SOURCE: Taylor, D. J. “Weirdness, Whimsy and Mayhem.” Spectator 282, no. 8909 (8 May 1999): 35.

In the following review, Taylor characterizes Blue Light as a transitional novel, noting that “the spectacle of the writer trying to work out what he wants to write about can be glimpsed from one sinewy sentence to the next.”

One of the funniest moments in Evelyn Waugh's Work Suspended finds its detective novelist hero John Plant ensconced in his publisher's office trying to explain a mounting crisis of creative self-belief. Listening to the author of A Death in the Dukeries and other works descanting on the need for technical experiments and new worlds to conquer, little Mr Benwell grows ever more perturbed. Finally the strain becomes too much. ‘You've not been writing poetry in Morocco?’ he tremulously enquires.

One somehow doubts that Walter Mosley, for some years now one of the hippest alternative crime writers on the...