Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: DEREK RAYMOND

From: John Williams ( johnwilliams@ntlworld.com)
Date: 22 Feb 2002


Etienne wrote re. Derek Raymond

> B. And, as far as I know, from the rest of his corpus
> there is another novel that was not published in
> English:
> SICK TRANSIT (1982)

There are two novels unpublished in English - each has multiple possible English titles so its simpler to refer to them by their published French titles

Le Soleil Qui S'Eteint was Robin's first novel after his long layoff in the 1970s. He thought it was terrible and it's hard not to agree. He certainly never wanted it to be published in English and as his literary executor I'm inclined to go along with his wishes (also there's no sign of an Eng lang m.s).

The second novel Cauchemar Dans La Rue (Nightmare in the street) is a different matter. It features a French cop v similar in temperament to his English couterpart in the Factory novels. It's flawed but has some wonderful passages and is certainly miles better than Robin's last two novels Dead Man Upright and Not Till The Red Fog Rises (which he was still rewriting when he died and actually features a page or so written by me in an attempt to resolve some plot contradictions).

In conjunction with Robin's agent Max Jakubowski we're shopping around for a publisher to reprint the Factory novels and release Cauchemar in English. As and when we get somewhere I'll let you all know.

> C. SHORT STORIES
> Until now I never saw a complete list of Raymond's
> short stories. Part of the explanation is that he
> never paid attention to this kind of texts and was
> always reluctant to assemble them in anthologies,

Yes, not easy for me to assemble either. As of now I don't think there's enough for a book sized collection. There is btw material for a sizable volume of letters but that will have to wait for a sizable upturn in interest.
>
> - There was a series of telefilms by the BBC in 1990
> based on "The Factory", but I never saw anything of
> it.

This sadly never happened despite some fine scripts being written. There have since been numerous film options on the books but don't hold your breath

John

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