemporary novel in the sense that all of his books are grounded in his own actualities, his own time and place. He himself worked or ran a kind of

vineyard in Tuscany, so this is based on some of his own experience. He spent most of the 60s and went bush and went... Exactly. And that was one of the things, having read a couple of the other The Factory series, this great noir series, I guess the sensibilities are linked, but it's very different.

And A, I didn't know he'd written this, and I certainly didn't know that quite a big chunk of this book is set in Italy. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's actually quite important, about the idea about fascism as well. The localities are really deep in it. I mean, the book is divided into two halves.

You have the first half, I mean, it's a character called Richard Watt, who's the main narrator figure of the book, who is an ex-journalist who has wrote about politics and has been blacklisted essentially by this new jobling government, this government of this benign dictatorship. And so because he can't work as a journalist anymore, he sort of drifts to Italy with his partner, Magna Carson. They're not married and he is fearful about the future

to the extent where she wants them to have a child and he refuses to kind of accede to that. So right at the beginning of the book, there's a sense of something ominous in the future. And really, the first half of the book is about their life in Tuscany. Shall I just read, let me read the blurb on the back of this copy, because you're right, it's a book of two halves. That first half is set in Tuscany and is very much the sort of existential struggle of the Derek Raymond figure

to make sense of his life there, right, in relation to his life in Britain. Anyway, this is what it says on the back of the most recent edition. Serpent's Tale reissued in 2007, I think. Yeah, and I've got one here from 94, so they put out in masque noir, but I think this was the first time it had been republished since 1970. Okay, cool.

And it would have been published under his original name, which is Robin Cook. And indeed, he was still published as Robin Cook in France. Did you know that? Really? That the Derek Raymond books were published as Robin Cook in France, and he was very popular in France. He was Chevalier d'Honneur.

Indeed. Anyway, this is the blurb. Here we go. It is the 1960s. England has become a dictatorship governed by a sly ruthless... That's actually wrong, isn't it? It's the 1980s, not the 1960s. Well, it's amorphous, the time, really.

You say that. There's a giveaway at one point where he says he dates it as 15 years after X. That's 1980, right? Anyway, so it is the 1960s. Sick. England has become a dictatorship governed by a sly, ruthless politician called Jobling. All non-whites have been deported, the English Times is the only newspaper, and people live in dread of nightly curfews and secret police.

Richard Watt used all his journalistic talents to expose Jobling before he came to power. Now in exile in a farmhouse amid the cruel heat of the Italian countryside, Watt cultivates his vineyards. His remote rural idyll is shattered by the arrival of a government emissary from London. Derek Raymond's skill is to make all too plausible the transition from complacent democracy to dictatorship in a country preoccupied by consumerism and susceptible to media spin. First published in 1970,

Raymond's brilliant satire is as dark and frightening as ever. That's quite a good blurb, I think. Yeah, pretty good. It's interesting, isn't it? Satire, satire. I don't know. Is it satire? I think it's a bit I think he's engaging

It's in a clear tradition of which obviously 1984 is Yeah, it's a dystopia, I mean Robbie Cook, aka Derek Raymond, like Orwell went to Eton and actually wrote quite enthusiastically about the fact that both he and Orwell hated Eton

with a particular venom. And I think he certainly venerated Orwell in that respect. I mean, it's dystopian, certainly. But I think it's often like lots of... As I said, the idea of him being a contemporary writer is that he is responding in part to both the situation in the world, i.e. this is the era of Enoch Powell and the Rivers of Blood speeches. You have the emergence of Enoch Powell and the Rivers of Blood speeches.

