Where Crash literalised the term “auto-erotic”, Cocaine Nights does the same for “guilt complex” (note that these are both psychoanalytic terms). Cocaine Nights, Ballard’s most recent novel, is something of a departure; the first half of the book reads like a fairly straightforward detective piece, with none of Ballard’s trademark tampering with space-time or individual psyches. Cocaine Nights’ plot centres on the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar, where a housefire kills five people, and the subsequent involvement of Charles Prentice, an outsider whose brother Frank has been arrested for murder. Like Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and indeed Crash, the book is under the spell of an alluring and quite possibly insane visionary figure. In its description if a society hellbent on leisure, Cocaine Nights follows the line of the argument set out in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime compares the cuckoo clock art that came from the gentile Swiss culture with the decadent and depraved reign of the Borgias that produced da Vinci.