What do you think?
Rate this book
The Crust on Its Uppers
First published in 1962, The Crust On Its Uppers, Derek Raymond's first novel (written when he was Robin Cook) is a gripping tale of class betrayal. With ruthless precision, it brings vividly to life a Britain of spivs, crooked toffs and bent coppers - in fact, a Britain that in its bare essentials has changed little over the past thirty years.
190 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
About the author
Derek Raymond
19 books138 followersAka Robin Cook.
Pen name for Robert William Arthur Cook. Born into privilege, Raymond attended Eton before completing his National Service. Raymond moved to France in the 50's before eventually returning to London in the 60's. His first book, 'Crust on its Uppers,' released in 1962 under his real name, was well-received but brought few sales. Moving through Italy he abandoned writing before returning to London. In 1984 he released the first of the Factory Series, 'He Died With His Eyes Open' under the name Derek Raymond. Following 'The Devil's Home On Leave' and 'How The Dead Live' he released his major work 'I Was Dora Suarez' in 1990. His memoirs were released as 'The Hidden Files'.
Pen name for Robert William Arthur Cook. Born into privilege, Raymond attended Eton before completing his National Service. Raymond moved to France in the 50's before eventually returning to London in the 60's. His first book, 'Crust on its Uppers,' released in 1962 under his real name, was well-received but brought few sales. Moving through Italy he abandoned writing before returning to London. In 1984 he released the first of the Factory Series, 'He Died With His Eyes Open' under the name Derek Raymond. Following 'The Devil's Home On Leave' and 'How The Dead Live' he released his major work 'I Was Dora Suarez' in 1990. His memoirs were released as 'The Hidden Files'.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 9, 2022
Derek Raymond is best known for his five noir crime Factory Novels series written in the 1980s, however before writing those novels, and around two decades earlier, he'd written as Robin Cook, his birth name, in the 1960s, before having to leave the UK for mainland Europe for a protracted period. This relocation reputedly linked to his criminal activities during that era.
Derek Raymond was born Robert William Arthur "Robin" Cook in 1931 and he died in London in 1994. He was the son of a textile magnate who dropped out of Eton, the famously expensive and elitist British public school, aged 16, and turned his back on his privileged background. After a period travelling and living in the US and Spain, he returned home to London and was variously employed as a pornographer, organiser of illegal gambling, money launderer, pig-slaughterer and minicab driver, who preferred to associate with criminals and con men. I’ve yet to read his 1992 memoir The Hidden Files which provides information about this period.
Cook apparently began his literary career writing pornography, but soon turned his attention to a series of darkly comic novels loosely based on his own experiences. The Crust on Its Uppers (1962), was his first published work. Involved in various petty schemes, from counterfeiting to fencing stolen goods, our nameless narrator presents a colourful tale of criminality meeting aristocrats which presciently presages the collision between gangsters, pop stars and toffs which, in part, came to characterise Swinging London a few years later.
So, is it any good?
I came to it having recently read Stand On Me by Frank Norman which also has a glossary of Cockney slang to help the reader decipher the Cockney vernacular. Unlike Frank Norman, Robin Cook lays it on way to thick in the book's early chapters, which makes it almost impenetrable in places (despite the glossary). At around the halfway stage the storyteller in Cook takes control and plot-wise things pick up considerably and an exciting story unfolds.
I love good London novels, and The Crust on Its Uppers works well as a London novel (though the action later relocates to Kent and then Europe) and so gets an extra star on that basis alone. Whilst not quite up there with, say, Colin MacInnes, Sam Selvon, or Patrick Hamilton, it is very evocative, especially when Cook reigns in the Cockneyisms.
4/5
Portrait of the artist as proto-Modernist
Derek Raymond was born Robert William Arthur "Robin" Cook in 1931 and he died in London in 1994. He was the son of a textile magnate who dropped out of Eton, the famously expensive and elitist British public school, aged 16, and turned his back on his privileged background. After a period travelling and living in the US and Spain, he returned home to London and was variously employed as a pornographer, organiser of illegal gambling, money launderer, pig-slaughterer and minicab driver, who preferred to associate with criminals and con men. I’ve yet to read his 1992 memoir The Hidden Files which provides information about this period.
Cook apparently began his literary career writing pornography, but soon turned his attention to a series of darkly comic novels loosely based on his own experiences. The Crust on Its Uppers (1962), was his first published work. Involved in various petty schemes, from counterfeiting to fencing stolen goods, our nameless narrator presents a colourful tale of criminality meeting aristocrats which presciently presages the collision between gangsters, pop stars and toffs which, in part, came to characterise Swinging London a few years later.
