Along the way we are treated to a series of set-piece scenes marked by bathetic grand guignol. Tyndale’s attempts to manipulate the grotesques he meets – such as a double act of “beefy, imbecilic” DJs, whom he recruits to rough up a young girl’s unsuitable boyfriend – are always doomed. When, out of compassion, he hires a very expensive prostitute named Shy to seduce the miserable Napalm, Napalm doesn’t even fancy her.

But underneath Tyndale’s cynical suit of armour and his attempts at ruthless criminality, he remains residually hopeful, something he regrets: “Unfortunately, deep within me the desire to be happy still skulks.” His despair at the human condition – “Are decency and love simply masks for arrogance and selfishness? Is rectitude a pledge that eventually we will get something in return?” – is so painfully rendered that when Fischer unexpectedly provides a redemptive ending, involving an idealised good woman, we cannot really believe in it. By the time one gets to the end, one is so inured to futility and horror that one suspects Fischer does not believe in his own deus ex machina either.

At his best, Fischer is a writer of dextrous verbal inventiveness whose literary imagination is at once highly controlled and utterly deranged. There are riffs on synonyms for cocaine, undercover cops with names such as Unibrow, Clingfilm, Earmuseum and Rehab (the latter is addicted to tiramisu), and odd neologisms (“pulpiteer”, “tournamentize”). Each sentence is highly polished, and Fischer’s cool stylistic intelligence saves the prose from mere mannered tricksiness. He is less assured when it comes to the larger narrative structure, however, which perhaps mimics Tyndale’s lack of direction rather too closely.