BOOKS: IN BRIEF

2 Manchester Slingback, by Nicholas Blincoe, Picador pounds 9.99. It's a relief not to wade through another novel about Ecstasy. Speed was the drug of choice in Manchester's gay Village in 1981, a world of "Bowie- boys" and mascara, rent-boys and drag queens, in the times before Manchester went Madchester and Acid House took over.

We first meet our hero Jake in London in '96, running a casino and indulging in ultra-violence. A policeman from his past sniffs him out and takes him back up north to help him with enquiries into the murder of an ex- associate from Jake's time in the Village.

Blincoe alternates his chapters between the consciousness of Jake the teenage Speed queen and Jake the thirtysomething with the guilt-edged hangover he just can't lose. He can write with a certain energy, mixing adolescent action with middle-aged remembrance in a double act of narrative regression.

Gradually the make-up from the glam years comes off. The "Village" has been cleaned up and cleared out. The gay bars have become brasseries and the feather boas have been replaced by mobile phones. Good-Day, an ageing drag queen and landlord of Jake's favourite haunt, has sold up and sold out, kicking off his heels and hanging up his wig for good. But it's not just the gay scene that is exposed. The criminality of Jake's past - his unwitting involvement with what turns out to be murder and paedophilia - demands to be dealt with.

Blincoe takes on some pretty big issues. Alongside the central storyline of child abuse leading to murder, a range of political and social problems try to edge their way in. The IRA bombing of the Arndale Centre gets too clumsy a mention - "It was horrible, more than horrible" - better not mention it at all. The news that one of Jake's friends has died of Aids during his time in London feels as tacked on as a fake finger nail. Christianity is personified in the cliched Bible- and gay-bashing policeman, Inspector Pascal. It's his crusade that brings an end to the "Village" as Jake knew it and he who becomes the unlikely answer to the questions that arise out of Jake's past. The way Blincoe writes about interior decoration (a recurring theme), is far more convincing than the lip service he pays to more interesting topics. Issues begin to interrupt the flow rather than add to it, and the story becomes over-complicated and confused.

Davey Green, the policeman investigating the case, comes from the Chandler- for-beginners school of detective fiction. Though advertised as a plain- speaking Northern copper, his use of camp Americanisms makes him less than believable. I can't imagine a Mancunian policeman describing the train trip to London as "getting to the smoke was nothing but a drag". What might generously be described as stream of consciousness becomes nonsense, as consistency and control of tone and character make way for the author's patter. No one voice is recognisable except Blincoe's, and I quickly got tired of listening to that. Joe Cogan

ENDS......