So, is it any good?
I came to it having recently read Stand On Me by Frank Norman which also has a glossary of Cockney slang to help the reader decipher the Cockney vernacular. Unlike Frank Norman, Robin Cook lays it on way to thick in the book's early chapters, which makes it almost impenetrable in places (despite the glossary). At around the halfway stage the storyteller in Cook takes control and plot-wise things pick up considerably and an exciting story unfolds.
I love good London novels, and The Crust on Its Uppers works well as a London novel (though the action later relocates to Kent and then Europe) and so gets an extra star on that basis alone. Whilst not quite up there with, say, Colin MacInnes, Sam Selvon, or Patrick Hamilton, it is very evocative, especially when Cook reigns in the Cockneyisms.
4/5
Portrait of the artist as proto-Modernist
June 14, 2014
Derek Raymond is generally acknowledged as the godfather of Brit Grit, based on his ruthlessly dark novels like I was Dora Suarez, but there’s a sheer delight in this earlier work that doesn’t seem to get the same love, maybe because it’s not as hard-boiled. Admittedly, the narrative is a bit elliptical. The central dodgy heist doesn’t really get going until late in the novel.
But the chief difficulty for readers both contemporary and modern is probably what I like best about it: the language.
I love how they call each other ‘morrie’ and I love the wealth of rhyming slang and sly jokes that fill its pages. Wonderful bits like:
“…those two gaffs have more ears stuck around the walls than a Cocteau film.”
“Only one thing to do about all that slag–-there’s a brick there, so I pick it up and hurl. Bang through the window. No slag hit, but all smothered in glass, and that followed by two fireballs flung with the master’s hand and lo! sylphidewise one falls with a dying fall flop almost on to a bird’s espresso-bongo hairdo.”
“It was nice the way she said cash like a civilised girl and not the reddies or something; though she was in the morrie world she was somehow not quite of it, which made me fonder of her than almost anything else-–when I say Christice was loyal I mean she had values of some kind, though daughter to pompoons.”
“Pushing our way through now against the va-et-vient, Marchmare and I gain this haven, to be rewarded at once by the sight of Messrs. Copewood and Cream, purveyors of shooters, etc., to the trade, who, with their followers, queen it from a table near the bar, where they feed steak to a snarling hound and rack their ganglia over the race-page of the linens. A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.”
“‘You Englishmen,’ said Herr Wurter. ‘You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.’”
Sure, it’s not for everybody, but it’s a real treat if you love a real wild spin in somebody else’s garrulous mind. And if you get lost, my edition anyway had a glossary so you could find that ‘vera’ means ‘gin’ and ‘slags’ (not quite in the current sense) mean the opposite of ‘morries’ who are all right.
“I wonder what it is we must deplore that turned us into morries evermore?”
But the chief difficulty for readers both contemporary and modern is probably what I like best about it: the language.
I love how they call each other ‘morrie’ and I love the wealth of rhyming slang and sly jokes that fill its pages. Wonderful bits like:
“…those two gaffs have more ears stuck around the walls than a Cocteau film.”
“Only one thing to do about all that slag–-there’s a brick there, so I pick it up and hurl. Bang through the window. No slag hit, but all smothered in glass, and that followed by two fireballs flung with the master’s hand and lo! sylphidewise one falls with a dying fall flop almost on to a bird’s espresso-bongo hairdo.”
“It was nice the way she said cash like a civilised girl and not the reddies or something; though she was in the morrie world she was somehow not quite of it, which made me fonder of her than almost anything else-–when I say Christice was loyal I mean she had values of some kind, though daughter to pompoons.”
“Pushing our way through now against the va-et-vient, Marchmare and I gain this haven, to be rewarded at once by the sight of Messrs. Copewood and Cream, purveyors of shooters, etc., to the trade, who, with their followers, queen it from a table near the bar, where they feed steak to a snarling hound and rack their ganglia over the race-page of the linens. A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.”
“‘You Englishmen,’ said Herr Wurter. ‘You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.’”
Sure, it’s not for everybody, but it’s a real treat if you love a real wild spin in somebody else’s garrulous mind. And if you get lost, my edition anyway had a glossary so you could find that ‘vera’ means ‘gin’ and ‘slags’ (not quite in the current sense) mean the opposite of ‘morries’ who are all right.
“I wonder what it is we must deplore that turned us into morries evermore?”
October 9, 2022
One unnamed, youngish English criminal, slumming around on the seedy side of London with his droogies (or, as he calls them, “morries”), uses slang to fight off nihilism. At least, that’s how I interpreted it. His argot is an amazing blend of Cockney rhyming slang, Yiddish, Americanisms, and the occasional line in French or Spanish. Impenetrable to the honest and square, there’s a glossary of it in front (which still doesn't cover everything).
