I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond Review

An axe murderer kills a trio of victims one night - Detective Sergeant No Name is on the case!

Derek Raymond was apparently one of the UK’s founders of noir. I’ve tried reading noir many times before and I feel like I enjoy the idea of it more than the books claiming to be it. So maybe Raymond truly is a noir writer because I didn’t like his novel I Was Dora Suarez very much.

The opening chapter was compelling - we see the axe murderer at work and how nutty his psyche is, which is morbidly interesting to read - as was the ending, as the cop tracks down the killer for a final confrontation, though it plays out predictably.

The vast majority of the novel though is really dull. It’s a standard police procedural with the cops interviewing the various creeps that make up the seedy underbelly of London until they eventually get the killer’s name. I didn’t find the dialogue in these scenes all that convincing - either it’s outdated or Raymond wasn’t that good at writing realistic speech for coppers and gangsters.

Then there’s the main character. It was towards the end of the novel that I realised I didn’t know his name and began looking back. I don’t think he is ever given a name, just a title: Detective Sergeant, and other characters refer to him as “Sarge”.

I wonder if that’s a deliberate choice for this book. Because Sarge weirdly falls in love with the first murder victim, Dora Suarez, whose diary he finds and reads religiously. It’s an awkward fit - having Sarge relate pages and pages of supposedly hard-hitting crime detail and “gritty” dialogue and then intersperse this with having him suddenly shift gears to saying wishy-washy romantic paeans to a dead woman. It feels trite and forced every time.

But maybe Raymond is implying that Sarge “becomes” Dora Suarez through reading about her life - her vengeance beyond the grave - and not giving the main character a name makes that spiritual connection easier? Sarge was Dora Suarez and that’s one possible interpretation of the title - maybe anyway. I just don’t know why else Sarge would fall in love with the murder victim so suddenly.

Also, Sarge was apparently a disgraced cop out of the service but got brought back because of short-staffing. Is that what happened back in the day - bring back disgraced cops to work on a single high profile murder case before kicking them out again? Hmm.

There’s a lot of very graphic and unpleasant detail throughout as well, which is quite off-putting. The book feels very of its time - early ‘90s - with its AIDS fascination with plenty of detail of the ravages of that disease. I suppose the graphic detail lends realism to the story - this is what homicide work is really like - but, like the wannabe tough-guy dialogue, it felt like Raymond trying to be a badass more than anything else. I found it gratuitous.

All of which adds up to a boring, oddly-nuanced, dated, and generally gross novel that I wouldn’t recommend to most crime fiction fans. Some writers just aren’t well-known for a reason and I feel that Derek Raymond has fallen into relative obscurity because he just wasn’t that good. Just say no to noir and I Was Dora Suarez.