PURGATORY by Ken Bruen

Oh, sure, I was prepared to like PURGATORY -- the book, not the concept -- from the outset. Ken Bruen? Jack Taylor? Wit and poetry and irreverence and, natch, violence? Just my cuppa.

But when Bruen introduces me to a quotation from Mark Twain, dissing Jane Austen? I went from pure reading pleasure straight on to literary paradise. No stops for purgatory -- the concept, not the book -- along the way.

Want to know what Twain said? Sure, you do. If you are as sickened as I am by the constant parade of cinematic pap for what amounts, IMHO, to little more than a collection of 19th-century soaps occasionally breathed on by the faintest breeze of humor, you want to know (if you don't already) what he said. And if you are one of the Army of Austenites, ready to take up teaspoonly cudgeons in her defense, you want to know, too, so that you might gird your loins for literary battle. So. What Twain said was:

'Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.'

You can't imagine my delight at reading that. Oh, Ken Bruen, how much I owe you for introducing me to that line! And knowing a bit about Twain, just enough really, it seemed likely that he had more than that to say about Austen's books. So I went looking and found, for the vindictive pleasure of we few, we happy few, we band of Anti-Austenites, this pair of nasty gems:

'I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
                             -- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898 

'To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
                             -- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909

No, please, don't anyone send me any impassioned defenses of Ms. Austen's creations, or of any of the works that sprang (sprung? springed? spronged?) from them. It would be quite useless. Neither of us will persuade the other. Instead I will admit here and now to being a literary heathen. And I will continue to laugh every time I read one of Mr. Twain's remarks about her work. You may consign me, not to purgatory (the place, not -- you know), but directly to perdition if you like. I shall be happy to shake Mr. Twain's hand upon my arrival there.

Which locale, one muses, may be where Jack Taylor is heading. Anyone who has read much of the series probably thinks Jack has either already been to perdition or long been doomed to eventually end there. And yet, here in PURGATORY -- the book, not the other -- Jack seems to be managing his vices and character flaws better than he ever has; backsliding a bit now and again, but not only making a recovery, but wanting to make a recovery. Wanting to avoid the violence, the drugs, the booze, the cigarettes. Jack even manages not to immediately lay verbal waste to his arch-enemy, Father Malachy, when he discovers the ill-natured padre is reading FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. No doubt Jack is saving his barbs for his final downward spiral into perdition so that he has that one last feel-good moment before eternal damnation.

No, this isn't much of a review of Ken Bruen's fine book, is it? But what I said a few paragraphs back, about wit and poetry and irreverence and violence, that all holds true. This book is trademark Bruen in that, yes, his fans will find what they expect to find in a Jack Taylor book. And PURGATORY is also trademark Bruen in that his fans will find what they least expect to find as well. This is why Bruen is still the King of Crime Fiction in my universe.

RECOMMENDED.

HEADSTONE by Ken Bruen

Jack Taylor gets a small headstone in the mail. Well, he's the kind of guy that would happen to, isn't he? But when his friends -- he still has one or two -- receive similar items and then are subject to brutal assaults, Jack has to start sitting up, drinking down, and paying attention.

Is there any encomium I have not yet bestowed on Ken Bruen? If so, it's been a drastic oversight on my part. Bruen's writing goes from strength to strength. His ability to twist a plot is masterful; his pacing is precise; and his characters fairly leap from the page in all their rage.

Rebounding from his recent encounter with one kind of devil, Jack finds himself in the position of making deals with another. Body and soul, Jack will not come away from this case unscathed, nor will his friends, and even some of his enemies will be affected by the fallout. HEADSTONE may well be the most surprising -- shocking is not too strong a word --  story in the Jack Taylor series since THE DRAMATIST, and I think it is one that reveals Jack's conflicted soul better than any other.

As with virtually every book by Ken Bruen, HEADSTONE is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

REVIEW: THE DEVIL by Ken Bruen

Jack Taylor has always been ridden by demons: Addiction, bitterness, narcissism, despair, self-loathing. So what's a guy like Jack to do when confronted by the devil. No, excuse me, The Devil. Satan. Yeah, that one. Evil Incarnate. Well, let's see. Have you ever known Jack to back down? Thought not.

What begins with Jack's search for a missing college student ends with a metaphysical tour de force, and in between are packed all of Bruen's hallmarks: Biting wit, dark laughter, heart-wringing sorrow, and enough generosity toward other writers and musicians to earn Ken Bruen his place in heaven, had he not already earned it. At this point though, it's all just polish for the halo.

In Sanctuary, the previous installment in the Jack Taylor series, some measure of redemption for Jack was hinted at by the author. Readers, we should have known better. This is Ken Bruen's work here, this is his Jack Taylor, not ours. And the author quickly disabuses any notion (a thing in and of itself to be despised, according to him) that Jack may have at last found his center of mass (hey, you read this book and see if you can refrain from religious puns!). Right up front, in the prologue, a mysterious figure known as Kurt says to Jack, "... evil hones in on those closest to redemption."

