In 1960 Derek Raymond (aka Robin Cook), an upper-class wide-boy, made front-page news when a Rubens and a Renoir disappeared. This autobiography by the Fifties wide-boy and amateur art-dealer, Sixties mainstream novelist and Eighties crime-writer, reflects the contradictions in his personality - a mixture of bleakness and urbanity, black despair and courteous generosity. These are the memoirs of a natural writer - one whose behaviour at times is reminiscent of the computer on which he writes, and its array of hidden files that hold the functions which make it the subtle and flexible machine that it is. Like the computer, the writer's performance is judged on the final, visible quality of his output, rather than the obscure, cryptic processes that contributed to it. The book represents an attempt to break the codes and gain access to the author's personality. Derek Raymond's books include the series of four Factory crime novels.