It strongly reminded me of A Clockwork Orange, but with a simpler plot. Like Alex, the narrator is charming, cultured, and lacking in social conscience. He’s looking for kicks (not of the ultraviolent kind, however), and in general has a devil-may-care attitude. But he has his loves: a girl named Christice (who I think is actually his wife, even though he has to sneak into her parents’ house to see her), and his morries, especially Marchmare. They are “loyal,” the highest praise in his world.
But this novel didn’t have the powerful effect that Orange did on me. Maybe because it doesn’t have the same world-changing implications.
It strongly reminded me of A Clockwork Orange, but with a simpler plot. Like Alex, the narrator is charming, cultured, and lacking in social conscience. He’s looking for kicks (not of the ultraviolent kind, however), and in general has a devil-may-care attitude. But he has his loves: a girl named Christice (who I think is actually his wife, even though he has to sneak into her parents’ house to see her), and his morries, especially Marchmare. They are “loyal,” the highest praise in his world.
But this novel didn’t have the powerful effect that Orange did on me. Maybe because it doesn’t have the same world-changing implications.
Read
August 15, 2024A dive into the frantic organised crime world and Chelsea bohemia of 1960s London, through the unlikely lens of an Old Etonian. Robin Cook's (aka Derek Raymond) aim in life was to break out of the rigid upper class he was born into, sick of its ideals which he considered meaningless, and crime was his means of achieving the escape. This book is an illustration of his glorious descent, fizzing with cockney slang. I urge you to read it- a capital novel!
July 6, 2015
Crust on Its Uppers (A Five Star Title) Well, this was interesting, hailed as his forgotten first novel it certainly deserves to be remembered and read.If I described it the tone of the novel as "Oh I say, that is simply frightfully terrible old chap" meets "Orl right then geezer" or the drift as The Saint meets Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels you may get some idea.Upper Class dropouts on a crime spree, cudgels and cocktails, drugs and evening dress, aristocracy and arseholes.Once you get the drift it is actually quite enjoyable.
Written in the patois of the times which consists of rhyming slang and old expressions not heard these days. I think the first 2 pages in the book act as a glossary for the slang. Still there were some expressions that I could not get a handle on right up to the end. Like "loyal", used endlessly but in so many contexts that I still couldn't get the sense of it. Probably like someone in the distant future reading "pants" or "sick".The background is London in 1962, so already the "Swinging London" had started to emerge and it was this class that began the swinging, not the working class who were still shovelling coal in cellars while muttering "Bah Goom".A Good Read (in capitals) so go and good read it.
Written in the patois of the times which consists of rhyming slang and old expressions not heard these days. I think the first 2 pages in the book act as a glossary for the slang. Still there were some expressions that I could not get a handle on right up to the end. Like "loyal", used endlessly but in so many contexts that I still couldn't get the sense of it. Probably like someone in the distant future reading "pants" or "sick".The background is London in 1962, so already the "Swinging London" had started to emerge and it was this class that began the swinging, not the working class who were still shovelling coal in cellars while muttering "Bah Goom".A Good Read (in capitals) so go and good read it.
July 20, 2023
“Derek Raymond’s” first book. Overwritten and packed with Cockney dialogue that was tough to translate for me, there were still glimpses in dialogues and scenes that showed the great writer he would become by the time he got to the excellent Factory Detective series.
January 30, 2022
Could not get through the book. Definitely unlike his other work. Only got through 2 pages, couldn’t go any further. The lingo was 2 hard to follow.
March 26, 2012
The Crust On Its Uppers & The Suarez Seance bejesus
Sat, July 19,2008 07:51:02AM
The Crust On its Uppers by Derek Raymond and The
Suarez Seance at the Horse Hospital Off Russell
Square London 17.7.08. Featuring Gallon Drunk
with Richard Strange, Cathy Unsworth, Maxim
Jacuboski.
This show was a seance to summon up the spirit
of Derek Raymond and to celebrate the re-isssue
of his seminal novel and the album with Gallon
Drunk "I Was Dora Suarez" that he recorded with
them in 1993 shortly before his death in 1994.
It also coincides with the continuing re-
publishing of his books and I finished reading
his first novel The Crust On It's uppers on the
way to prague which turned out to be quite
fitting as the book arrives at its messy ending
at the borders of Czechoslovakia, which is odd
as its described as the quintessential London
Noir books. It more than lives up to its billing
and is written almost entirely in old Etonian
1960's underworld slang so as with the seance
there is much talk of Morries and slags and the
place is of course full of Ice-creams most of
whom are on the up and up so to speak.
