I was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond I've given this book 5 Stars as credit not only to the book itself but to its place in the history of the novel.
 
Whatever accolade is given to the author for inventing "British Noire" you cannot doubt its depravity. It makes Quentin Tarantino look like the colourful, stylistic cinematic event that he is. This is black and white in your face and very gritty. The main character is the unnamed detective who moves from metaphysical musings to a kind of sentimental pathos in easy strides. Showing a surprising emotional depth and empathy given the amount of gore and human vulgarity that make up the weave of this book.Not for the faint hearted. The story is the publisher vomited over his desk when reading this. I guess in 1990 with no Internet full of SnuffPorn this book blew in like a breath of bad air and made people feel queasy.I found it interesting to see in print the literary equivalent of all that SnuffPorn.Bloody (and scabby, shitty, snotty) good reading. ( )

(Original Review, 1990-04-17)

“He produced a big 9mm Quickhammer automatic with the tired ease of a conjurer showing off to a few girls and shlacked one into the chamber. He told Roatta: ‘Now I want you nice and still while all this is going on, Felix, because you’re going to make a terrible lot of mess.’
Roatta immediately screamed: ‘Wait! Wait!’ but his eyes were brighter than he was, and knew better. They had stopped moving before he did, because they could see there was nothing more profitable for them to look at, so instead they turned into a pair of dark, oily stones fixed on the last thing they would ever see – eternity in the barrel of a pistol. His ears were also straining with the intensity of a concert pianist for the first minute action inside the weapon as the killer’s finger tightened, because they knew that was the last sound they would ever heard. So in his last seconds of life, each of them arranged for him by his senses, Roatta sat waiting for the gun to explode with the rapt attention of an opera goer during a performance by his favourite star, leaning further and further forward in his chair until his existence was filled by, narrowed down to, and finally became the gun.”

In "I Was Dora Suarez" by Derek Raymond

I've read most of the important stuff when it comes to Crime Fiction, and some of them are very disturbing in their way, but I'm not sure any of them can hold a candle to "I Was Dora Suarez", the fourth novel in Derek Raymond's Factory series.

Ostensibly, it's a detective novel, but the first fifty or so pages are the most gut-churning, flat-out disgusting thing I have ever read - allegedly, they made the publisher throw up over his desk when he read them. Chris Petit described it thus: “a book full of coagulating disgust and compassion for the world’s contamination, disease and mutilation, all dwelt on with a feverish, metaphysical intensity that recalls Donne and the Jacobeans more than any of Raymond’s contemporaries.”

Why do people read, or write, this kind of stuff? Why does anyone voluntarily invite hideous images into their minds? The few examples of this kind of stuff I have come across are still stuck in my memory, and pop out to cause a little bit of mental pain at random times. It's like some weird form of masochism.

Not for me thanks. It's hard enough feeling good without that to contend with.

[2018 EDIT: I read it many eons years ago, and stuck with it to the bitter end, and I can honestly say that many years of baths and showers still haven't completely removed all traces of the horrible residue that it left behind. If you think Stephen King writes about horrific stuff, you don’t know the half of it…] ( )

Brilliant story but very violent. Raymond didn't hold back on the descriptions of depravity in a decaying society. The victim's life is told via diary entries and the nameless hero/cop vows to deliver justice for her brutal death. ( )

Derek Raymond (aka Robin Cook) had a colorful life before he even turned to writing, ranging from selling lingerie to hanging out with the Beat poets in Paris, marrying an heiress for two months, smuggling paintings, driving fast cars, and getting jailed in Spain. Raymond wrote five books in the Factory series about a rude, obstinate unnamed sergeant in the Department of Unexplained Deaths. No one in the Department really wants him around and he thinks they are lazy and incompetent and uncaring. He cares about the victims and gets inside their heads to solve their murders. But, pity anyone who gets in his way when he is trying to solve these riddles.

I was Dora Suarez is appropriately considered Raymond’s masterwork. It is the fourth book in the series and its opening chapter is darker and more troubling than perhaps any crime fiction ever. This is a brutal double murder told from the point of view of the psychotic murderer himself as he reasons through why he must commit what he did. The words in this chapter form slowly as each piece of reasoning is mulled over and each action is committed in almost slow motion, symbolized quite clearly by the great clock into which one of the victims is actually thrown, Betty Carstairs who dared intrude on the killer’s actions. In this beginning to the novel, the reader is taken into the depths of a most tortured soul, not to pity him, but to see through his twisted psychotic eyes, why these things must be done. There has never been an opening as dark and harrowing as this and legend has it that the first publisher shown the novel (the publisher who had put out the earlier three novels in the series) got sick from reading it and, indeed, some of it is quite sickening, be forewarned.

The balance of the novel is filled with the unnamed investigator’s work in viewing the victims’ bodies at the crime scene, pushing the coroner’s office to speed it up, bullying his way into a nightclub frequented by one of the victims where she was subjected to the most venal things. But, as with the other novels in this series, the investigator finds a diary by Dora and tries to understand her as he reads it and realizes that she was slowly and painfully dying anyway and wanted to end it all, but was not given the opportunity or the freedom to do so. ( )

Harder going than the previous books in the series, mainly because of the nature of the killer. Well written and not sensationalist in tone, it was still twisted - more so than The Devil's Home on Leave, which is also about a psychopath. I can't say I enjoyed it. It feels more like I endured it. ( )