Poet and English Professor-cum-novelist, James Hall's first two volumes -- Undercover of Daylight, Squall Line -- garnered him a crime-writing reputation far outstripping the quality of the actual books. Taking his cues from the local giants of the field, Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford, Hall has an added tendency to wed his texts to eco-awareness and overload on the literary, thus effectively preventing the narrative from taking flight in quite the way he anticipates. Bones Of Coral lines toxic waste as a MacGuffin, and investigations are prompted by an apparently self-inflicted gunshot to which Shaw Chandler is summoned, only to discover the dead man as his errant father who abandoned the family years before under suspicion of murder.

Returning to the Florida Keys to visit his mother, he is suddenly plunged back in to the heart of a twenty-five-year-old mystery and the affections of Trula Montoya, an old girlfriend turned TV actress currently helping a doctor to unearth the apparent environmental conditions of her youth that have left her the sufferer of recurrent debilitating bouts of MS.

Hall's novels have always been crippled by the lack of credible centre-pieces, and Chandler is no less tiresome; all messed-up emotional life and crumpled charm, but with none of the spark or down-market charisma of, say, a typical Dutch Leonard. The net result is a book that slumps whenever he or, to a lesser extent, Trula take the stage, particularly since the writer has clearly learned, in Dougie Barnes, a lesson or two in how to turn a villain. Determined the family secrets should remain such, his scurrilous father regularly dispatches this porn-loving simpleton of a son to 'suicide' irritants. Arguably Hall piles the eccentricities a little too high -- the newly acquired parrot for one -- but Dougie's frequently obscene rhyming-chatter and brief marriage to a hooker make him a comic grotesque worthy of a Carl Hiaasen novel.

For his fourth novel however, Hall has seen fit to turn his eco-warnings to a low-light and Hard Aground is a far better novel for it, wherein a sunken Spanish galleon laden with gold is exciting pulses up and down the Miami coast, not least those of Daniel Rawlings, County Archaeologist whose interests might not be entirely historical, and Senator Garnetta Rawlings, powerful widow and scheming bitch-queen of the local business community. It's when his brother dies during unexpectedly kinky sex games that Daniel's younger, less-stable, sibling Hap begins to take an interest in buried treasure and Rawling's reporter daughter, Marguerite.

So soon on the heals of the improving Bones, Hard Aground is a minor revelation. Essentially ditching any real pretext towards schooling, the novel has a less formalised approach, the plot retaining more the nicely realised freewheeling, character-driven air of the best crime fiction. Hap is no less neurotic than his predecessors (more so, if anything), but makes for a less irritating lamp around which the moths of the criminal element can flit. And they are by some distance the best of Hall's career to date -- the would-be kingpin Alvarez, the down-at-heel Hollings, and the wonderfully drawn transsexual professional-con Martina.

Crime is one genre where less is all too often more, and all of Hall's novels to date suffer jointly from a certain level of overwriting, reflecting the author's academic bent, when the work calls for more sparsity and atmosphere. In addition, Hall is wont to subject 250 page ideas to 300 page-plus treatments, and both of these novels tend to over-reach themselves at the climax, going for extended chases and the classic show-down -- albeit less so in the later novel -- where a little more imagination could well have nudged them in to something a little more off the beaten path. That said, however, Hall's later work is beginning to exhibit a wry sense of humour and refreshing willingness to tip its hat towards the grotesque when occasion calls. Starting to show all the hallmarks of developing a unique voice for himself inside the next couple of books, coupled with a fair wind and the ability to loosen-up on plotting, James Hall could soon be up there with his contemporaries. In the meantime, Hard Aground is a smart, abrasive enough read to be getting on with.