As for the Seance it started with the most
unboiler like presense of Cathi Unsworth
introducing us to this Sohemian Society evening
by ringing her little bell and giving us a
potted biog of derek raymond before introducing
a film of him talking about writing Dora Suarez
and writing noir fiction in general shot by his
3 wife in his gaff in France, where he looks as
sozzled as you'd expect while he types on a very
old school computer a very cool film to watch.
Then after a break for us to all get another
drink the sconed half opened with Cathi Unsworth
having a chat about Derek with Maxim Jacubowski
who used to work in the legendary Compendium
bookshop and is Dereks literary executor, and to
a guy whose name I didn't catch but who put
Derek together with Gallon Drunk. The main chat
was with Maxim who told some good stories about
drinking and hanging out with Derek and what he
was like very cool indeed to find out he was
living just around the corner from here at the
end and drank in a few of my locals. This was a
good insight into a truely great London writer
and there were many mentions of the Crust on its
uppers and the influence its slang dictionary
had as well as the books impact, for me its just
a real great read with a bunch of caracters who
use slang I had almost forgotten from my
childhood and explains what my uncles and dads
friends were on about!!
Then it was time for the main event of James
Johnston and Terry Edwards as musical magicians
creating the dark brooding atmosphere for
Richard Strange to invoke and instill in himself
the darkness needed to take on Derek Raymonds
role of narrator of a section of I Was Dora
Suarez a book that is right up there on the
chill you to the bone dark murder books.
The musical backing was jazzy atmospherics with
some great sax and miniture trumpet playing by
Terry Edwards and some very spooky keyboards and
odd bit of textured guitar mangling from James
as I finally get to see a Richard Strange
performance I loved rather than the shows I saw
him do with his band way back when that he got
bottled for!!
He was Suave and debonair as he tried to have
that just so Etonian accent as he was talking
about the way Dora was splattered over that flat
in Clapham.
This show was over far too quickly of me, but if
they had done the entire novel it would have
been too soon a great night out that as it
should ended up in the pub across the road from
the Horse Hospital having the odd beer and
talking to several people who knew Derek!
Sat, July 19,2008 07:51:02AM
The Crust On its Uppers by Derek Raymond and The
Suarez Seance at the Horse Hospital Off Russell
Square London 17.7.08. Featuring Gallon Drunk
with Richard Strange, Cathy Unsworth, Maxim
Jacuboski.
This show was a seance to summon up the spirit
of Derek Raymond and to celebrate the re-isssue
of his seminal novel and the album with Gallon
Drunk "I Was Dora Suarez" that he recorded with
them in 1993 shortly before his death in 1994.
It also coincides with the continuing re-
publishing of his books and I finished reading
his first novel The Crust On It's uppers on the
way to prague which turned out to be quite
fitting as the book arrives at its messy ending
at the borders of Czechoslovakia, which is odd
as its described as the quintessential London
Noir books. It more than lives up to its billing
and is written almost entirely in old Etonian
1960's underworld slang so as with the seance
there is much talk of Morries and slags and the
place is of course full of Ice-creams most of
whom are on the up and up so to speak.
As for the Seance it started with the most
unboiler like presense of Cathi Unsworth
introducing us to this Sohemian Society evening
by ringing her little bell and giving us a
potted biog of derek raymond before introducing
a film of him talking about writing Dora Suarez
and writing noir fiction in general shot by his
3 wife in his gaff in France, where he looks as
sozzled as you'd expect while he types on a very
old school computer a very cool film to watch.
Then after a break for us to all get another
drink the sconed half opened with Cathi Unsworth
having a chat about Derek with Maxim Jacubowski
who used to work in the legendary Compendium
bookshop and is Dereks literary executor, and to
a guy whose name I didn't catch but who put
Derek together with Gallon Drunk. The main chat
was with Maxim who told some good stories about
drinking and hanging out with Derek and what he
was like very cool indeed to find out he was
living just around the corner from here at the
end and drank in a few of my locals. This was a
good insight into a truely great London writer
and there were many mentions of the Crust on its
uppers and the influence its slang dictionary
had as well as the books impact, for me its just
a real great read with a bunch of caracters who
use slang I had almost forgotten from my
childhood and explains what my uncles and dads
friends were on about!!
Then it was time for the main event of James
Johnston and Terry Edwards as musical magicians
creating the dark brooding atmosphere for
Richard Strange to invoke and instill in himself
the darkness needed to take on Derek Raymonds
role of narrator of a section of I Was Dora
Suarez a book that is right up there on the
chill you to the bone dark murder books.