You have the emergence of the National Front in Britain, which he clearly, by this time, because he was living abroad, would have only really encountered via newspaper reports. So there's an element where he's getting some of that information while removed. I think the other key element about this book, which relates to the earlier Robin Cook novels and his own rather rackety existence as a uh an enabler shall we say of gangland london is that he had had moved he had moved broad for reasons of health shall we shall we say to remove himself from certain people in certain

situations so the idea of this character, Richard Watt, being in Italy and suddenly this emissary from London arriving and the second half of the book, without giving too much away, is about the process of how he ends up embroiled in the dictatorship, I think has a huge grain of truth about it, about probably his own state of mind, about the idea of living slightly in fear and in exile and who might come

and get you robin cook as well was we've talked about um the book kieran's pin book jumping jack flash on this podcast about david litvinoff and clearly robin cook moved exactly moved in those circles right moved in the kind of soho craze litvin off lucian freud colony rooms falling out of pubs and into razor blades yeah kind of yeah yeah existence yeah i mean it's the golden age of boho soho i mean he he describes there are two pivotal points in his writing career the first he says i mean he he goes to Spain for part of the... He originally wants to be a poet. He has ambitions to be a poet.

And then he comes back to London from America, I think, in 1960. And that's when he starts knocking about with gangsters. And it's a period where somehow the gangland and the aristocracy sort of meet in this sort of clubland culture. And he's sort of a front for various fraudulent campaigns. And through that process, he sort of absorbs working with gangsters and their dialect and their speech. And he writes his first novel, which is A Crust on Its Uppers. I just want to talk about A Crust on Its Uppers.

So I read The Crust on Its Uppers basically yesterday and the day before. And I wanted to read it for a while because when Jonathan Green came in to do Absolute Beginners with us, he raved about it to us and to me. It was really peculiar reading it because actually it's like, as I said to you, Travis, it's like the evil twin of Absolute Beginners or at least that's how it starts it has this weird genius way of describing it I have to say I hadn't

read it before I'd always wanted to read it did you read it as well? It's good isn't it? really good I liked it rather more than I liked State of Denmark. Well let's say it I agree so did I I mean I think State of Denmark is a really interesting book. I don't think it's a successful... I don't think it quite...

Well, we'll talk about State of Denmark in a minute. But there's great things in it. But the fascinating thing about, as you were saying, Travis, is that The Crust on Its Uppers is published the same year as A Clockwork Orange. It is, yeah. So it's a bit like Absolute Beginners, but it also has this incredible slang kind of... John, have you got a little bit from the beginning of The Crust on Its Uppers

just to give people a... Yeah, I mean, you could almost read the foreword as well because it's just so good. Shall I just read from the beginning? Just read. Because it's great. I'm trying to get the voice right for... I must warn you...

It's going to be quite posh then. I must warn you that everything that follows emanates from the following figure. Sacked from the most super public school in the country at the age of 16. Puzzled. Sacked from Cramer the following year with clap caught from the Greek maid. Still puzzled. Joined the army because still too green to knock. Glowing career at Mons, blinded by the toothpaste smile reflected from my boots at Adjutant's Parade.

Certainly not. Latrines Corporal, still puzzled. Illegitimal child in Weymouth, now about nine. One of the few things that made sense in those days because the punishment fitted the crime. Daisy was a right old boiler. Demobbed with the following report.

Officer potential, nil. NCO potential, nil. CO's comment, a very poor soldier indeed, with a nice smile. What next? Oxford and turn over a new leaf? No, no, Morrie. I was beginning to learn. To the north, full of demon energy. To London, a proper ice cream to look at. Only I assure you, I'm all about trout. Age 28, with a hard apprenticeship behind me since those army days. Two years in Spain, flogging hot tape recorders. A year in France, busy vanishing. I lived on the left bank, subsisting on ten pounds as my mother sent me in illustrated London newsies.

Taking civilisation at the Sorbonne and penicillin for clap. Living all that year like a sort of Lucifer among the scabs and crabs with a record player roaring out skiffle and trad jazz on the end of the bed I think that's probably oh it's so good

I mean that is that is a riff right that he yeah yeah and that's I just think in that kind of and that is his life as well yeah

condensed we've got a clip here almost a bit Gene Rees-y as well yeah yeah we've got a clip here the thing about Robin Cook and-y as well yeah yeah we've got a clip here the thing about Robin Cook and we'll explain

the Derek Raymond thing after we listen to this but the thing about Robin Cook is that he and this was a Robin Cook it was published as Robin Cook and it was a

it was a very successful book wasn't it we should just clarify this for people listening he was published as Robin Cook in the 1960s he wrote almost nothing

in the 1970s and then he was published as Derek Raymond in the 1980s and also he's writing genre when he comes back as Derek Raymond so we have a clip here but this does have, I mean, Crust does have a kind of, it's villainy element it is a crime

so we have a clip here of Robin Cook talking about how he transmutes experience into art. So let's have a listen to that. The challenge for a writer of black novels it seems to me

is both to have lived it and to survive it. Because the job of a writer is to survive and record. If you're dead, you can't record anything. You're living something which you're recording at the same time.

