Pre-Publication: GREEN HELL by Ken Bruen

GREEN HELL (Mysterious Press) will be the 11th Jack Taylor novel in Ken Bruen’s Galway-set series about the irrepressibly post-modern private eye. Quoth the blurb elves:

The award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen, called “the best-kept literary secret in Ireland” by the Independent, is as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic, mixing high and low with hypnotic mastery. In the previous book in the series, Purgatory, ex-cop Jack Taylor had finally turned his life around, only to be taunted back into fighting Galway’s corruption by a twisted serial killer named C33.
  In the new novel, Green Hell, Bruen’s dark angel of a protagonist has again hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and pills; and his firing from the Irish national police, the Guards, is ancient history. But Jack isn’t about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at the University of Galway who has a violent habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. And when Jack rescues a preppy American student on a Rhodes Scholarship from a couple of kid thugs, he also unexpectedly gains a new sidekick, who abandons his thesis on Beckett to write a biography of Galway’s most magnetic rogue.
  Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jack’s vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals toward chaos. Enter Emerald, an edgy young Goth who could either be the answer to Jack’s problems, or the last ripped stitch in his undoing. Ireland may be known as a “green Eden,” but in Jack Taylor’s world, the national color has a decidedly lethal sheen.

  GREEN HELL will be published on July 7.

A Matter Of Some Purgency

The latest – the 10th, I believe – Jack Taylor novel arrives from Ken Bruen early in August, when PURGATORY (Transworld Ireland) hits a shelf near you. Quoth the blurb elves:

Someone is scraping the scum off the streets of Galway, and they want Jack Taylor to get involved. A drug pusher, a rapist, a loan shark, all targeted in what look like vigilante attacks. And the killer is writing to Jack, signing their name: C-33.
  Jack has had enough. He doesn’t need the money, and doesn’t want to get involved. But when his friend Stewart gets drawn in, it seems he isn’t been given a choice. In the meantime, Jack is being courted by Reardon, a charismatic billionaire intent on buying up much of Galway, and begins a tentative relationship with Reardon’s PR director, Kelly.
  Caught between heaven and hell, there’s only one path for Jack Taylor to take: Purgatory.

  The more eagle-eyed among you will note that the cover for PURGATORY features an inset of Iain Glen, who plays Jack Taylor in the TV series adapted from Ken’s books. The box-set of the series is now available, with all the details available here …

On Sisyphus, Hercules And Shaggy Dog Tayls

First off, apologies for the intermittent service at Crime Always Pays these days. All Three Regular Readers are, I know, accustomed to more regular reading than has been provided here over the last few weeks. But work has gone crazy in the last couple of months, and I’m also working on an extra-curricular project that is barrelling helter-skelter towards a deadline that looms large at the end of the month. So if you bear with me, normal-ish service will be resumed in short order.
  Meanwhile, I had a short review of Ken Bruen’s HEADSTONE (Transworld Ireland) published in the Irish Times yesterday. It ran a lot like this:

HEADSTONE
By Ken Bruen
Transworld Ireland (£12.99)
Jack Taylor is probably the least private eye in crime fiction. In Ken Bruen’s novels, Taylor is as well-known on Galway’s streets as Eyre Square itself, and as easy to find. Further, he’s ‘an alkie vigilante with notions above his station’, as one character describes him here.
  Would you commission this man to find your wandering daughter?
  ‘Headstone’ is the ninth in the Jack Taylor series, and Ken Bruen’s 29th novel in total. The plot finds Jack pitched against a neo-Nazi group bent on slaughter, while also trying to track down a priest who has absconded with the funds of an Opus Dei-style organisation.
  As always, the plot is incidental. It’s traditional for fictional private eyes to investigate a disappearance, an absence or a lack, in the process shining a light into the dark corners of the culture from which they spring. Jack Taylor tends to ramble around Galway pointing out its shortcomings in his uniquely bleak and lacerating way, occasionally remembering to engage with the job he has been commissioned to do.
  ‘Mostly what you got was tired,’ he says after one less-than-heroic effort. ‘My limp ached. I even did a Google search. Nope. He had really flown under the radar.’
  Bruen, of course, is fully aware of Jack Taylor’s limitations, both as a man and the hero of a series of novels. Taylor is the self-referential, knowing creation of an author with a PhD in Metaphysics, a private eye who not only reads crime novels to restore his equilibrium, but one who falls in love with a crime fiction writer. ‘At my most cynical, I thought I was simply material for her next book,’ he says. ‘A broken-down Irish PI, with a limp and a hearing-aid. Yeah, that would fly …’
  Yes, Jack Taylor is an absurd character. As ludicrous as any knight errant tilting at windmills, or Hercules hosing down the Augean Stables of Galway, or Sisyphus flogged up and down his hill time and time again.
  Are we meant to take him at all seriously? Probably not. He is, after all, a bottomless well of compassion and rage, and as such is an entirely preposterous creation in contemporary Ireland. Long may he run. - Declan Burke

Ken Bruen’s Cartoons

Ah, bored. Remember being bored? God be with the days when I’d be so bored I’d collapse comatose on the couch and flick through the TV channels just to see if there was anything on that didn’t involve cooking, buying property or Hitler. Halcyon days.

