Aside from being one of rock’s great unsolved mysteries, the disappearance of Richey Edwards, the guitarist and lyricist with the Manic Street Preachers, is highly unusual. Several famous rock musicians have committed suicide, lost their minds or gone temporarily AWOL, but none has vanished the way Edwards did on February 1, 1995.

His body has never been found and he is “presumed dead”, which may have been his intention. Edwards was a thoughtful depressive, morbidly obsessed with his effect. The most notorious example of this came during an interview with the NME journalist Steve Lamacq in 1991 when he calmly carved 4REAL into his arm with a razor blade, a wound that required 17 stitches. Such extreme attention-seeking, along with the unconfirmed sightings of Edwards in exotic locations from Goa to the Canary Islands, lend some plausibility to the notion that four years after mutilating himself for the media, he might have staged a “pseudocide”. The trail of clues he left suggests that whatever happened was carefully premeditated.

Early on the morning of a promotional trip to America, Edwards checked out of his London hotel and drove home to Wales, where he briefly visited his Cardiff flat. In a rather stagey display, he left his passport on the desk along with his bank cards and some Prozac. Two weeks later, his Vauxhall Cavalier was found abandoned at a service station near the Severn bridge, close to a spot where many people jump to their death. This could either have been what Edwards did, or what he wanted us to think he did. The fact that he withdrew £2,800 from his current account over the fortnight prior to his disappearance supports the theory that he was planning to abscond and assume a new identity. This is still his bandmates’ view. Apart from using some of Edwards’s old lyrics on their latest album, Journal for Plague ­Lovers, they still set aside 25% of their royalties on his behalf.

Rob Jovanovic is no detective, and, despite the book’s feisty subtitle, he has nothing much to add to the missing-person investigation. He doesn’t try to trace the mystery girl Jo with whom Edwards was in touch in early 1995 (and whom he mentioned in his last interview). And like many indie-rock specialists, he has little appetite for interviewing police officers or the private eye hired by the Manics’ management after Edwards disappeared. After a couple of trips to Wales and a light churn of the known facts, his book ends with a resounding whimper: “It’s unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure.”

What really interests Jovanovic about Edwards are his cultural preoccupations, which ranged from the gory suicide of the Japanese writer Mishima to the Russian roulette scenes in The Deer Hunter. A Version of Reason opens with an account of the disappearance of the American poet Weldon Kees, who was last seen near the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955. The way Jovanovic tells it, we’re supposed to think he’s describing Edwards 40 years later. If this sounds a tad pretentious, well, in a glum, sophomoric fashion so was Edwards. He used to wear a T-shirt blazoned with Philip Larkin’s misanthropic grumble, “They f*** you up your mum and dad.” In one of the final lyrics he wrote for the band, he de-claimed, “I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer / I spat out Plath and Pinter.” Alongside the grim tales of self-harming, Jovanovic's thorough inventory of Edwards’s taste makes it clear that in his mind he was on some kind of death mission.Whether this was actual or fictional remains unanswered.

A Version of Reason by Rob Jovanovic
Orion £18.99 pp297

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