You're always two people. You're the participator in the event. You suffer like everybody else. If you didn't, what you wrote would be no good. You suffer, and as you record your own agony, that's what you do as a writer. It's no better or worse than what other people do. They suffer, they're agonised, the same as anybody does, the same as I do. But they don't write it, that's all.

And that's interesting because that is a quote direct quote that thing about if you're a writer your job is to survive and record that comes straight out of the pages of State of Denmark and Richard and what I found

really interesting about reading The Crust on Its Uppers A State of Denmark and He Died With His Eyes Open, which is the first of the Derek Raymond factory novels from the 1980s, is they are different from one another, but they are all clearly attempts of Robin Cook to write out his life in different genres and formats. And voices, actually.

I think the main thing to say is he was a very acute listener and observer of the world. All of these things are really kind of... Even in that bit where he describes a tie, the fact the tie has the right brand for the tie or whatever. And then similarly in the Tuscan village, just the way that the weather is used and the landscape there. He listened a lot and observed immensely. And he describes himself as being that outsider thing i mean i mean the whole element of his outsiderness as well as the

though he had this what he described as this coming having been born in a rich ghetto his mother was american and of jewish extraction i think that also gives a different kind of place within his own english class the english class. There's a bit here from A State of Denmark, which sort of comes out of nowhere. This is like 70 pages in. It's just a short paragraph that I'm going to read, and it shows you that he was very adept at shifting through different registers of writing.

So we've just had, I think, quite a long passage of dialogue with Magda, his partner, and he's reminiscing about something and then he says, the next chapter begins like this, last night I had a slight stroke. Yeah, that's a great

passage. A brilliant gold and silver ball exploded behind my eyes while I was asleep. It was veined with black, like certain kinds of marble. It looked like a model of the brain done in metal, the light was so bright. I immediately sat bolt upright to find I was blind in my left eye and deaf in my left ear. I also had the most curious sensation in my left hand, not at all like pins and needles, but more as though electricity were being passed through a piece of lately sentient wood. I was unable to move this arm below the elbow.

That was one way death could come to you then. No pain, but there was the shock, a loud snap in the brain while you slept. Because it was very hot, the bedroom window was wide open and I could see the stars. But when I shut my right eye, I could not see anything. And when I covered up my right ear, I was deaf. You know, it's recording, isn't it? It's just great writing. I mean, that's the thing for me. While I think it might not have completely succeeded in its own terms as a novel, there's so much cracking stuff in it.

I've also found the whole way he works into the narrative in Tuscany, the fascist, their experience. It's in the landscape. There's an amazing sequence where he gets told the story of Arturo, who's this 18-year-old who's got a cross in the village. And the story of that, just a bit of historical reporting, is so brilliantly done. He's already beginning all the way through that just a bit of a historical reporting yeah it's so brilliantly done he's already beginning all the way through that first bit of the book you're getting dim

dull difficult presentments of disaster the weather the storms that gathering you know there's all this kind of sense the stroke and then the stroke the sense that things are slipping away and then when nemesis arrives it's a fat, kind of really annoying jobsworth. But it's also the very 70s element that it's a representative from the Inland Revenue. It's the other strand of Raymond's own consciousness.

One of the things that I thought he did do brilliantly, and I mean my issue with it is that you don't quite get the... He doesn't really... I mean, he sort of suggests how it happened, that jobling takes over. You don't quite really feel... It's a one-remove.