How's that for a harbinger? You can pretty well guess that there's some black misery in store for Jack. Here's a word of advice: Set aside the time to read this one twice. First, just read it. It's quite a story. Then read it again and take notes. When you've done that, let's get together and talk about what you think that ending means. Because Bruen's Devil isn't William Peter Blatty's evil that can be dispensed with ritual and faith; it isn't John Connolly's evil that is simply the vacuum left by the absence of empathy. It isn't even the devil that Garth Brooks sang about (in Tony Arata's song, Face to Face), the one that hides deep inside everyone. Bruen's Devil is of the walking-around, in-your-face, what-are-you-gonna-do-kill-me unstoppable evil. Not just a force but a knowing presence.

Sure, Bruen may well be using the devil as metaphor for what has replaced the Celtic Tiger, but he's got more to say here than that these are miserable times. And it's worth reading. Oh, hell, yeah.

Here are a couple of pithy excerpts:

"Evil is only a concept to those who've never experienced it. To those who've met it, the term 'concept' dropped from their vocabulary."

And:

"Every day, like jig time, Sawyer played nine holes.
And he cheated.
O.J. Simpson did, too, and there's a moral there.
Not of any uplift."

REVIEW: SANCTUARY by Ken Bruen

SYNOPSIS: Does Jack Taylor have a problem? He's abandoned his plan to escape Galway and fly off to the USA, staying in Ireland instead to oversee the recovery of his friend Ridge, who's trying to offset a recent mastectomy by indulging in Jack's favorite vice: drink. Meanwhile Jack is fighting, with only partial success, his own addictions. In the midst of his wreck of a life comes a letter from a psychopath: a death list that includes two cops, a judge, a nun and a child. Oh, yeah, Jack has a problem all right. You see, he doesn't know his name was omitted from the list, sort of accidentally on purpose. And the cops -- never Jack's most indulgent acquaintances -- don't believe the list is genuine. So Jack Taylor does have a problem. You think?

BTW, the book jacket on the left is the UK version, on the right is the US version. I'm much more partial to the one on the left. Not only does the UK version appeal to my eye, but that white feather pictured has much to do with what's in the story.

REVIEW: What to say about a Bruen book that hasn't been said? As always the pace is swift, the action harsh, the hurt deep. Bruen keenly points out, in ways that fill the narrative rather than interrupt it, the early results of the worldwide recession being sharply felt in Ireland, only recently the world's second richest nation. He also captures the gradual loss of Irish culture due to the effects of globalization. The churches and the pubs are the most numerous reflections of the old ways, and the churches are losing ground fast. Or maybe their sins -- the pedophile priests and the Magdalen laundries and the brutal teachers -- are coming back to haunt them. And in Jack, Bruen personifies the ruinous results of the national preoccupation with alcohol.

Bruen is a master at creating characters without really describing their physical features. Beyond Jack's limp, hearing aid, and artificial teeth (yeah, the years, the booze, and the beatings are all catching up now that Jack can't run so fast), I've no idea what he looks like. But Jack's soul, severely scorched round the edges, is a perfect picture to me. And it is in this book, the seventh in the series, where the reader begins to see the culmination in Jack of everything that has gone before. Maybe this time, at last, the deaths of the innocents will mean something more to him than an excuse to reach for the bottle, because this time Jack's story ends with a touch of hope rather than of black despair, and the reader finds that Jack may have learned a measure of forgiveness. And if he can forgive the one person who has most grievously wronged him -- well, is it possible Jack could actually join the human race? And if Jack can do that, isn't there hope for the rest of us?

Here are two excerpts from the book, just to show how Jack can swing from deep tenderness to calculating sarcasm. In this first scene, Jack is with a dying man, a man grossly obese and whom Jack had met only one time previously.

Jesus, I couldn't help but like this poor sad bastard. He was unable to move because of his sheer girth and he still had fucking manners. That killed me and I swore an oath, an unholy one, that I'd make that bitch suffer as I killed her...

I have never hugged another man, not even me own beloved father. It's our upbringing -- you never put your hand on another man unless you want to lose it from the shoulder. Now I leaned over and put me two arms around this massive man.

He started to cry, muttered, "Thanks, Jack."

Fuck, fuck, and fuck it all.

This hugely obese man, lonely as only the truly lost can be, was thanking me and he wouldn't let go. I had the horrendous thought, He's never had a hug in his whole life. And that the first should have to be from a fucked, deaf, limping trainwreck like me...

In this second scene, Jack has encountered Father Malachy in the park. Malachy is Jack's long-time nemesis. Malachy was also his late mother's best friend, and it's an understatement to say that Jack didn't get along with his mother.

I asked, "Do you believe in angels?"

He looked at me, suspicion writ huge. "Why?"

I could feel a warm mellowness beginning to take hold. God bless pharmaceuticals.

