Here is the detective as sacrificial visionary. He has literally lost his own, personal life in the service of the impersonal quest for justice; this may seem to us, readers at a distance, a kind of madness. For certainly there is something deranged in so vast and so passionate a quest, in such debased circumstances—this faith in a “new future.” It isn’t a coincidence that Derek Raymond’s knightly detective is also, in temperament, an artist, a poet, and a philosopher for whom “words sometimes take the place of tears.”
Joyce Carol Oates has written a piece on the incredible Derek Raymond. [via NYRB]
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