How The Dead Live (Melville International Crime)

Can you murder for love?

In the third novel of the series, the nameless detective visits a decrepit country house to look into the case of a lady of the manor who has disappeared.

It is, as always for the nameless one, a deeply unsettling investigation of love and damnation. The woman’s husband seems to love her entirely. And yet he seems reluctant to find her. Meanwhile other cops are getting in the way of the Sergeant and he’s making new enemies on the force.

With his trademark sense of enraged compassion, the Sergeant fights to find a murderer not by following analytical procedure, but by doing the most difficult thing of all: understanding why crimes are committed.

Editorial Reviews

First published in the U.K. in 1986, this powerful and mesmerizing novel should gain new U.S. fans for Raymond (1931-1994), known in Europe as one of the masters of British noir. The unnamed narrator, a dogged Scotland Yarder with a gift for antagonizing his superiors, travels to Wiltshire to resolve a bizarre missing-persons case. Though Marianne Mardy, a popular local figure, hasn't been seen for some time, her physician husband, William, hasn't reported her missing. The police are strangely uninterested in making any effort to locate the woman, and the narrator soon uncovers evidence of official corruption. After an initial interview with William, who lives a reclusive existence in a massive, crumbling mansion, the detective gets a glimmer of what really happened to Mrs. Mardy, only to find himself struggling to reconcile the truth with what his personal sense of justice requires. With spare, often lyrical prose, Raymond digs beneath society's civilized veneer to expose the inner rot. (May)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About The Author:

Derek Raymond was the pseudonym of British writer Robert Cook, who was born in London in 1931. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton and rejected a life of privilege for a life of adventure. He traveled the world, living in Paris at the Beat Hotel and on New York’s seedy Lower East Side, smuggled artworks into Amsterdam, and spent time in a Spanish prison for publicly making fun of Franco. Finally, he landed back in London, working in the lower echelons of the Kray Brothers’ crime syndicate laundering money, organizing illegal gambling, and setting up insurance scams. He eventually took to writing—first as a pornographer, but then as an increasingly serious novelist, writing about the desperate characters and experiences he’d known in London’s underground. His work culminated in the Factory novels, landmarks that have led many to consider  him the founding father of British noir. He died in London in 1993.