"Well, you're a priest, sort of, and angels and all that stuff is your... How should I put it? Your merchandise."

I saw a slow cunning light his eyes and knew he was ready to retaliate.

He said, "Your mother was an angel."

I let him savour that for a bit then said, "So was Lucifer."

REVIEW: ONCE WERE COPS by Ken Bruen

Synopsis: Shea is a young Irish cop, relatively inexperienced, who wangles a transfer to the New York City police force. Unfortunately for Shea, once in New York he gets paired with a psychotic brute nicknamed Kebar. Unfortunately for Kebar, Shea is not only smarter than Kebar, he's twice as psychotic. With Internal Affairs and the mob breathing down their backs, Shea and Kebar are about to turn the NYPD on its collective ear.

Review: Ken Bruen is a literary force of nature. Ah, crap, that sounds like gushing. Hell with it. [You see how my vocab and tone have changed from the norm as a result of swimming in the black depths of this book?] Bruen is just that brilliant. Consistently. Brilliance doesn't just flash occasionally for Bruen, the quality is so permanent and pervasive that you have to wonder just when it was that he sold his soul, eh? Even as I anticipated reading this book I worried that maybe, lacking old friends like Sgt. Brant and Jack Taylor, Once Were Cops might not be vintage Bruen. To the contrary, Bruen has managed to up his game. You young whippersnapper-writers out there (and you know who you are) take note: The Master is the Master for a reason. So what if your last book raised the ante? Bruen just upped it again, and he looked you dead in the eyes when he did it. Man up, boys.

For folks who are bigger fans of Bruen's Brant series than of the Jack Taylor books, you're going to love this book. Kebar is Brant taken one step farther. Shea is yet another step (or 12) farther out. And when you think Ken Bruen has taken you to the outer edge of cop psychoses, oh, brother, had you better think again. Think Mephistopheles. Yeah, I mean the characters, but I think I mean Bruen, too. Scary, ain't it?

The Bruen trademarks are all present: Pithy sentences that speak paragraphs more than many another crime fic writer; Bruen's usual nod to those younger authors (Duane Swierczynski this time around) I have come to think of as his crew; a mix of books and music worth noting; and a continuation of his, um, danse macabre with the Catholic church. And his finest trademark, the twist on the twist, with maybe a little extra turn of the screw.

Here'a sample from a scene in which Shea is being interviewed by two Internal Affairs cops after he saved Kebar's life by shooting a perp. The punctuation and spacing are as they appear in the book.

McCarthy put up his hand to stop me, asked,

"And did you caution him, tell him to drop his weapon, identify yourself as a police officer?"

I glanced at the black guy and was he smiling? I asked,

"You ever hear a shotgun being primed?"

He stared at me, irritation on his face, asked,

"What's your point?"

I made a click with my tongue, said,

"That's the sound and it tells you, you have maybe two seconds to identify yourself or...save your partner, what would you do or don't you get out from behind a desk?"

The black guy chuckled and McCarthy was riled, snapped,

"Hey pal, you're a goddamn rookie, don't get mouthy with me, you got that?"

I let that hover for a bit, then said,

"A rookie who saved his partner's life."

He changed tactics, became Mr. Cordiality, asked,

"How do you find your partner, busting your balls is he?"

Now I got to smile, said,

"I thought that was your job."

He let it go, continued,

"How do you feel about cops on the take?"

I didn't hesitate, said,

"Much the same way I feel about informers, sorry...Internal Affairs."

I usually like to point my reviews at those who would most appreciate the book. So if you've read Bruen's work and did not become an immediate fan, this book won't change things for you. If you're already a fan, you won't be disappointed. If you're thinking about trying out a Bruen book for the first time, this is as good a place as any to start. If John Sandford's books appeal to you because of the black humor, if you like Joe Pike best when he's killing someone, if you don't mind not having a single character to empathize with, if you think Jim Thompson's Lou Ford character was a wimp, and if you like going ooh and aah every so often while your eyebrows dance all over your forehead, this is your kind of book. Folks who like a mystery solved by cats, need not apply.

For all my raving, I find there is something negative to be said about this book. About the book, mind you, not about the story, not about the writing. Something present in this hardbound edition I purchased, that I have not noticed in other Bruen titles, is the white space. If the double-spacing were eliminated and the font set to something other than 'For the Legally Blind,' this book would run to perhaps 120-130 pages, rather than the 294 pages the publisher feels is required in a crime novel. So let me just say this to the good people at St. Martin's Minotaur: Save the trees! I will pay full price for every Ken Bruen title you publish, I even buy from an indie bookstore where there are no deep discounts, so cut the crap, okay? 120 pages from Ken Bruen carry more weight and have greater impact than 400-500 pages from almost any other author you care to name. Didn't I already say it? Ken Bruen is a literary force of nature.

UPDATE 11/8/08 - Duane Swierczynski says that Bruen has a couple of letters in his name swapped around in the book and thus the character is not really named after him. Bosh! I say, and bosh! again.