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“... invoke, by conditioned reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he ...”

“... on itself, excusing and exploiting well-worn anecdotes. Moorcock sketches his version of the late Derek Raymond (a.k.a. Robin Cook) as a Soho revenant: ‘Cookie was still alive in those days . . . and telling your stories back to you faster than you could recount them.’ Much of King of the City is like that, using the ‘twist’ to reconstitute ...”

“... more than to intellect’, San Fiancisco BEEF), and a plastic fortune-telling device derived from Raymond Lull – who would notice? Who noticed when it was in spate? An art strike in West Cork is a fantastic notion. West Cork is an art strike. West Cork is weather. Neither, unfortunately for the postman facing a six-mile yomp over mud and pebbles, is the ...”

“... that Gordon Burn and Fullalove aspire to the extremity represented by the best of J.G. Ballard or Derek Raymond, by a Crash or an I Was Dora Suarez. Both of these books retain some residual claim to realism, but work by isolating a lurid element in the world and expanding it almost infinitely. Fullalove tries the same trick, but there is a curious ...”

“... best hope of getting into newsprint. There was, for example, fulsome coverage for Robin Cook (Derek Raymond) once he had gone; local colour pieces (memory tapes from the Coach and Horses) outweighing the tepid inches of a life-time’s review space. Cook, that most civilised of men, most troubled of writers, was one of the last to sustain a career on ...”

“... gunslingers proved their manhood: Jim Thompson, Harry Dean Stanton and Robin Cook (a.k.a. Derek Raymond). Penman was the writer who isn’t in the book, talking to people who are, or were, or ought to be. His patch was cinema arcana, curating the ‘sessions men’ as he calls them, jobbing actors with faces full of motel moonlight. Professionals ...”

“... his devils. Frewin, the author of Scorpian Rising, a paperback original, which performs a sort of Derek Raymond autopsy on Margate, appeals to Seabrook, the pulp addict, in ways that Graham Swift and his Last Orders never could. Seabrook takes his Faulkner neat, binge reading, with chasers of Sir Thomas Browne and a dozen ghosted gangland memoirs. As an ...”

“... the Richard Yates books I shared with him. When I was ill at one point I read through all of Derek Raymond, whom I recommend to anyone with a stubborn bacterial infection. ‘Oh, yes,’ Thom said, ‘he’s wonderful, isn’t he.’ Sometimes we came on an author separately that sent us both head over heels. I don’t recall who got there first, or ...”

“... Raymond’s Revuebar is usually thought of as Soho’s superior strip club. It stages not mere skin shows but Festivals of Erotica, it sells Dunhill or Lambert and Butler cigarettes, and it gets itself listed in the daily papers under Theatres. Svens and Ottos have no need to look shifty when they sidle into Raymond’s ...”

“... Master of Balliol. The interestingly named Fanny Hill was also involved, at this period, with Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony’s College, which Marks describes as the ‘CIA’s Oxford annexe’. The property that the postgraduate Marks rented in Leckford Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William ...”

“... ocean. and now we accompany him, not to Brazil, but to Los Angeles, where he is reincarnated as Raymond Chandler’s fast-talking private eye, philip Marlowe, apparently in search of his father. ‘Immram’ is not easy to follow, but then neither is Chandler, who once admitted that he, the author, could not himself make out exactly what was happening in ...”

“... Lighthouse). It’s true that parenthood has hobbled men too, sometimes: to remind us there’s Raymond Carver’s extraordinary and perhaps not quite forgivable accusation, in his essay ‘Fires’, that his children prevented him from working on his stories. The practicalities did for him: a terrible sense of his life having been wasted sweeps over him in ...”

“... totally outstripped art. Could any mere novelist – Anthony Trollope, Hugh Walpole, even Ernest Raymond – conceivably have come up with a plot in which a highly-regarded, if disappointed, Oxford don first mixes an explosive cocktail to be drunk by his own Church, on being taxed with it denies all responsibility for his action, then in fear of exposure ...”

“... from Japan, my friend, colleague on the Sunday Times and journalistic partner on Bloody Sunday, Derek Humphry, from Eugene, Oregon – had flown in at the invitation (and expense) of HMG to help the Bloody Sunday Inquiry in its renewed investigation into what had happened on that never-forgotten, never-forgiven day. Muzak crooned in the arrival hall, stalls ...”

“... magazine in 1947. Both then and during her subsequent explorations of freelance life with Derek Stanford, a boyfriend and collaborator who became one of her major irritants, she turned out criticism that staged lively arguments in an idiom seemingly designed not to ruffle ageing bookmen: lots of ‘the diction is felicitous and pure’ and so ...”