I mean, it's reported by other people that there's a letter he receives from a writer friend of his who has foolishly gone back from New York, and he writes in this very detailed letter explaining how the whole place has gone to kind of hell in a handcart that one of the one of the burdens of course for him is the idea that um under this new regime you can only drink five pints of beer a night yeah it's the limit you know no more no less you know but it's worth saying as well when I said I was uh reading this

book the state of Denmark for backlisted the historian Orwin Turner got in contact with me and he said the thing about The State of Denmark is it's published in an era just as the crust on its uppers in the early 60s you could see as a kind of post-absolute beginners but criminal caper thing, very of its era. By the late 60s, when Robin Cook's writing a state of denmark this is a this is a mini genre in itself and he gave me a list of british novels that i'll just read out the titles of because they're so evocative which imagine future britain under yeah sort of dystopian

dystopian fascist wellian the lost diaries of Albert Smith, a.k.a. After All This Is England, by Robert Muller from 1965. The Leader by Gillian Freeman, 1965, which has just been republished by Ballancourt. The Man Who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing. Not a catchy title, is it? By Peter Van Greenaway, 1968.

And then 1970 saw Who Killed Enoch Powell by Arthur Wise. And Elwynn said to me, basically, quote, there was a lot of it about. Which says an awful lot about how Britain felt about itself in the 1960s. When it has a Labour government in the mid-60s but it feels itself on the cusp because of passage of time modern media these are both things that come into a state of demnol and these things as well the dystopian you know yeah again there's a sort of film coming out in in 1971 so that thing's against that context i mean i, I guess the thing that he does brilliantly is the change in sensibility through the book,

which I think we can give without too many spoilers. Richard Watt is obviously, not only is he a good journalist, he has spotted Jobling from an early stage and has publicly humiliated him on television. And this is the unforgivable crime that comes back to haunt him but you know you can tell he's he's been working in the vineyard you know he's built this vineyard with his bare hands he's fit he's lean he's argumentative one of the the sequences

in the book that i really like is the the kind of this grotesque english couple who come who are sort of janet janet and malcolm janet and malcolm yeah and that they have a fantastic kind of this grotesque English couple who come, who are sort of bien pensant. Janet and Malcolm. Janet and Malcolm, yeah. And they have a fantastic kind of, you know, square up for a fantastic ding-dong row. And he basically just turns on them and tells them what a pair of venal kind of, you know, weak will. Because he's obviously, but you can tell he's terrified

at the way that they're just... It's this slide into dictatorship that's really troubling to him. Just a little bit here, which I just thought was... When he's reading them their character, as it were, he then goes on to say, this to me is classic Roman. This is the beginning... You can feel in this book what he's... I think his later books, what he's a genius at doing jim thompson is getting inside the mind of psychopaths and it's possible that he had

you know psychopathic tendencies himself but this is this is a great paragraph this is about him telling people that you know he can't help himself i would give anything not to have these aposu. They kill me. They kill me too, by extension, reminding me of my own mortality. They force me to lead two lives, the outer one extremely dishonest, as it must be in order to hide the inner one, which hides nothing. But truth means loneliness, and loneliness is a surer killer than even guilt or anxiety. So I buy off loneliness with lies that leave me exhausted, which is why I said I didn't get any rest and that things were always just beyond me.

Moreover, dissection of my own mechanisms leaves me not at all angry at the pretenses of others, but just sad. Jobling is a liar as solid as lead, with not a chink of truth in him anywhere. Malcolm has his battles and his guilty petty thieving and Janet her sex, in inverted commas.

It's, and I, there are definite, that thing of, that feeling of sadness. You know, he's kind of like his own, he's so caught up in his own sort of inner drama. Actually, his kind of anger, and this anger, what's brilliant is you watch this anger just drain away with the second half of the book. It's really disturbing.