  Boredom’s a bit of a luxury these days, as is TV: about the only TV I watch now is the occasional baseball game on ESPN, Match of the Day on a Saturday night, and a documentary now and again. I got to watch half of a documentary on the Minoans last night, and good stuff it was too, although I stumbled off to bed once they started to get into the really good stuff, i.e., human sacrifice. Not that the human sacrifice bit put me off; more that I wanted to be alert when I come to the second half, so as not to miss the gory details.

  Anyway, I may just have to make room in the schedule for some TV on Thursday night, as I discovered whilst roaming through KT McCaffrey’s new blog. Quoth KT:

“I’m looking forward to Ken Bruen’s latest Jack Taylor episode. It’s on TV3 this Thursday at 9.30pm. Should be interesting to see how Bruen’s writing translates to the small screen. This one is called ‘The Pikemen Murders’ and will be shown over two nights.”

  Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly throws its eye over Sir Kenneth’s latest offering, HEADSTONE, with the gist running thusly:

Moments of grace are fleeting in Bruen’s world, and things rapidly head south after Taylor receives a miniature gravestone in the post, courtesy of a group of psychopaths calling themselves “Headstone.” Led by a fanatic recidivist criminal from a previous Taylor case, they target the “weak,” including the handicapped, the mentally ill, and the homeless. Now they have their sights set on Taylor and everyone close to him. That the plot is a tad cartoonish and over-the-top scarcely matters in a remarkable series that at heart is about one man’s reckoning with a lifetime of pain and loss in a rapidly changing Ireland.

  ‘A tad cartoonish’? A tad harsh, no? Especially when it’s the case that Ken Bruen tends to use plot in the way a TV chef might use a wok, a purely functional tool into which are mixed his prime ingredients of character, atmosphere and language.

  Of course, it being a Ken Bruen novel, virtually anything is possible, and without having read it yet, it’s not beyond the bounds of plausibility, given that his previous offering featured the Devil, that the storyline features actual cartoon characters.

  Ken Bruen scripting Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote? I’d buy that for a dollar, not least because I’d imagine that that perpetually irritating overgrown chicken would finally get its comeuppance …

Stella: Reassuringly Expansive*

Charlie Stella (right), and especially JOHNNY PORNO, remains one of the glaring gaps in my reading over the last few years, not least because he appears to be something of an American Ken Bruen, beloved by his peers as a writers’ writer. That’s something I’m going to have to remedy in short order, because Charlie, unprompted, has gone the extra mile on behalf of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. To wit:

“Clever writing is something I enjoy. So is smart writing. Add some black humor to the mix, dialogue that smacks you with a smile and a genuine sense that the author knows well the surroundings/history, etc., of which he (or she) writes and you have a perfect storm of terrific reading. Harry Rigby is a “research consultant” (clever in itself) ... a self-loather of the first ilk, but one with a sense of justice balanced by pragmatism; you do what you can when you can do it. He’s got a particularly nasty brother he hasn’t seen in four years, a wife who doesn’t love him/nor he her, but they share a son they both love dearly. Trouble brews when the wife of a prominent politician offs herself (except she didn’t -- it look more like murder) ... one of Harry’s few friends has the pictures ... there’s the beautiful Kate (brother, did I want a date with her--proving I have some of this self-loathing thing in me as well because her comebacks rival Rigby’s) ... treachery abounds and it’s Christmas, for fucks sake. No spoilers here, but this is terrific writing that shouldn’t be missed; something my compassionate friend Doc will thoroughly enjoy for sure (his being a Jack Taylor fan and all).
  “Harry Rigby, the ultimate anti-hero, fights his own demons (including a death wish except for protecting his son) and some of the corrupt and powerful in and around his home town when murder comes a knockin’ at Christmas ... nothing short of brilliant writing is the highlight of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE ... absolutely brilliant writing.” - Charlie Stella

  Funnily enough, I’d been chatting with someone else a couple of days ago about EIGHTBALL, and saying that it makes the classic first novel mistake of throwing the kitchen sink (and the rest) at it, in the hope of making a decent impression. Then I got home to find Charlie’s take on it waiting for me. Just goes to show, there’s no second-guessing how someone’s going to read your book …
  Anyway, bless your cotton socks, Charlie Stella.
  If you’d like to take a punt on Harry Rigby, the Kindle version of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE can be found here on Amazon US, here on Amazon UK, and here on Amazon Germany. And hey, if you like it, don’t be shy about letting me know. Such are the tiny triumphs that make this writer’s life worth living …

  * If you haven’t seen the ‘reassuringly expensive’ Stella beer ads of recent times, feel free to ignore this headline.