The musical backing was jazzy atmospherics with
some great sax and miniture trumpet playing by
Terry Edwards and some very spooky keyboards and
odd bit of textured guitar mangling from James
as I finally get to see a Richard Strange
performance I loved rather than the shows I saw
him do with his band way back when that he got
bottled for!!
He was Suave and debonair as he tried to have
that just so Etonian accent as he was talking
about the way Dora was splattered over that flat
in Clapham.
This show was over far too quickly of me, but if
they had done the entire novel it would have
been too soon a great night out that as it
should ended up in the pub across the road from
the Horse Hospital having the odd beer and
talking to several people who knew Derek!
March 29, 2008
Well, it took me forever to get through this one, and it's not Derek Raymond's fault. Just finished (for now) 2 months of 16 hour workdays, followed by enough alcohol to be nice to people just long enough to try and get some sleep. No complaints, save that it leaves little time to read.
There's something infuriating about Raymond, and it may be the thing that makes him worth reading. He's a good crime writer, and his depictions of the criminal underworld in 60s & 70s London are cinematic, all muted tones until they explode red. The tendancy to slip into melodrama is the sticky part, and this being the 1st D.Raymond book I've picked up in many years, I'd almost forgotten. Said melodrama seems to spring from a real desire to break free of all limits, and to live free and wild. In the Smoke. D.R.'s a philosopher, and I give him points for that. Sometimes a little bald in exposition, detract points for that.
Excellent for collecters of obsolete slang.
There's something infuriating about Raymond, and it may be the thing that makes him worth reading. He's a good crime writer, and his depictions of the criminal underworld in 60s & 70s London are cinematic, all muted tones until they explode red. The tendancy to slip into melodrama is the sticky part, and this being the 1st D.Raymond book I've picked up in many years, I'd almost forgotten. Said melodrama seems to spring from a real desire to break free of all limits, and to live free and wild. In the Smoke. D.R.'s a philosopher, and I give him points for that. Sometimes a little bald in exposition, detract points for that.
Excellent for collecters of obsolete slang.
April 9, 2009
What a hoot. Written in 1962 in Raymond first career as a novelist, this is written in the stongest most over the top cockerney dialect its untrue. There is even a dictionary of terms at the front, but I am fairly sure noone uses the term scotches to refer to legs. What are scotch pegs?
The cockney patoir is really over the top at the beginning... reminding me of a clockwork orange and getting in the way of understanding the story. However, this soon settles down and is much less OTT from about 1/3 in.
The story is not up to much and probably refelcts Raymonds life of an upper class man getting involved in sixties gangland shennagans. There are forgeries, trips the continenent and he winds up in chokey.
What makes the book a hoot is the way that he talks directly to the reader and the phrases.... never heard charvered before but this one stuck.
For fans only....
The cockney patoir is really over the top at the beginning... reminding me of a clockwork orange and getting in the way of understanding the story. However, this soon settles down and is much less OTT from about 1/3 in.
The story is not up to much and probably refelcts Raymonds life of an upper class man getting involved in sixties gangland shennagans. There are forgeries, trips the continenent and he winds up in chokey.
What makes the book a hoot is the way that he talks directly to the reader and the phrases.... never heard charvered before but this one stuck.
For fans only....
November 16, 2015
Raymond's first novel, published in 1962, doesn't have a great deal to recommend it, frankly. The rest of his early novels have never been reprinted, so I don't think I'll bother paying an arm and a leg for secondhand copies. It isn't a terrible novel, but it's gimmicky with the ridiculous slang (which doesn't work nearly as well as in A Clockwork Orange) and, worse, the actual plot doesn't really get going until the second half. This is all self-indulgent twaddle and a long, long way away from the searing work Raymond would produce in his declining years.
February 6, 2011
This Derek Raymond crime story has a big rep, and that's what sold it to me. But I didn't like it. Toffs who want to do a bit of blagging just didn't grab me by the lapels. The criminal argot used (there is a glossary) is dated and pretty irritating – unappealing posh guys talking about 'boat races' and jam jars' every other word became wearing. The main 'morrie' has a distinctive voice and was a rounded character – I just didn't like him or care.
August 23, 2014
Not his best, but quite exciting once I got past the first couple of chapters with their excess of 1960s gang speak and rhyming slang. It was like reading an early Michael Caine film, a bit cheesy, a bit lairy, but the underlying story was good fun.
June 20, 2008
Derek Raymond is the 'Govnor' of British Crime fiction. Also he has a 'poetic' style with respect to the lowlife's that are in his books. Good police narration mixed with the grit of London.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews