Maggie Gee's review of Cocaine Nights was published in the TLS of September 20, 1996.

J G. Ballard is a professional writer in the best sense of the term. Beginning as a copywriter and then a scientific and technical journalist, he has written two dozen works of fiction, moving from a cult reputation as a science-fiction writer to the literary mainstream with books like the Booker short-listed Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. From the outset, he has used genre writing as the fixed springboard for a series of dazzling and original dives.

Cocaine Nights begins and ends like a crime novel. Murder has been committed in Estrella del Mar, an enclave of expatriate Brits near Marbella, on the Costa del Sol. Five people have been burned to death in a mysterious fire at the house of the Hollingers, Estrella del Mar's most exalted residents. The story is narrated by Charles Prentice, a successful travel-journalist, who is drawn into the world of "sun and sundowners" when his beloved younger brother, Frank, manager of the resort's chic Club Nautico, confesses to the murders - although no one, including the police, appears to believe in his guilt. Charles sets out to establish Frank's innocence by exploring this incestuous little world and pinpointing the real criminals.

So Ballard sets up the kind of conundrum beloved of crime-writers, sending off his central character in pursuit of answers in the approved manner. Why was the retired film tycoon, Hollinger, found in his jacuzzi with the Swedish maid, Bibi Janssen? Why was Mrs Hollinger, the former Rank Charm School starlet, in the room of the male secretary, Roger Sansom? And why did her niece, Anne Hollinger, burn to death with a syringe in her hand? On the surface, this book is an extended examination of the various possible combinations of victim, motive and criminal.

But Cocaine Nights both fulfils and cunningly undermines the rules of the crime novel. Ballard doesn't point, in the last few pages, to an alternative suspect, or suddenly unveil a devilishly intricate alternative mechanism of causation for the crime. This is the juncture in the classic crime novel where even the most interesting practitioners (such as Ruth Rendell in her recent The Keys to the Street) can disappoint by offering a solution which, however ingenious, is simpler and shallower than the world they have created, and seems almost extraneous to the novel as a literary construct. Ballard is too much of a professional to flout the rules of the game by leaving the reader in doubt on the whodunit level, but his solution directs us back to that sprawling futuropolis of "a billion balconies facing the sun", which is the book's central concern - Estrella del Mar and all its sister colonies down the coast. His ending therefore satisfies at a deeper level, too.

As a travel-journalist, Charles can plausibly operate as the poetic anthropologist Ballard needs to characterize the timeless, workless limbo – "the longest afternoon in the world" – which he thinks may be our future. A few human beings will perhaps work for a decade before they are thirty, but for most there will be nothing but perpetual leisure. Charles sees, as his brother did before him, that that way lies the "brain death" of an "eventless world", the atrophy of thought and feeling in "an intense inward migration" behind locked doors and security grilles.

But vacuums attract whirlwinds. Tutored by the hyper-energetic, charming tennis coach, Bobby Crawford, Charles begins to believe, as his brother did before him, that a certain amount of mayhem may be necessary to stimulate the glazed expatriates, "wandering the golf greens by day and dozing in front of their satellite television in the evening". Blonde, handsome, looking like a youthful and intensely eager junior officer, Crawford is credited by everyone with the relatively recent awakening of Estrella del Mar into a community where theatre and the arts flourish. Slowly, Crawford extends his influence over Charles, at the same time letting him see more and more of his diabolic alter ego, the lord of misrule who distributes cocaine and speed because they are preferable to sleeping pills and tranquillizers, and considers extremes of violence as the purest theatrical spectacle. Ballard's thought-experiment pricks liberal complacency; we don't like to think that "crime is part of the necessary roughage of life", or that "the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side".

Occasionally, I felt a lack of editing in certain over-wordy passages of dialogue - "what else is there to do in paradise? You catch the psycho-active fruit that falls from the tree. Believe me, everyone here is trying to lie down with the serpent." Similarly, in one or two descriptive passages, where a sentence of lyrical assonance – "the estate was still bathed in a marble light, a world of glooms glimpsed in a morbid dream" – is flattened by an over-explicit one: "Death had arrived at the Hollingers and decided to stay, settling her skirts over the shadowy pathways."

But this is quibbling. J. G. Ballard has achieved something very rare at this end of the twentieth century – he writes books about our collective psyche which have wide popular appeal and are newsworthy and filmable, yet he is also a writer's writer. He is admired because he uses language with such easy elegance, so little self-advertisement or vanity. Once this book is shut, the images and phrases linger; a woman does a strong crawl, "hands ransacking the waves", people savour "the silky mis-demeanours of the night", and the blank sun blazes down for ever on Estrella del Mar's "memory-erasing white architecture".

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