by Robert Edric 319pp, Doubleday, £16.99
A small yacht runs aground 100 metres from the shore in the Humber estuary. It's night. Visibility is bad and the tide is out. The Humber at that point is "more mud, silt and shifting, shallow channels than running water"; the river proper is a long way away. Aboard the yacht, one figure stands for a while waving and shouting to the shore, then quits the boat and is silently absorbed by the mud, while a second sits unmoving on the deck. By the time help arrives, both of them have vanished for good. A year later, these events - these murders, if that's what they prove to be - lead Hull-based private eye Leo Rivers to slumlord Simon Fowler and the braided streams of violence, property speculation and gangmaster capitalism which flow through the city.
This is the second Leo Rivers mystery. The first, Cradle Song, featured a major character who never appeared onstage and a detective less a human being than a synopsis for one. Hearsay replaced action, carrying a narrative which was complex, retrospective and often conjectural. Despite this risky and unappealing method of storytelling, Edric managed to convey a powerful sense of agenda, of the manipulative practices of investigator as well as investigated. There was a feeling that all is testimony and all testimony is unreliable. The contemporary investigator, the author seemed to be saying, can barely produce a result, let alone a satisfactory sense of justice or closure.
In Siren Song, some attempt has been made to sharpen up the narration and connect the dissociated Rivers more directly to the events he is investigating. He has an affair with his client's daughter. He finds himself tied into the case by unsuspected emotional bonds. He confronts Fowler, and Fowler's mucky business, with unsuppressed, if largely unfocused, aggression. But none of this is very visceral; and though, every so often, Rivers tracks down a phone number or consults a public record, detection still proceeds by spoken exchange. These encounters, in pubs, bedrooms and along the bleak Humber shores, are accomplished with a blunt northern honesty which disguises several layers of subtle northern guile. Everyone is using everyone else, and everyone, as they're quick to inform one another, knows it. They know what they know, and they have not one but many plans for each other.
At its best, this produces a kind of clipped humour. At its worst it leads to paragraphs like this: "I wondered how much else she knew about what he knew, and how much of what neither of them revealed of these shared understandings was all a part of the unspoken and perfectly understood intimacy between them. She watched me for a moment, perhaps guessing at my own uncertain conjectures."
Rivers remains a bleak little cypher. He lives on his own, but we never see how. He has no inner life. He has no close relationships. Although we suspect that he's been round a time or two with his friend Yvonne, and although he exchanges the odd telephone call with his mentor and former partner, nothing is happening in his life but the case of the moment. He is simply the investigating eye, the wavering moral focus for the reader's energies among all these shifting social currents and streams of information. The Humber estuary offers a metaphor for his state of perpetual disorientation, and ours. It is a kind of fluid discharge from the moral and economic events a little way upstream. You will never stand firm on it, or find your way back to either solid ground or deep water, both of which are at least navigable. Edric drags the reader through the mud, but it isn't just the mud of Hull: it's the mud of contemporary evasiveness.
Most investigations, Rivers believes, come to no great conclusion. Some peter out amid minor revelations and disappointments, "small confessions"; most don't even get that far, but die of exhaustion and unhappy compromise. Demonstrating this is a laudably realistic goal for a mystery writer, but it could be done more vividly. Edric has a knack for the shift of perspective which shows you that a world you have begun to accept has morally barren assumptions and rules; that in the end the "facts" are ineffectual and even the solutions to mysteries are negotiated. But the intent of a mystery is to create excitement, curiosity, a need to know; and if you are planning to release the reader into a fog, you should at least fill it with concrete objects.
Edric fails on these counts, partly because his prose is both dull and uneconomic, and partly because he fails to draw the reader into the subculture of human trafficking on which Siren Song relies for its social colour and moral drive. We simply don't see enough. We're left with dialogue, written up with such a determination not to be melodramatic that it lacks any kind of drama at all.
· M John Harrison's latest novel is Light (Gollancz).