Tishomingo Blues, by Elmore Leonard <br></br>Clubland, by Kevin Sampson

A case of Mississippi blues and Liverpool noir

When it comes to crime, are British writers as tough as the Americans? Raymond Chandler famously pointed out the schism between the effete, body-in-the-library mysteries of Agatha Christie and the hard-boiled, streetwise fiction of Dashiell Hammett. How much has changed? These two crime novels make it possible to compare British noir with the US version.

Elmore Leonard has long been regarded as one of the best in the business, often avoiding the overused New York and LA milieus. His stamping-ground here is a grittily realised Mississippi, where massive violence is meted out among a criminal fraternity whose redneck stupidity is peculiarly American. Kevin Sampson's Clubland is set in a Liverpool every bit as dangerous: we plunge into a sleazy ghetto of sex tourists, strippers and drug addicts, with life every bit as cheap as in Leonard's Delta.

The differences, however, are as marked as the similarities. Leonard's hapless protagonist Lenahan observes a grisly killing and is pursued by a bunch of thugs. With the master of the sardonically written crime novel in which black humour counterbalances mayhem, Lenahan can't just stumble over the murder in an alley. He witnesses it from the top of an 80ft diving tower (as a stunt diver in an amusement park). The killers are cut from a cloth we have encountered before in Leonard: squabbling mafiosi, not overburdened with brains, who converse in a fractured (and brilliantly observed) argot.

Inevitably, with this Southern setting, race is an issue: another witness is Taylor, a black petty criminal who co-opts Lenahan into a lawless lifestyle. The bloody high jinks end in a recreation of a Confederate battle, with a Mafia don attired as saviour of the South, Ulysses S Grant.

Sampson's setting could not be more different, its narrow horizons constrained by placing the action between Runcorn and Birkenhead, via the mean streets of Liverpool. But the language has all the demented idiosyncrasy of Leonard, with violent criminal Ged Brennan's narration voicing his irritation with the young thugs stealing his thunder. His often impenetrable dialect resembles nothing so much as a Scouse version of Anthony Burgess's Nardsat in A Clockwork Orange.

Both books have bags of vitality and quirky detail, though neither represents each writer at his best. Leonard piles on the outrageous incidents at the expense of his normal verisimilitude, while Sampson allows us little respite from his relentlessly unpleasant dramatis personae. Even the progressive-minded Margo, with her visions of urban regeneration, is an unsympathetic character.

The tougher book by far is Clubland. This really is a deeply amoral immersion in a mean-spirited world, where the cut-throat humour barely undercuts the omnipresent menace. Leonard's shenanigans, by contrast, stray into comic opera territory. Things have changed since Chandler: now it would appear that Brit crime writers are quite as tough as the Yanks.