#4 Ken Bruen...(Top 10 Crime Fiction Writer Series)

Ken Bruen has to be one badass mofo.  Or maybe I’m making the mistake of confusing the writer with his writing…but hard to believe characters this injured, this battered come straight from the imagination. They walk in a maelstrom of their own making. And the only peace is in the pinprick pupil of the storm.

If there is a moment of happiness, joy or even calm it is the moment just before the twister touches down. And as Ron White says - it’s not THAT the wind is blowing, it’s WHAT the wind is blowing. And in a Ken Bruen book it’s always blowing bile, black lung and beat downs. 

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There are times the deluge of misfortune stops just this side of caricature and then only because Bruen is a damn near incomparable street poet. No long glistening lyrical passages describing stuff I don’t care about – it’s  musical but not like a symphony or a sonata…short, sharp and usually on the 2 and 4. 

​Sometimes it’s the image.
Galway was a cosmopolitan city but still in the valley of the squinting windows

Sometimes it’s the rhythm.
Tasted my coffee, double-loaded, it hit like a fist.

Sometimes it’s a little of both.
She was dressed in a heavy black coat as dark as the shadows beneath her eyes.

​The central characters in his books – hard to call them heroes – are as shadowed as any in literature. Even the worst of his leading men are fallen angels – aware of their better selves, just not always prepared to grasp the outstretched hand.  Matthew O’Shea in Once We Were Cops is described by his own mother as living,

“…in another room.”
“A room covered in ice and fierceness.”

Happy Birthday, son – give your mom a hug. 

O’ Shea is a cop who strangles young women with green rosary beads – nothing subtle there.  And O’Shea, tightening the beads so they cut into his palms,
“...felt like I’d been gloriously crucified.”

The same guy talking about taking somebody’s knees out with a hurling bat,
But you never quite lose the talent, and to hear the whoosh of the bat, it was like the darkest music.

Wow.  There is nothing oblique about this - this is all about the clash between the sacred and the profane. Bruen isn’t trying to weave his way to a point. He’s a stone-cutter –precise, sharp, straight, diamond-hard strokes revealing faces, faults and facets.  But don’t mistake any of this for simple – a finely-cut stone looks different from every angle. 

And I don’t know if it’s intentional but he often captures the conflict in the way he juxtaposes language. Let me put it this way: those whom the Irish gods would destroy first they give a shard of joy to. Least it’s how they fuck with me and often.

The first line, a sad lament, could be any Irish martyr’s epitaph, the second line, as street-wise and gutter-soiled as any rummy’s last words.  Or this, less poetry but just as jarring, I never knew the etiquette of graves. Do you kneel, pray, look forlorn as part of the deal, what?

I knelt.
Fuck it….

Or this.

Sometimes the gods relent, even they think – “Enough already, let’s let the fucker see what it could have been like.  As it is for the blessed."

This seems to happen too often to be an accident – but maybe it’s just the way Bruen sings.

And while the conflict may be about heaven and earth, it is a very particular heaven and earth. The Catholic Church, curse and comfort, is rarely far away in a Ken Bruen novel…just look at his titles –

Priest, Cross, The Magdelyn Martyrs, Shades of Grace.  

It’s the shadow he can never walk far enough or fast enough to escape.  Within the first 20 lines of Cross, one of the Jack Taylor books, we get this line, Sure enough, the first rays of dawn cutting across the small hill, throwing a splatter of light across the figure on the cross, looked almost like care.

And this ain’t metaphor – it’s a scene we are watching play out.  But if this leaves us a little uncertain about what Bruen may think about the church, don’t be misled.
“You could have been a contender.”…

I think I meant it, though like the best prayers it sounded hollow at the center.  Not the words, they were as good as any, but just phony….

Get this – Taylor’s describing the best prayers.  The line can seem gentle at first glance, if it had been ‘most prayers’ or ‘some prayers’ or even ‘my prayers’ it would have been a prod, but ‘best’?  This is lethal. 

It seems odd to have got this far without explicitly mentioning Jack Taylor – the Taylor books are what Bruen is best known for – but there is a thread through all of Bruen’s work and with or without Jack Taylor, Bruen doubles down on darkness.  But shadows need light and as the best of Bruen’s heroes, Taylor never completely lets go of the possibility of redemption.   And though the following bit of dialogue wasn’t said by or about Taylor it could have been,

“How will I live then?
I touched his shoulder, said,
Liked the rest of us, pal – the best you can.”

This might be what Bruen does best – provide the sense that his guys are just doing the best they can –
even if it ain’t that good.

Like most of my favorites, Bruen isn’t about plot. He’s about character and language - the characters
shading every twisted corridor and the sentences lighting the way out.
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Aside: I have started watching the TV series based on Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor books and my one
quibble is the casting – Ian Glen seems like the kind of guy they are having to dress waaaaayyy down to
play Taylor.  When I look at Glen I can imagine him playing James Bond  – and the real Jack Taylor would
fit a tuxedo like a balled fist in a wool sock.  That said, I like the show.