Raymond Chandler It takes a particularly rough set of circumstances to engender hardboiled fiction and as history would have it, the United States was the perfect environment. Pioneered by Caroll John Daly and ushered into the mainstream by Dashiell Hammett, it was Raymond Chandler that brought the genre into more literary acceptance. While Chandler’s smooth-‐operating Philip Marlowe is very different from Derek Raymond’s unnamed Detective Sergeant, the archetype of the ruggedly honorable yet thoroughly street-‐ weary detective is clearly one that Derek Raymond lifted from Chandler. He made no qualms about admitting this either and cited Chandler as the first of his three main influences.
Jim Thompson
If Chandler created the archetype, Jim Thompson provided the investigative blue print. We’re not talking procedural here, either. Thompson was one of the first writers of crime fiction to obsessively seek out the psychology behind the killer’s impulses. While far more primitive than I Was Dora Suarez, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me is clearly the black spring from which Derek Raymond’s masterpiece flowed. Thompson’s psychological interest in the human within the killer creates an uneasy sympathy for the author and reader alike. In I Was Dora Suarez Raymond brought the device of inner investigation to its pinnacle, rendering in plain view the inner workings of a violent serial killer. Jim Thompson was perhaps the most important of Raymond’s influences.