The uncertain father of British noir, Noirvember continues, Lee Marvin won't discuss his 1972 film Prime Cut

Will the real father of British noir please stand up?

So exactly who is the father of British noir fiction?

I ask because I recently completed the fifth and final book in Derek Raymond’s Factory series, Dead Man Upright, originally published in 1993. I have now read four of the five books in the series, completely out of order I might add, and have just ordered a second hand copy of the one I don’t own, The Devil’s Own on Leave (1984).

Derek Raymond was the pen name for Robert William Arthur Cook. Cook, who died in 1994, penned a memoir, The Hidden Files, published in 1999, but it is hard to find and very pricey when do you come across copies, so I haven’t read it. To give you the whistle stop tour, Cook was born the son of a wealthy London textile magnate in 1931. After a short stint in the family business, he realised that the mercantile life, at least its legal iteration, was not for him.

He revolted against his family’s bourgeois values and lifestyle and spent the 1950s as what was known as a ‘wide-boy’, a wonderful English term for someone who lives by their wits and dabbles in crime. He swanned about the bohemian quarters of London, Paris and Lower East Side New York, during which time he had a sideline smuggling oil paintings and fast cars in Europe, activities for which narrowly avoided the inside of a jail cell. Returning to London in the 1960s, he started writing fiction.

The Factory books, his best known, really are an acquired taste, even for the aficionado of noir fiction. They concern a never named police narrator in the Department of Unexplained Deaths at the Factory Police Station. The common theme running through all the books is the investigation of hideously violent crimes that don’t seem to have a clear motive and which no one, except for the narrator, gives two shits about solving.

In the first book, He Died with His Eyes Open (1984), the victim is a middle-aged, unemployed writer beaten to death with a hammer. How the Dead Live (1986) is about the murder of a woman that no one can be bothered investigating. I Was Dora Sanchez, published in 1990, was too much even for me, and dealt with a young prostitute dismembered with an axe, who the unnamed investigator discovers was also dying of AIDS. Dead Man Upright focuses on a brutal serial killer. The unnamed narrator knows who the killer is. Problem is that no one believes him, least of all the killer’s besotted girlfriend.

To return to my original question, though, many blurbs for Raymond’s books by other crime writers credit him as the father of modern British noir fiction, or at least its key innovator.

Enter Ted Lewis, the author of incredibly influential 1970 British crime novel Jack’s Return Home aka Get Carter and a slim oeuvre of other crime novels. Lewis is a somewhat tragic figure. He hit it big with Get Carter (the subject of a lengthy 2014 essay by yours truly in the Los Angeles Review of Books which you can read here), but was haunted by never being able to replicate its success—although some of his other books are excellent. Lewis, like Raymond/Cook wrote of what he lived: hard partying and dalliances on the fringes of crime. In Lewis’s case this was courtesy of the Soho drinking scene he frequented in the 1970s, although we can only speculate as to just how deep Lewis’s illegal knowledge or involvement was. Nick Triplow’s excellent 2017 bio of Lewis (which I reviewed in some detail here) drops hints but cannot conclusively prove much as all those who really know the score are either dead or wouldn’t talk.

Triplow’s book is titled Getting Carter, Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir, and contemporary blurbs for Lewis’s work are similarly full of praise for his role as the father/founder of British noir. So, did British noir fiction sleep around and we’re not sure who to assign paternity to? Or is it a case of the genre having more than one father?

Raymond’s Factory series are bleak, deeply disturbing tales of busted lives and nothingness, made even more despondent by Raymond’s sparse, hard-hitting prose and blunt observations about life and death. These take up more wordage as the series continues, musings on everything from death, failure, sex, to the nature of the serial killer.

Some of Lewis’s books veer towards the hardboiled. But others, such as Plender (1971) in which an immoral private investigator uses the death of a young woman to get even with a sleazy photographer who bullied him mercilessly at school, is a deeply noir dissection of Britain’s class system. Ditto, GBH (1980), about a former London porn baron cooling his heels in an offseason British seaside resort after his business goes belly up. A paranoid tale of revenge, which flicks between the past and the present, we can say that GBH is also the clearest hint as to some of the unsavoury connections that Lewis may have amassed while frequenting Soho drinking establishments.

But none of this gets us any closer to identifying the father of British noir. To make matters more complex, I found this interesting 2021 article in CrimeReads about a British author called Russell James, which describes him as the ‘Godfather of British Noir’. I have never even heard of James, and it appears that nearly all his books are out of print. However, I have just ordered a second hand copy of his 1996 heist gone wrong book Count Me Out, so I’ll let you know how that goes at some point.