That, Travis, is what Travis was saying about the second half of the book. Although it's set in the... He's basically transported back from Italy to England. And he's very fighty when he gets back. He's really up for it. But you see relatively little. You're not treated to sort of, it happened here,

vistas of walking through London, seeing it with swastikas hanging from County Hall. It's all seen through the narrator's eyes as he is transported back, basically dealing with one through the window of a train dealing with one thug after another, and I would argue

that what the book is about is the effect of, I don't think Robin Cook, Derek Raymond was the sort of writer who who was interested in big external descriptions or detail but what he's really good at in this book and with all respect to you john what i think is very good about the book is it's an attempt to within a genre describe the effect of fascism on individual character and i think on i i would

agree that on in those in that in that regard it does actually it does work i think the the only issue i have is that you it's it feels a little that the fascist britain and the transition to fascist britain for reasons that i can completely understand feels a little bit under a map just feels a little bit yeah i agree i think i think i think that that's that understand feels a little bit under a map just feels a little bit under a map I think that's done, I think that's a deliberate thing I think the point which is why I think in some respects it might have more

the contemporary resonance thing is that he himself, either Raymond or certainly the narrator thinks that England is more susceptible to fascism than Italy at that time because the memory of what a fascist state is like is not there because it wasn't

occupied. So you get this enormous, the Arturo, which you just mentioned, John, that the story of the black shirt and the power he's able to exert, and even the farmhouse he lives in, it's called the Abyssinian or something isn't it because

it was where people from there under mussolini were were kept so there's so there's a way there's a kind of extra layer of historical detail that he gives to the italian setting almost in a way as a lesson for england to think about what life under fascism is like and therefore in the second half in a way it's like it's the reason why england has gone fascist is because it wasn't occupied and because it didn't have a fascist dictator the first time around and therefore it doesn't know what fascism is and i think this is in a way this is an element of raymond's other books where he has this whole thing about the reason why he hates all the sort of cozy crime writers like alice christie and so on is he says they have no understanding of the meaning

of the word evil and I think that's this is an element what the book is about it's in a sense it's a moral element we should talk a little bit about Derek Raymond's

return as Derek Raymond in the 1980s so he writes five novels the factory novels the first of which is called He Died With His Eyes Open and they are

if you've never read them they are we did we did raymond chandler on this podcast a while ago and the reason he's called he chose the name derrick raymond is partly in tribute to the raymond and raymond chandler right this is like sort of chandler in thatcherland yes isn't it, Derek Raymond? Reading them now, they are remarkably evocative of the darkest version of the Sweeney you can possibly imagine. Yes, absolutely.

They're almost the, I mean, David Peace's kind of 70s, those Ripper novels. Very influential. Very influential on David Peace. Cathy Unsworth, you mentioned, Ian Rankin as well, as I said. And the fourth factory novel is called I Was Dora Suarez.

And very famously was rejected by his publisher Dan Franklin, the great Dan Franklin at Secrum Warburg because it was just, you know, Dan famously said he read it and it made him feel ill.

Joyce Carol Oates describes it as excruciatingly horrific, I think is a great description of it. And someone who interviewed Raymond in the early 90s when he was writing his memoir happily confessed to not having finished it because they were so kind of horrified. Joyce Carol Oates, there's a brilliant quote here about these books from Joyce Carol Oates.

She says, Raymond's milieu is the chill of Thatcher-era London and his atmosphere is an 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 wiseguy tone of Chandler and Hammett. Sentences in the factory novels are likely to be short, blunt, fevered.

Quote, Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win. I mean, that's sort of of a piece, isn't it, with the State of Denmark stuff that we were reading. The job of the writer is to get it down. I'm not the world's expert on noir, but I love those. I haven't read Dora Suarez, but I read...

You were a bookseller at the same time. Yeah, yeah. He was a sensation, a sort of cult sensation. Yes, well, I really associate... Among booksellers, because it was... This was the time, I guess, when Maxim Jakubowski was... That's right. ...was also bringing a lot of American...