Wicka Wicka Wild West

I’ve no idea what it is they’re putting in the water over there these days, but the west coast of Ireland, if what we’re seeing on screen is to be believed, is going to hell in a hand-basket. RTE’s acclaimed TV series about a lone rural cop, ‘Single-Handed’, recently had its fourth run; Ken Bruen’s THE GUARDS was adapted as ‘Jack Taylor’, starring Iain Glen; now comes ‘The Guard’, which this week opened the Sundance Festival World Dramatic Competition. To wit:

‘The Guard’ is a thriller-comedy set on the west coast of Ireland where Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is a small-town cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international cocaine-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to his door.

The film is written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, brother to playwright and film director Martin McDonagh (‘The Lonesome West’ et al, ‘In Bruges’), who doubles up here, along with Don Cheadle, as executive producer. The big attraction for me here is Brendan Gleeson, though, an immensely likeable and always watchable actor, and by all accounts a thoroughly nice bloke to boot. Variety likes him too, with the gist of its Sundance review running thusly:

“… it’s Gleeson who rightly owns the screen as a beer-swilling, crotch-grabbing, Derringer-firing crusader with one hell of a filthy mouth to go along with his heart of gold,” while the director John Michael McDonagh’s “filmmaking crackles with energy.”

According to Element Pictures, the movie will be getting a summer release here in Ireland. Should be a cracker.

The Sun Comes Up On Galway Bay: Or, Jack Taylor Hits The Silver Screen

‘Jack Taylor’, the pilot for the movies based on Ken Bruen’s THE GUARDS, screened last night on TV3, and I have to say - reluctantly - that I don’t buy Iain Glen (above, left) in the lead. It doesn’t help that his faux-Irish accent wanders all over the map, but that’s not the biggest problem.
  The script, and particularly in the voice-overs, makes something whimsical of Jack Taylor’s fatalism. In the movie, Jack Taylor is a broth of a boy, prone to the odd eye-twinkle, a tough man to deal with if you push him too hard.
  In the novels, or in my reading of them at least, Jack Taylor is a dangerous bastard to know, a man fuelled on anger and Jameson, a man who is as hard as only the truly brittle can be, who know that just one more shove or punch or insult could shatter the façade.
  It also doesn’t help that the movie, being a movie, needed to make of THE GUARDS a straightforward narrative of investigation, whereas the novel, and all the Taylor novels, are a post-modern take on the detective story, for the most part philosophical ruminations occasionally linked by the need to have some investigative narrative.
  I suppose the difference is that, in the movie, Jack Taylor was investigating a series of crimes, rather than investigating Galway itself as a microcosm of the new Ireland.
  There was a lot to like, it has to be said, not least of which was the depiction of Galway city, and there were some good performances in the minor roles. And hey, maybe Iain Glen has the chops to convince an audience that isn’t familiar with the Bruen novels. Fans, though, will be disappointed, I think. For some promo vids, and to make up your own mind, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, it’s been a busy week for Irish crime fiction. Staying with TV3, the ever-radiant Alex Barclay was on the Ireland AM couch, talking up her latest offering, TIME OF DEATH. The conversation includes a very nice shout-out to John Connolly and Declan Hughes - clickety-click here for more …
  Staying with Declan Hughes … I don’t know if you could call Emma Donoghue’s new novel, ROOM, a crime novel, even though it concerns itself with some rather despicable criminal activity, but Squire Hughes was suitably impressed when reviewing it for the Irish Times. All the details are here …
  Staying with reviews: the eagle-eyed Maxine Clarke has organised her reviews by country over at the Petrona blog, and her introduction to her Irish reviews cites Gene Kerrigan, Brian McGilloway, Alan Glynn and, erm, yours truly. But don’t let that put you off - there’s some really good stuff just about here …
  Elsewhere, Peter Rozovsky reviews Declan Hughes’ latest, CITY OF LOST GIRLS, while the good word has already started to tumble in for Stuart Neville’s COLLUSION …
  Finally, and veering off the straight-and-narrow of crime fiction, congrats to all who were responsible for having Dublin declared a UNESCO City of Literature last week; and congrats too to Irish scribes Emma Donoghue and Paul Murray, both of whom were long-listed for the Booker Prize, for ROOM and SKIPPY DIES respectively.
  Nice work, folks. Very nice indeed …