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The Crust on its Uppers
Robin Cook
New Authors Limited, 1962

This crime novel’s old Etonian author was in the thick of London’s criminal underworld: Robin Cook – who later changed his name to Derek Raymond, under which moniker he had much success – was born on 12th June 1931 to an upper-class family with City connections.

Expulsion from Eton and an inglorious National Service military career (latrines corporal), was followed by car smuggling to Gibraltar, dodgy tape-recorder selling in Spain, art scams, and fronting bogus property companies for Charlie Da Silva, an associate of the Kray twins.

Before Chelsea’s King’s Road meant the Swinging Sixties, it was the happy hunting ground for tougher players: people like the late Diana Dors and her lover “Dandy Kim” Caborn-Waterfield – and upper-class con men, of whom Cook was arguably the doyen. And when he wasn’t scamming, he was holding twenty-four-hour parties with the likes of Jeffrey Bernard.

So, Crust isn’t simply a roman-à-clef of Cook’s late twenties; it is a gritty memorial of criminal London in the late fifties.

The novel gets us into the action straight away. After giving us a short autobiography, its nameless protagonist (with, you’ve guessed it, a public school background) introduces us to his fellow conspirators, or ‘morries’, Marchmare and the Archbubble. Like him they’re young, upper class, need loot for their expensive tastes and will do whatever it takes to get it… so long as it isn’t straight.

After a drunken night at Winston’s (a real Mayfair nightclub of the time where the underworld could meet the elite), the protagonist gets a phone call from a tough street villain called Mike. Meeting in a West End drinking club, Mike reveals the scam in which he wants to involve the protagonist and his morries: importing slush (counterfeit money) from behind the Iron Curtain. As he talks, Mike’s eyes ‘are burning with a deadly gleam El Greco’d’ve been proud of.’

Doubtful at first, the protagonist lets himself be carried along with the scam, and we see how its strategy and tactics – at one point the teachings of the great military strategist von Clausewitz are invoked – are organised and executed. This happens by way of illegal gambling dens in Belgravia, slum properties in the Balls Pond Road, greasy spoon caffs in Gloucester Road, and another trip to Winston’s.

We get a picture of a London that’s on the cusp of change between postwar austerity and the ‘Never Had It So Good’ era that would explode into the sixties. Needless to say, things don’t go quite as planned: a vital rendezvous is missed, there’s a terrifying interrogation in a German castle, and... Well, I won’t spoil the ending for you.

The novel sparkles with slang – there’s so much of it that there’s a glossary at the front of the novel. Indeed, lexicographer Eric Partridge regarded Crust as the best source of criminal slang to have appeared for twenty-five years.

Crust gives us criminals who are not cardboard cut-outs, but complex, dark characters. Early on, the protagonist recalls a conversation he once had on the Czech border with Marchmare during some Continental skulduggery. He’s shocked by Marchmare declaring:

   ‘Oh, how I do hate everyone!’
   ‘But why morrie?’
    He doesn’t know, though, except obscurely it’s all down to mum, who certainly does, from what I can hear, seem to have dragged him up a bit strange.
   ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘how much is your father worth?’ 
   ‘I don’t know,’ I say, moodying, ‘about eighty grand.’
   ‘Habits?’
   ‘What do you mean, habits?’
   ‘You know what I mean,’ he says, all impatient. ‘Where’s his office, what time does he reach it, what time does he leave. See what I mean? Slip it into him in the street.’
   ‘No, morrie.’
   ‘Yellow streak down your back, morrie?’
   ‘Maybe.’
   ‘I would.’
   ‘Why don’t you, then?’
   ‘Not enough reddy in it in my case.’
    He sighs. He isn’t joking. A real morrie conversation in the heart of the Tyrol.

After Crust came more novels in which Cook dissected the downside of the sixties, followed by a fallow period in the seventies. Meanwhile, other Robin Cooks had showed up: the author of medical novels, and the Scottish politician and some-time Foreign Secretary who was an early victim of New Labour spin.

Cook renamed himself Derek Raymond – joining the names of two dear, dead friends – and returned to writing in the eighties. His series of Factory novels followed, featuring a nameless detective-sergeant, based in a tough West End police station known as ‘The Factory’, who solves unexplained deaths.

In doing so, Cook/Raymond examines – in one case literally – the skull beneath the skin, aspects of individual and societal behaviour that most people prefer to ignore. He Died With His Eyes Open and I Was Dora Suarez are reckoned to be the best of the series that he produced before his death in 1994. But Crust did the preliminary spadework for Cook’s later, darker excavations. Serpent’s Tail reissued the novel in 2000, so any literary morrie who’s all about trout can easily get their lifters on a copy.