Thursday, March 22, 2012

Why You Should Read Ken Bruen the Master of Irish Noir


The Daily Beast - Mar 17, 2012 

From the mean streets of Galway comes one of the darkest and most underrated Irish crime writers. In honor of St Patrick’s Day, get thee Ken Bruen’s books says critic Allen Barra.

If Ken Bruen did not exist, only the devil could have invented Jack Taylor. Taylor is the hero—and that’s casting a pretty wide net in defining the term—of nine novels as nasty and profane as anything written in the English language coming under the heading of crime fiction. (His most recent novel, Headstone, was published last fall.)
Though he’s built up a sizeable following stateside, Bruen is still largely a phenomenon waiting to happen here. The 2010 film London Boulevard, made from a Bruen novel (not in the Jack Taylor series) starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley and directed by William Monahan, screenwriter for The Departed, was considered “too foreign” for American audiences and has scarcely been seen here. The BBC miniseries of the first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards, was critically acclaimed in the U.K. but has still not made it on to American TV.
Perhaps Americans are used to their private detectives being of sounder moral character. The Galway-based Taylor is a former policeman fueled by Jameson’s, the occasional line of coke, and, as he puts it in The Guards, “a mix of rage and sadness, and it’s a dangerous cocktail.” Top o' the mornin’ to ya.
Bruen has no patience with Hollywood’s brand of Irish sentimentality. “The old folk say, ‘When you hear a bell ring, it’s an angel getting her wings.’ Mind you, the old folk believe all kinds of weird shite.” Much of that shite comes from Jack’s ma. In a refreshing reversal stereotype of Mother Machree married to a drunken lout, Taylor reveres the memory of his da and can’t stomach his mother. Every gesture she makes is fraught with deceit and self pity: “She sighed. It was what she did best. She could have sighed for Ireland.” Or, as he expressed it another time, “My mother is a walking bitch.”
Not that Jack is without reverence for old, or at least Old Ireland. He’s been to the States, lived in London, and has even seen a bit of Dublin, but he goes back to Galway, which is just big enough for his ego and small enough to be a last bastion of things worth saving. He’s not above slipping 10 euros into the cap of a street busker playing “Carrick Fergus,” and is fond of the elderly woman who runs Bailey’s Hotel, where he lives, “Perhaps it’s that we are both of that endangered species, ‘Old Galway,’ and our time is truly limited.”
irish-writer-barra
‘Headstone’ By Ken Bruen. 256 p. Mysterious Press. US$24., Steven Weinberg / Getty Images
New Galway is a town unknown to Bing Crosby, populated by Eastern European drug dealers, neo Nazis, Satan worshippers, and even psychotics who slaughter Galway’s famed swans. Compared to Bruen’s Galway, the Dublin of his fellow crime writer, Benjamin Black, is the Innisfree of John Ford’s The Quiet Man.
Full review at The Daily Beast

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