A lot of the American crime lists, the Serpent's Tale were doing their crime list. There was no exit press. There was a sudden interest in Jim Thompson. A lot of great crime writers were suddenly becoming read for the first time and taken seriously. I think that's the main reason. And Raymond was our guy. That we could say,

you raised Jim Thompson, I raise you, Derek Raymond. We did an event at Waterstones in Ellscourt for the paperback of I Was Dora Suarez. Those were the days. I can remember almost nothing about it. Because I actually asked people that I used to work with this week you know

did we do an event did we what i've got a memory that we did and what they reminded me was yes we did an event derrick was very personable uh he had on his famous beret which you were saying you can go and visit it in the french house in dean street so it is on a on a hook uh above the bar gathering gathering a little dust, actually, the last night. And there's also some nice caricatures. I can't remember much about this event. Hardly anything, because much drink was taken. But what I remember, I just have a mental picture

of Derek sitting there with a glass of wine in one hand and a fag in the other smoking on the shop floor which even in i'm talking 1992 was forbidden yeah i mean the voice which you heard a bit of on the table that voice was something else wasn't it it's sort of posh strangulated but you felt that it nicotine red wine kind of it's the voice of soho isn't it i mean it really is exactly that i just remember i just associate him and when I first lived in London and he made a record of readings of Dora Suarez with a group called Gallon Drunk doing the backing and I just I associate him totally with going to see Gallon Drunk and you know not remembering certain events after they had happened. So amnesia, really, is what you're saying.

Yeah, and a certain kind of amnesia. So when did you meet him? It would have been the same sort of time, I guess. It would have been early 90s, late 80s, early 90s. At the time, I remember meeting him at one of the classic Jonathan Meads parties where there was Chris Pettit, there was Gordon Byrne, there was Robin Cook, there was Chris Pettit, there was Gordon Byrne, there was Robin Cook, there was Reeds, there was a whole... It was that kind of bit of London.

And all of those writers are terrific. And they're all also terrific recorders. But also that era, that's really interesting, that era. Because we talked about David Litvinov a moment ago. Derek Raymond is in the 1991 film The Cardinal and the Corpse, made by Ian Sinclair and Chris Pettit, which has Emmanuel Litvinov. It's a really powerful era now, I think,

that late 80s, early 90s era of writers. London writers. It was a bit of a golden age. It was also that period I think, you know, obviously the older generation had known about Patrick Hamilton but for a lot of us who were sort of younger we were starting to read novels

about London and London life that were that weren't kind of, you know, mimsy, Hampstead, you know, middle class. Also seeking back into the past to find some voices which are also represented that version of london as well i think it's a great period i think for pre-internet or sort of internet was just about about but of rediscovery and people like

kathy particularly and the music press actually i mean uh raymond uh got lots of uh write-ups and interviews and stuff within the weekly music press, and also bands themselves, like Gallantrunk, very suave, always wore suits and ties, had a 50s craze kind of aesthetic about their fashion sense. So that idea of that rediscovering of some of those voices and plundering them for a kind of contemporary resource, I think, was a huge thing. I mean, people like... I mean, Jake Arnott's The Long Firm, for example,

those kind of novels owe a huge debt to Raymond. I mean, I'm sure he'd be happy enough to admit that too. So Robin Cook, the author, writes in the 1960s. In the 70s, he almost writes nothing and works as a minicab driver. Right? And then in the 80s, he comes back as Derek Raymond and has, like, this glorious 10-year run before he dies. There's this brilliant quote from him saying, I've watched people like Kings of the Amis

struggling to get on the up escalator while I had the down escalator all to myself. But he understood. He strikes me as somebody who, towards the end of his career, understood what he was good at, what his niche was, and who he spoke for. Definitely. You know, himself, but also that kind of... I mean, he has a great description. He describes about his early novels, because, again, they're within his class structure, in a sense.

They are public school boys who are slumming it with gangsters in Soho. Those worlds are remarkably close, the same degree of nepotism, odd slang, particular forms of schools, property, gambling, etc. All those things knit together quite neatly. But he just says, he felt that his early novels got rather rejected because he says,

they were drawing undue attention in the drawing room to what should have been hidden under the drawing room carpet. So it's an idea in a way that everyone knew that there was a big scam going on, but it was implied to say so. And he drew attention to that within his novels. We're going to wrap up in a minute, but I would say, you know, we started this podcast didn't we, saying it's about the state of Denmark

and if you're interested in seeing somebody imagining what Britain might be like under that type of regime, it's worth reading. But actually you know what, if you want to read the best of Derek Raymond, if you haven't read Derek Raymond, well, haven't read Derek Raymond,

well, what are we saying? Are we saying the factory novels are where you go? I probably would say so, yes. Yeah. John, do you think? Yeah. I mean, what I would say, though, is if you are interested in dystopias and you're interested in...

