5 JUNE 2004, Page 48

Clues and booze on the Humber

Alan Wall

SIREN SONG by Robert Edric Doubleday, £16.99, pp. 396, ISBN 0385605765 The detective thriller offers the satisfactions of what was once called the venatic art, that is to say the world of the hunt. Identifying spoors, following tracks, connecting up phenomena to origin. And all of this without leaving the easy chair. It also allows at least for the detection and elimination of evil, in a world where evil itself so often baffles, or merely smirks triumphantly as it strolls out of court with a suspended sentence. Like the cinematic cartoon, that great invention of modernity at its best, the thriller presents us with a world we know to be untrue, since it makes all atrocity soluble, and yet it still permits the telling of types of truth within its conventions. Vivid social detail is one such: it might be there in Ian Rankin but it was there too in Conan Doyle. The London portrayed in the Sherlock Holmes stories is anarchic, exotically sinister, often far beyond the reach of social control. Crimes in the riverside wharves were as ubiquitous as rats. If this was a city of dreams, a fair number had started smokily in opium dens, and often turned out nightmarish. Only the unrelenting extremity of the detective's intelligence, his commitment to a world of material cause and effect, could penetrate to the heart of this darkness. Such a seeker is always Theseus in the labyrinth, and his Ariadne's thread is the line of his own evidential reasoning.

Well, here's another city with a mighty river running through it. Not London, though, not New York or San Francisco, but Hull. Much of the action here takes place on the Humber where John Prescott apparently sails these days, while resolutely refusing to serve drinks to any of the passengers or eat a single oyster, on the yacht of a businessman friend. One sailor then who made it from the hammock to the bridge, and is now in a position to issue commands to the poor sods in steerage. But our hero, Leo Rivers, is no Sherlock Holmes. A different literary lineage is being revisited here: that of the gumshoe.

The private detective of fiction has a noble lineage, and in Raymond Chandler's Marlowe he came to speak some of the best prose of the last century, simultaneously elegant and demotic, the streetwise, hardboiled mandarin talk of the private dick. All detective thrillers start with two essentials: a scene of extra-legal complication and a tracker: a crime and a pursuivant intelligence. Or if you like, Theseus again, confronted with a labyrinth and something very peculiar bellowing in the night inside it.

Simon Fowler has arrived from London and is soon buying up Hull properties in a blitz of speculative voracity. But is he responsible for the death of Helen Brooks? She has died on his yacht, or rather, very shortly after getting off it. This was after a somewhat mysterious jolly on the Humber, then it's down with her into the mud and slime, the very place Venus first emerged from. Or is it? Helen is beautiful and spoilt, a serious looker with some serious petulance to match. She also has a

hole in her arm where all the money goes. To find out the rest, you'll have to read the book yourself.

Edric is exploring some very pertinent material here. We have asylum-seekers renting dilapidated properties from Rachman landlords. There is a figure not dissimilar to Van Hoogstraten, that fellow who recently walked free on appeal after arranging for a disputatious associate to be so badly beaten that he died. It is a world in which tenant means vermin and a refugee is a target for murder. The ghosts of the oysterpickers of Morecambe Bay and their gangmasters are never very far away.

There's a fair amount of doffing of caps to Chandler's Marlowe, right down to whisky in the filing cabinet and a pair of glasses needing the dust blown off them. There's lots of lunchtime boozing too — Humphrey Bogart would be proud. None of your whole-earth detective types here, using bio-friendly invisible inks and sipping herbal tea, No. Good old-fashioned malt. Smoky bars and smoky women whose morals are far from impregnable. It's never one bottle of wine here but three. The dick with the estuarine name even manages to bed one of his clients with Bogartian (or should it be Marlovian?) insouciance. And towards the end, for a patch of about 50 pages, the plot develops Chandleresque complications, occasionally producing a not dissimilar brainache in the dutiful reader. But this soon passes and we are back once more with the Humber, which is more than complicated and dangerous enough: We were an island flowing with rivers, seas that came and went; and some of those rivers and seas remained unfathomed even today; and others changed their configuration with every tide.'

Boats and broads then, Clews and clues. The one word grew out of the other, originally signifying a skein or ball of thread, and referring back to that bobbin Ariadne handed the faithless Theseus. Sometimes it seems as though things remain much of a muchness in the world of fiction. But can Chandler's hard-bitten poetry really be reproduced in the same streets that produced Philip Larkin's Welfare Wasteland? Maybe. Edric, to be fair to him, doesn't try. He keeps his prose functional and the tale moving, despite the considerable amount of psychologising that goes on. Like the Humber, the book is deceptive: it moves so quickly you don't always register its depths.

What is the siren song then? The sound of money and influence? The effect wreaked by beauty, particularly selfdestructive beauty? It seems to come from over the river anyway, and the river is always dangerous, even at its most enticing.

Alan Wall's latest book, China, will be published in August in paperback by Vintage at £8.99.