King Crow, by Michael Stewart,Blue Moose, £7.99

Birds feature at the heart of three works of popular post-war English fiction.

Daphne Du Maurier’s 1952 novella The Birds, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a film; Barry Hines’s 1968 debut novel A Kestrel For A Knave, which Ken Loach made into a film; and Ted Hughes’s 1970 collection of poems, Crow, which followed the suicides of his wife Sylvia Plath and his lover Assia Wevill.

In the Du Maurier book, England is under aerial attack by flocks of birds – thought by some to be a metaphor for the bombing of England by the Nazis.

The threat to life in Hines’s book comes from degraded human beings; the kestrel at the centre of the story is a symbol of beauty and freedom.

For Hughes, the crow is the embodiment of the destructive, malevolent forces in the universe. His mythic, god-like bird, is stronger even than death.

Thornton-based writer Michael Stewart’s first novel King Crow modestly takes its place in this avian tradition. Lots of varieties of bird appear – owls, finches, dippers, gulls, swifts, even the road-runner. The title of every chapter is the name of a bird.

The main character, Paul Cooper, a working-class Salford schoolboy with a passion for ornithology, carries a book in which he ticks off the birds he sees in Salford, London and Cumbria.

Unable to fit in with the urban underclass of his daily life, Cooper withdraws into his obsession, dominated by the image of the rarely-seen predatory scavenger the raven – King Crow – until he cannot tell the difference between reality and flights of fantasy.

Cooper’s first-person narrative of what happens in the space of a week – car thefts and drug-taking with his friend Ashley and at least two killings – is mixed in with minutely-observed reflections on his broken family life, his Salford habitat and the behaviour patterns of birds. He likes to watch and record his observations in drawings.

Although criminal activity is a feature of Cooper’s journey from mania to something like sanity, King Crow is not a bog-standard crime thriller. There is a refreshing absence of senior female detectives, cop shop banter, police procedures and forensic lingo.

Michael, who used to work on the wards of High Royds Hospital, Menston, cleverly takes his readers on a journey too – up the garden path. There is a clue in the first chapter that all may not be what Cooper says it is.

Even then, the penny didn’t immediately drop when I first read the book. The success of the revelation depends on whether readers are surprised or puzzled and just how clever Michael has been.

Either way, they’ll learn a lot about penguins, pandas, starlings, rooks, crows, and a little about the cartoon birds and animals of Warner Brothers and the Disney studios.

The book ends on a note of self-realisation. Cooper’s journey may not be complete, but at least he is heading in the right direction.

* Today, from noon, Michael Stewart will be signing copies of King Crow in the Bradford branch of Waterstones.