American PI novels have never worked in Britain - there are no Philip Marlowes in English crime fiction, as there are no Miss Marples in American. Snakeskin is only the latest in a long line of failures, though this one is more spectacular than most. This is partly due to the fact that the author seems to have little notion of how to construct a plot or sustain a narrative. Characters, themes and ideas emerge, flit across the reader's attention, and vanish, never to reappear. In addition, he has failed to resolve the problem (perhaps, even, has not recognised its existence) of placing a first-person narrator in a social milieu primarily characterised by patterns of speech. While all around him drawl broadly ("Wha' you sayin', bro?" asks his brother), Ervine has a cutglass-BBC accent ("I know Mum taught you not to speak with your mouth full," he replies): the contrast can be ludicrous. Matters are not helped, too, by the fact that Ervine's logic is often as surreal as Jeffrey Archer's. "Wren's office was much smaller than I might have imagined, had I paid my imagination any mind before I entered," he ruminates, thoughtfully.