I mean, I do think this is an interesting moment to read this book. I mean, I was just looking at a piece in the New York Times this week which really reminded me that this idea that our liberties are not taken from us by jackboots. There's a great passage in here where he says that jobling has succeeded in England right across the board and almost without violence, overt violence at any rate. The further on in a series that a particular revolution occurs,

the neater the job the aspirant dictator makes of it. He has so many examples to draw on. By comparison, Hitler's rise to power was a messy, bungled, dreadfully amateurish affair, while Mussolini was a comic opera, as long as you lived abroad. And I think there's this thing, but when you're getting these kind of amazing things coming through, that there are fewer and fewer people now And I think there's this thing, but when you're getting these kind of amazing things coming through, that the support for...

There are fewer and fewer people now who think a liberal democracy is an essential thing within the West, and even among young people. It's just this sort of gradually, we're getting a little bit bored with this idea, and it's kind of run, and everybody's corrupt. But you kind of... That actually liberties leak away from people.

It's not that they're just, that they're taken at gunpoint. It's that they just disappear and they don't come back. And particularly in that sequence in the novel where Janet and Malcolm are describing how the newspapers have changed. And it's just very casual that they've taken this on trust. And saying that, you know, well, it's great now. The fashion coverage is brilliant

and they've expanded all the lifestyle stuff. Exactly, yeah. But what about Rick Watts saying that, you know, well, it's great now. The fashion coverage is brilliant and they've expanded all the lifestyles. Exactly, yeah. It's brilliant circumstances. There's this short passage just here from one of the narrator's friends who's got a letter through to him in Italy. His friend says, I made a serious, possibly fatal error

in ever returning to London from New York. You know me, Richard. I get something right in a book only to get the same thing wrong when it comes to real life. After being in the States for eight months I couldn't believe that things had gone so wrong in England and so quickly as people, papers and television reports received through Scotland and Wales said they had and now I'm paying the penalty for my own stupidity. You remember the stories we used to read in the old days about Iron Curtain nationals who had lived in the West sufficiently long that they felt it must be safe to go home,

at least just for a visit to see family, etc., and never got out again? Well, I think that's what happened to me. It's that thing you were talking about, John, about the sense of it. You know, the famous phrase, it could happen here, it couldn't happen here. Well, I think what he's trying to do,

and I can say if he doesn't quite succeed, it's because it's bloody difficult to do. It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. But what he's trying to do is, as you say, it's the sort of the effect that fascism and repression has on the spirit, on the inner person. I mean, an interesting... And I think he does succeed in doing that.

I think the fact that we have difficulty imagining how our stable democracy would descend into authoritarian fascism... It's our own complacency. That's kind of maybe, you know, maybe that's my problem rather than Derek Roman's problem. I feel a bit more up on that than I was this time last year, unfortunately. I was saying...

I'm not that happy, though. I'm not that happy, no, everyone. So I think we're basically giving it a big thumbs up. We are giving it a big thumbs up. We're certainly giving Derek Roman, he's a kind of iconic, important English writer. You know what, I really appreciate it. I'm so pleased you chose this, Travis,

because when it came down to it, he's one of those people that I've been meaning for years to investigate properly. And actually, these were you know, if you I've been tag-teaming these books with books by our next

author on Backlisted, who I won't talk about, but it's been quite a surreal double-hand. Have you found that John? Me too, yeah. It's very strange. Surreal to the point of actual kind of madness. I have to say, my dreams have been particularly, Rowan by the way

is very good on dreams, my dreams have been particularly odd. So Notweed, notweed. Past the notweed. As good a point as any, yes past the notweed. Is there any point to stop? So we should say thank you to Travis, to our producer Matt Hall. And once again, thank you to our sponsors Unbound.

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