‘Crooked Little Vein’ plays it too straight

THERE’S rarely anything typical about Warren Ellis’ vision of the world. He is best known for the graphic “Transmetropolitan” series, which featured journalist Spider Jerusalem -- a one-man wrecking crew of addictions, destructive tendencies and mordant philosophy. Ellis owes a great debt to the late Hunter S. Thompson, both for his writing style and the substance of his worlds, and yet has always managed to remain unique. So it’s not a surprise to find him returning to the comfort of a gonzo world for his first nongraphic novel, “Crooked Little Vein.” However in this case, it feels overly derivative.

Set in a skewed version of our present day, replete with bad wars, misbegotten Bush presidencies, and an Internet filled with all imaginable fetishes, Ellis’ book drops us into the existence of private detective Mike McGill. So down on his luck that he’d need a deep-ocean dredger just to get him back to sea level, McGill wakes one typical hung-over morning to find a giant rat urinating into his coffee cup and a phalanx of Men in Black descending upon his offices. Before McGill can escape, the MiB usher in the White House chief of staff -- a smacked-out wraith with an offer McGill can’t refuse: The U.S. Constitution is missing and McGill must recover it to save the country from the toilet of morality in which it is mired.

Of course, it’s not the Constitution as we know it. Instead it’s “a secret document privately authored by several of the Founders” which details the true agenda of American society and includes 23 “Invisible Amendments,” has near-magical powers and is bound in the skin of an extraterrestrial who had a rather intimate relationship with Benjamin Franklin’s posterior. (That this revelation concerning Franklin is one of the least possibly offensive aspects of the novel should be duly noted.)

McGill is perfect for the job. Particularly since he freely admits to being “everything that never happened to anyone else,” which in McGill’s case means being the type of private investigator who ends up tracking adulterers to ostrich farms where unpleasant things happen between man and ostrich. That’s good news for the government, particularly since this Constitution has been shuttled through a perverse underworld of sexual deviants since it was originally lost in the 1950s when Richard Nixon traded it to “a Chinese woman living on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay” for sexual favors.

If that detail sounds familiar, it’s because Ellis is paying homage to his spiritual forefather Thompson, specifically his essay “Nixon and the Whale Woman,” which described a meeting between the journalist and a woman with an interesting story: “In Rio Vista, a small riverside town about an hour’s drive east of San Francisco, I met an elderly Chinese woman who claimed to be the former mistress of Richard Nixon. She lived on a houseboat that was moored in a slough near Antioch, she said, and the ex-president had often visited her there when he came to California.” It also provides a clue for the reader: What you’re about to read will be full of fear, loathing and hallucinatory experiences.

In many ways, Ellis delivers. McGill is as noir as they come, and when he meets up with the requisite femme fatale -- a graduate student/expert on sexual perversion/serial polyamorist named Trix -- at an ad hoc movie theater showing Godzilla films re-cut with porn for an audience of folks who have a special fondness for lizards of all sizes (your imagination will have to suffice here), there is an immediate kinetic bond that can only auger bad things.

The movie theater is just the first clue as to the whereabouts of the Constitution and, with Trix along for the ride, things only get weirder. Unfortunately, McGill and Trix never rise above their stock status. It’s not that a book like “Crooked Little Vein” requires that the narrator be an alpha male, it’s only that Ellis has shown an innate ability to create vivid characters in the past and the absence of nuance in McGill stands in sharp contrast. He’s an antihero, which is fine, but he’s the same antihero we’ve seen countless times before from writers less adept than Ellis.

It’s fun to watch McGill and Trix traipse across the country as they follow the Constitution’s trail from one den of perversion to the next, though what’s missing is a sense of place, a sense of connection. McGill travels to Ohio, Texas, Nevada and California, but you’d never know it from Ellis’ descriptions, which essentially serve only as transitions between dialogue. It’s as if the author was still anticipating that someone would come in behind him to paint the pretty pictures. Likewise disappointing, for all the glee and humor of the book, is the ease with which McGill is able to track down the document. All clues are correct. All twists find their right turns. Ellis also hits hard with his mission statements -- namely, that the Internet has changed the fringe into the mainstream (for better or worse, though, it seems, mostly worse) and that a world ruled by morality through government is one step from oblivion.

While “Crooked Little Vein” never ceases to entertain, it takes few chances, which sadly makes it maddeningly canonical in places.

Still, Ellis is a formidable talent whose wit and insight fit perfectly into the crime genre. Perhaps next time he’ll go as deep as his gifts can take him.

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Tod Goldberg is the author, most recently, of the short story collection “Simplify.”