Crime time on the coast

What is it about the English seaside? Writers have been capitalising on its seedy glamour since the days of Dickens. Think Greene, Buchan, Hamilton, Zahavi. And now David Seabrook.

All the Devils Are Here is a rather erudite and dystopian scrapbook of highbrow badinage and lowbrow sleaze, reminiscent of, though less dense than, Iain Sinclair's writings on London, but set instead among the stone villas and dingy sidestreets of north Kent's coastal towns.

As it turns out, north Kent provides particularly ripe material: historically rich, hopelessly marginalised, savagely seedy and not nearly as familiar as its south-coast cousins. Seabrook carves a two-lane highway through the lot, musing both on the terrain's history and its current messy state.

All The Devils gets off to a literally rocky start with a rather inaccessible ramble about TS Eliot's convalescence in Cliftonville, a polite crag overlooking Margate sands. It's a well-written ramble, with Seabrook mixing in with the crowds of bewildered asylum seekers and bored unemployed who now roam Margate's streets, but you wonder what it's for. Given this is a book about place, Seabrook's opener seems dangerously unsignposted.

Lulled into thinking this is some mildly quirky, literary travelogue, you yawn and guiltily skip a few pages. But persistence pays off as All the Devils soon descends into the dark and cancerous bowels of the thing. Seabrook promises all the devils and he delivers them: rent boys, murderers, madmen, prostitutes, drunks and ne'er-do-wells, all unhappily swilling about the streets of Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham, Margate and Deal.

Like Sinclair, Seabrook manages to blend arch literariness with schlock, true crime with poetry and reportage with introspection, to produce a rather chaotic and patchy work of retro-futurist esoterica. You have to admire Seabrook's huge range - taking in Oswald Mosley by way of numerology, Charles Dickens's the (chimney) Sweeps Festival and the Carry On films - but it can also prove tiresomely exhibitionist. In its way, All the Devils is a very Dickensian book - bleak, peacockish, voyeuristic, concerned with the edges of things - but without Dickens's inclusiveness or compassion.

All this leaves you wondering what it is about the English coastal fringes that make themselves available to Seabrook's kind of treatment. It's almost impossible to imagine a book about serial killers and sexual exploits set in Bath, for example, though I'm sure Bath has its share of both. It's just that no one would believe you. But Gillingham - well, now you're talking.

Still, Seabrook isn't attempting a traditional travelogue of descriptive flourishes and chance encounters. His interest is less in the Kentish towns themselves than in the way they inhabit him, what Iain Sinclair would call their psychogeography. Seabrook takes a landscape and makes a headscape from it.

So why doesn't the book have more heart? You are left wanting less of his impressive research and more of the man. There are tantalising intimations of him here and there. One time he refers, fleetingly, to the funeral of a fiancée to which he was not invited. Another time, he mentions his childhood, then veers away. After these evasions, you are left with a sense of a man subtly and irrevocably imprisoned in the places he describes, a man with a past he can only express in the pasts of others.