And while I am on the subject who is British noir’s mother?

I would be interested in any comments on the subject that you would care to leave below.

Noirvember continues

As usual, I never have the time to complete the ambitious watch target I set myself every Noirvember. You can check out my watch list on Letterboxd here. The following are my highlights in terms of new to me noir:

Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Red Circle (1970). I don’t know why it took me so long to clock what is one of the best heists gone wrong films I’ve seen. A desperate group of criminals (Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonté & Yves Montand) team up to rob a jewellery showroom, an extended scene that easily rivals the one in Jules Dassin’s classic, Rififi (1955). The Red Circle also boasts one of the best scenes in which a character suffers from the DTs scenes since Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945).

My friend Jedidiah Ayres recommended Joseph Pevney’s little known 1950 B-noir Shakedown, and it is indeed, great. The story of a ruthless newspaper photographer who will stop at nothing to climb his way to the top, it includes one of my very favourite film noir flourishes, the use of newspaper headlines to explain key plot points.

But the film that has really stayed with me is Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976). I am a huge Losey fan but had not got around to this one. A cynical war profiteer in Nazi occupied Paris (Alain Delon) finds his life starting to unravel when he is mistaken for a Jewish man of same name. A strange cat and mouse chase ensures as Klein pursues his doppelgänger, who may not even exist, around Paris. This is interspersed with what appear at first as unrelated scenes of the Vichy administration mobilising its bureaucracy and police, but which are eventually revealed as preparations to arrest and deport Paris's Jewish population to concentration camps. Everything about this film, from the washed out aesthetic to Klein's brushes with various uncaring officials, serves to function as a chilling noir infused metaphor for the deliberate unseeing of horrific events. In addition to real war time events – the mass arrest of Paris’s foreign Jewish population by the French police at the behest of the German occupiers in July 1942 – Losey must have infused Mr. Klein with his own experience as a victim of the anti-communist HUAC witch hunt in the early 1950s.

My stuff

I just want to alert you all to fact that my academic monograph, Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback, is due to come out in paperback on January 16 2024.

The book has been out in hardback via Anthem Press since mid-2022, priced for university libraries and thus unavailable to individuals interested in the history of Australian pulp fiction. The paperback is more affordable – £25 or US$35, plus postage. You can check out the book on the Anthem website here but have no doubt I will also be banging the drum about it a bit on this newsletter over the next couple of months.

Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction & the Rise of the Australian Paperback originated in a PhD I took at Sydney’s Macquarie University on Horwitz Publications, Australia’s largest post-war pulp paperback publisher. My study is the first book length examination of Australian pulp and one of the few detailed studies I am aware of a specific pulp publisher to appear anywhere. It not only looks the genres Horwitz published, but the writers and artists who worked for it, including some ground-breaking research on Australian female pulp writers. It also reveals the hidden role that Horwitz, derided purely as a low rent purveyor of cheap, salacious fiction for most of its existence, had in the take up of the paperback by mainstream Australian publishers, as well as how Horwitz pulp was a key vehicle for powerful vernacular modernist currents that coursed through Australia in the1950s & 1960s.

I am very proud of the book and would love it to get a few more readers.

Second, baby’s first solo film commentary is out, for the Severin Films release of Stephen Wallace’s 1980 tough as nails Australian prison film, Stir. Australia has produced some excellent prison movies, Ghosts of the Civil Dead (1988), Everynight… Everynight (1994) and Chopper (2000), but I think Stir is the best of the these. Based on the real life 1974 Bathurst prison riot, the film was made in collaboration with prisoner’s rights groups and was groundbreaking in so many ways, from revealing the brutal conditions in prisons to what is among the earliest depictions of homosexuality on the Australian big screen. You can pick up the Blu-ray, which is packed with other great features, from Severin Film here.

Lee Marvin on the The Tonight Show

Finally, one thing you need to know about me is my abiding love for all things Lee Marvin. So, I got a real kick out this YouTube clip in which Marvin refuses to talk about his 1972 film Prime Cut on The Tonight Show with stand in host Don Rickles. I wrote an essay on the bizarre wonder that is Prime Cut for the CrimeReads site a couple of years ago, in which I discussed Marvin’s dislike of the film and the fact that he had constantly feuded director Michael Ritchie during its making, particularly over Ritchie’s desire to make the relationship between Marvin & Sissy Spacek’s characters sexual. Instead, Marvin talks about the wonder of boxing and fellow guest Muhammad Ali. You can watch the clip here. Marvin’s segment begins at 17.30.

Until next time.