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When Paul Simon wrote that unlovably cocky, gotta-be-free little song about the 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, he forgot to mention the converse of his proposition: there are 50 ways for your lover to leave you (and then some). Given Simon's natural audience of bedsitter-blue sensitives, one can only suppose the song served some kind of wish-fulfilment function, like his earlier I Am a Rock: say it loud, I'm alone and I'm proud (honest!).

No such comfort here, though; although the title speaks neutrally of old flames, it's almost always the author's little glimmer that got snuffed out in the first place. I say the author, rather than the narrator, because the subject just naturally lends itself to disguised autobiography - there may be someone out there who never got chucked, or got chucked and never cared, but I can't think who it might be, unless of course it's Paul Simon.

This gives these 25 tales of bruised and broken hearts an extremely intimate and confidential quality; for the duration of each story, the reader feels like he's been co-opted as the author's best friend.

There's also a certain low-rent, unglamorous courage about them: to write such a story is to imitate another, more honest pop songwriter (John Lennon) and say: I'm a Loser.

Once that guilty admission gets sicked up, though, the author's stoicism is relegated to the back of your mind as you recall, ruefully or otherwise, the depths of epical misery that love once put you through, whether it was it 25 years ago or 24 hours (once an ex, always an ex, no matter how many times you fall in love again).

So the way these stories work, whatever your present romantic state of play, is by reminding you about yourself - which is to say, reminding you about what it is to be human.

Another thing they remind you about is that, in art as opposed to in life, nothing is as inspirational as pain. Happiness is dumb, but sadness has a thousand tongues - all of them blessed with eloquence, as the ferocious intensity and woozy, drunken lyricism of these exhumations of dead romances prove.

The authors are mostly obscure - not exactly unheard of, but closer to that than to even middling literary renown - yet launched upon this subject, every one writes like a champion. Special mention to Russell Celyn Jones for Statusphobia, in which the griefstricken narrator finds a kind of redemption in helping a fellow patient in his mental hospital, and Pat Cadigan's misery-loves-company black comedy Planet of the Exes; but anywhere you stop on this Lonely Street, they've got a good tale to tell.

et cetera

COUNTRY OF THE BLIND by Christopher Brookmyre (Abacus; #6.99)

G K Chesterton begins one of his Father Brown detective stories with the observation that many mysteries begin with the news that a millionaire has been murdered - which is all very well and good, he continues, but he can't understand why everyone else should be so upset about it. Those remarks could serve as the epigraph for Christopher Brookmyre's subversive tartan-noir comedy about the complications arising from the murder of right-wing media tycoon Roland Voss (and his wife, and his bodyguards) at his Scottish Baronial retreat in Perthshire, a slaying conveniently laid to the account of dedicated Glaswegian freelance wealth-redistributor Thomas MacInnes and his tabloid-christened gang The Robbin' Hoods. Gung-ho investigative journalist Jack Parlabane (has easy access to firearms and never lets any editor tell him what to do: us book reviewers should be so lucky) gets caught up in the

case for political and personal reasons and uncovers . . . yes, a secret-state, big-business conspiracy. Snazzy writing (sometimes a little too rococo with its patter) and droll characterisation overcome failings in the credibility department; good fun.

THE HANGING GARDEN by Ian Rankin (Orion, #9.99)

There is a little-known law on the statute book that makes it compulsory for every policeman protagonist in a Scottish crime novel to have a booze problem and be estranged from his wife and family, and it's one of the few laws Ian Rankin's Edinburgh flatfoot Inspector Rebus doesn't break in this dourly pretentious (in a peculiarly Scottish sort of way) attempt to write a thriller with profound political and social dimensions. When not arguing with himself about whether or not to have a drink, Rebus is trying to pin a charge on an elderly Nazi war criminal and tie that in with the civil war in Yugoslavia, a gang war in Edinburgh, and a suspicious hit-and-run accident involving his daughter - while simultaneously saving the body and soul of a teenage Bosnian-refugee prostitute. There's just too much weight here for the framework to carry, and the narrative suffers badly as a result, with Rankin

resorting to inserting the titles of moody old pop songs in a shorthand attempt to create atmosphere, like an inaudible soundtrack. It doesn't work.

A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS and Other Stories by M R James (Phoenix, #3.99)

Though we tend to think of M R James (if we think of him at all) as one of the minor Victorians, the fact is that he was neither particularly Victorian nor minor at all. His first volume of ghost stories was published in 1904, when he was only 42 but already well advanced upon a distinguished career as a Cambridge don (subject, appropriately enough, divinity), and the last as late as 1931. It is only their supplied-by-the-yard period dressing that places such terrible tales as The Mezzotint (described by Paul Theroux as the most frightening story in the world, and I wouldn't say he's wrong), Casting the Runes, and A View From a Hill in the nineteenth century of the imagination; psychologically these stories, with their resolutely everyday backdrops against which appallingly strange things happen as though in a waking dream, have more in common with the work of magical realists like Jorge

Luis Borges and Flann O'Brien. If this collection doesn't scare you, check your pulse - to see if you've got one.

l Author events are listed on Page 62