Brighton started life as a fishing village, then became a royal playground, and now attracts anybody eagerto surrender to its unusual charms. Nik Cohn takes a stroll on the louche side.

Brighton is a great English eccentric. An hour by train and light-years from London's gray sprawl, it flaunts among rival resorts like a peacock among pigeons—gorgeous, vain, and capricious. Its manners are often outrageous, but that's part of the allure. In Brighton, outrage and glamour are indivisible.

Delia's dog is gone. Yesterday afternoon, she was sunning herself on the beach, and she must have drifted off. When she opened her eyes, Tuffy was nowhere to be seen. He would never wander off on his own, so there's only one explanation: Tuffy has been snatched.

Delia's eyes keep sweeping the seafront. She's fortyish, long and lean, with wild hennaed hair, and she taps at my wrist with purple fingernails. "They'll be sorry," she says grimly, tap tap. "They're going to wish they were never born."

A few minutes ago, we were strangers. I was idling in a deck chair when she pounced on me and started brandishing Tuffy's photo—a droopy-eyed cocker spaniel with the fake-humble look of a defrocked priest. Now, I'm not sure how, I seem to have been conscripted. "We've got to find him," Delia keeps saying.

We?

Not that I struggle much. Delia, in her implacable resolve, reminds me of Ida Arnold, the avenging fury in Brighton Rock.

Ida's conscript in Graham Greene's novel, as she hunts down the murderous Pinkie, is Phil Corkery, described as "wasted with passions he had never had the courage to pursue." He keeps trying to weasel out of the chase, but Ida is too much for him. Five minutes of Delia and I know exactly how he felt. Phil Corkery? C'est moi.

"Brighton?" Delia says. "It calls itself a city, it looks like a town, but really it's just a village."

We are sitting on the deck at the Al Fresco, a waterside bistro, watching the sun set over the sea. Brighton sunsets are a pale dusky rose, bleeding into the water like smoke. They turn the multicolored pebbles that pass for a beach into a field of stained glass. "And this,"" says Delia, indicating the shore, "this is the village church."

We have spent a long, hard afternoon. Tuffy's snapshot now adorns dozens of lampposts, and we have chased a series of abortive leads, but at least, caroming around the town, I've been reminded what a wondrous, rackety place this is.

Its uniqueness starts with the topography, which is all cliffs and chasms. Walking its streets, you're either bent double or careering like a runaway horse. By the end of a day's trudging, my hamstrings vibrate like tuning forks.

Although I've never lived here full-time, I have known and loved the town for most of my life, and I revisit it each year, partly to relive old adventures, partly to chase up new ones.

I first fell under Brighton's spell in my teens. It seemed fabulously exotic to me then, in the mid-1960s—the perfect antidote to England's prevailing glumness. Swinging London was largely a media creation, a party reserved for the chosen few, but Brighton was truly unfettered. It promised excess, adventure, zipless sex.