SOURCE: A review of Cocaine Nights, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 266–67.

In the review below, Olsen offers a positive review of Cocaine Nights.

Criminality has become a kind of performance art at the end of this millennium, the protagonist of J. G. Ballard's wonderful new novel [Cocaine Nights] notes, the last real impetus for communal action in a bored leisure society.

It's no surprise, then, to find the author of twenty-five books, including such cult classics as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash (the latter now an unnervingly good film by David Cronenberg), turning to the murder mystery genre for inspiration, and, with typical innovative grace, reconfiguring its key narrative elements: Charles Prentice, a British travel writer who enjoys the in-betweenness of his profession, journeys to a town forty minutes up the coast from Gibraltar on behalf of his carefully self-destructive brother, Frank, who has...