Review: The Devil's Home On Leave

The Devil's Home On Leave by Derek Raymond
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I lost track of the number of times I double-checked to be sure this book is a sequel to Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open. Goodreads, Google, and Wikipedia all agree, but I don’t see it.

He Died with His Eyes Open is the first in the Factory Series – books about an unnamed detective in London’s Department of Unexplained Deaths (aka “The Factory”) – and it’s brilliant. James Sallis touted the series as one of his formative influences, and you can see elements of this detective in the otherwise unnamed Driver.

The remarkable thing about that first book is the way it gives us a protagonist who’s bankrupt of hope and meaning. He lives alone in a nondescript apartment and, other than knowing he was once married, we get no details about his private life. That vacuum becomes the heart of the novel when, as he plays back a series of audiotapes a murdered man left behind, he finds himself drawn into the complex of that victim’s life. His own emptiness powers the mystery and, like Sallis, I’m deeply impressed by it.

So…this sequel. It feels as if a totally different author has written about a totally different detective. In place of a vague past, we get a clear backstory: our detective was married to an unstable woman who threw their young daughter under a bus, killing her, and leaving him to visit her as she hallucinates in a sanitarium. In place of a man who’s so hungry for something like life that he adopts the baggage of a murdered man, we get a man who’s got it all under control – dead child and insane ex-wife aside.

And, in place of a detective who takes a deep dive into a case no one else cares about, we have a man who’s exposing high-level British governmental corruption and a serial killer. And, despite partnering with a series of supposedly top-flight intelligence officers, he’s a step ahead of everyone else. He’s so smug, so cocky in the way he outsmarts people with better resources and more impressive firepower, that I found myself thinking of Mickey Spillane – not a compliment in any way.

Add to all those disappointing changes three other charges of sloppiness. First, [SPOILER:] there is the unlikely (and – barring a highly contrived climactic final scene – unnecessary) decision to let the serial killer go free to catch the other, bigger fish. Yet those “big fish” turn out to be fairly small fry in their own rate.

Second, there’s a latent and lazy homophobia running through the whole book. Characters constantly reassure us that “there’s nothing wrong with it,” but homosexuality is one way in which the book’s ultimate governmental villain gets tripped up. It’s not something to hate here, merely something to see as a weakness, a pathetic extension of what bad people do when they aren’t strong enough to be good people.

And third, there are places where this is just badly written. Again, one of the strengths of the prequel is its quiet desperation, its eloquent silences. Here we get a passage like this: “I yearn for you, Dahlia [my daughter], yearn for you, and everything I do for justice, I do it in your name; and it is my terrible guilt that I could have saved you from your mother. But instead I went off to work that day, and how shall I ever forget you at the window as you waved me goodbye? Oh, it goes to my heart those times when I think of the horror, and through my fault, leaving in me an appalling emptiness that can never be filled.”

It’s not just that that writing makes me cringe, it’s that it’s so far removed from what the first of these so good. It’s an emotional sell-out, a paraphrase of the far subtler feelings that Raymond hinted at rather than took on from the front.

I may read another one of two of these in the series, mostly just to satisfy a hunch that this could be an anomaly, that Raymond was trying to explain for himself what he was doing so well in the first book and therefore came to the project more ham-handedly.

Still, I can’t believe how much weaker this one is than its predecessor. I may go check one more time because it’s that hard to believe.


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