Derek Raymond wrote British Noir novels. Black they are, deep and dark, and inI Was Dora Suarez, the novel is also blood red in the gory details that spill from the pages like an oozing wound. We hear the story of three related murders from the point of view of the murderer (his narrative turned my stomach repeatedly, so much so that I almost just gave up on finishing this book), of the victim through the writings in her journal, and of the ex-police office brought back on the force to solve the triple-murder.
The unnamed narrator ex-police officer and his team don’t so much solve the crime as beat the pieces to its solution out of anyone or anything in their way. The flip side to the brutality of the ex-police officer is his tenderness and introspection when thinking about the victims, and about his own life and his role as police officer. His overpowering need for justice, to even out the scales of life, was portrayed in such detailed resolution that I was brought to tears. Even his constant, robust, and very harsh swearing is softened when he explains it: “Don’t you see, the words sometimes take the place of tears.” His desire for justice burns deeply because of his own very tragic past, which we get in bits and pieces that are as sharp as the jagged edge of broken glass, and because of the strange identification he feels with the youngest of the victims, Dora Suarez: “I became Suarez physically as the killer came for her, and felt as paralyzed as she did as the axe bit into her arm at the swinging finish of its parabola.”
The edges of his misery, and the misery of the victims as well as the killer, are jabbed into our psyches again and again throughout this brutal novel. It was no pleasure to read but it was compelling, this story of one man’s search for justice in a very bad world: “I would always arrive too late, but I felt I must try to look forward to a day when that would all be altered, so that we would no longer only be able to obtain justice for people after they were dead.” Our un-named anti-hero wants the door shut on the grimmest of reapers, the murderers, and he will do everything sane and insane to nail it closed.
