favorite titles

I have yet to read this, but I love this title:  Goodbye, She Lied

 

Rilke on Black

Found a copy of Ken Bruen’s Rilke on Black at a used bookstore.  It’s very brief, but the book took me awhile, since I put it down in the middle and wasn’t eager to pick it back up.  It is interesting, though, to read a early work of an author you’ve read quite a bit of recently.  There was a bit of a mix of Bruen’s later Max and Angela, Brant, and Jack Taylor novels, and, there are, of course, themes and a style that are developed more fully in the later books.

The book is narrated by Nick, an ex-bouncer, who is something like Jack Taylor by the book’s end.  He’s the only character the least bit likable, and that’s not just a trick of the point of view, I think; he’s the underdog despite his size and violence.  His neighbor, Dex, is a bit of a wired sociopath, interesting and all over the place.  LIsa– talkative, pretty, black, hard, and the instigator for a poorly conceived kidnapping plot that is the book’s center– doesn’t really hold together as a character for me.   Nor does the Rilke-quoting kidnap victim.  (It probably didn’t help that I was reading Rilke but thinking Rimbaud for the first half of the book).

The first part of the book reads quickly as Bruen deftly paints his three characters.  The plot is unlikely in the extreme, rather like Bust with some brains in London, but there’s really little suspense and empathy for me, particularly in the middle of the book.   Inspector Brant himself does appear briefly in a late scene in the book, and London noir is a feature that appeals, but it is following Nick through the third (and last) part of the book that’s the most fun. 

As with other characters, Nick has an internal soundtrack of country, pop, and rock songs. Nick’s sometime girlfriend Bonny jumps off the page. There are riveting moments, but none that relate to the central plot, I think.

I’m not done with Bruen yet.  I’m on to London Boulevard, which I believe may be made into a movie, and the White Trilogy. I haven’t decided about the other Max and Angela books.

Hamish on bbc

So I finally looked at an episode of Hamish Macbeth from  the 1995-97 BBC series. It was quite enjoyable, but, of course, quite different from what I recall of the books.  Robert Carlyle, the actor playing Hamish, is quite good and very appealing, but threw me at first because he just wasn’t tall and gangly and red-haired enough.  Priscilla had morphed into the author, Alexandra; a bit warmer but not as appealing as the book character; there is a rather jolly lot of locals at the pub, rather than the tsk-tsking Currie sisters I’d expected; the dog was cute and the wild cat was missing; there’s no Angela and a rather young and handsome Dr. Brown; the police station is rather modern, and Hamish is not tending his sheep and chickens.  There no Patel, but rather some comic relief for a shopkeeper. The hotel and pub seem transplated fromthe Agatha Raisin series.  In general, the tone is lighter.  Don’t know quite how a plot about domestic abuse and matricide, no, filicide (?) could be so amusing, but there you have it. I’ll watch some more.  The first episode was “The Great Lochdubh Salt Robbery.”  Also on the disc are “A Pillar of the Community” and “The Big Freeze.”

I do have to admit, if the truth be told, there were whole sentences I did nae understand.  Hamish (is he not from Transpotting?) is understandable, but some of the minor characters are hard.  And, of course, the setting is quite beautiful, but not quite the Sunderland sea loch I had expected. I have driven over some single tracks near where this was filmed, but I thank god I did not have to meet an oncoming vehicle on the Camel’s hump.  Fun.

Priest

Priest, just nominated for a 2008 Edgar award, is a wonderful book, with, I think, some differences from the others in the Jack Taylor series. 

The writing, still economical and fraught with emotion (often rage), has a different rhythm to it, with, it seems, longer sentences and  paragraphs and more description.  Some of the verbal ticks and tricks, like

the spaced lists,
the far-ranging quotes,
the extremely terse dialogue,

are somewhat less evident. At times Jack seems more reflective, softer.  Friendship seems more important to him, and he manages to really connect with several new characters– a desolute priest who appears only briefly; the young policewoman Ridge, who becomes more than a source of information to Jack: and, most importantly, Cody, an appealing twenty-something Jack begins to regard as a son. There is an elegiac tone to his thinking of some of his dead, particularly Mrs. Bailey and his father. He thanks some people; he cuts at least one character a break.  It’s only a sometime thing, but Jack does change.

Of course, this isn’t the Disney channel and Jack’s edge, his rage, and his violence are still there.  Some of that he seems to attribute to his current stage of sobriety.  Many of the themes in earlier novels are repeated– the betrayal of trust; the diminishment of the church; the Irish economic tiger which leaves Jack’s generation bereft and isolated; the importance of the written word; and the lure of dark side.  The guards remain a tantalizing regret and a menace to Jack.  The biggest problems unresolved at the end of The Dramatist, such as Jack’s future relationship with Jeff and Cathy, remain unresolved.  In fact, the last page of this book is the inciting incident of a next.  With Jack, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. 

The story itself here involves a decapitated priest found in a confessional, a backlog of destroyed lives in his wake.  There’s also stalker, a sniper, and the usual suspects.  It’s a page-turner; not because of the murder, but what the events show us about Jack. His story remains compelling, however brooding and depressing the emotional landscape.

martyr

I’ve just finished the third book in Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series.  I wish I’d read them in order; I read #2 (The Killing of the Tinkers) first, then #1 (the absolutely incredible Guards), then #4 (The Dramatist), and now this, The Magdalen Martyrs, #3.  In some series, this might not matter, but Jack’s situation changes so much in these books.  It’s hard to keep track of his wavering sobriety; his important but precipitous friendships; his sense of purpose, self, or equanimity; even his living arrangements or his reading.   He does make progress, but it’s so fragile and sporadic that reading these out of order makes it harder to see that.  Unlike Matthew Scudder, something of an American counterpart to Jack and one who is  mentioned in this novel, Jack’s progress is much less linear. Jack feels so much the weight of the past– his own, his father’s, his schoolmates’, Galway’s, Ireland’s, I guess.  And the recent past, the occurrences of these books, weigh as heavily as his childhood.

In Martyrs, especially, Jack doesn’t really, in the neat and tidy sense, solve anything. He does some interviewing and instigating, but he’s no detective.  There’s really no whodunit?  We pretty much know who’s responsible for what, and there’s an amazing amount of guilt to go around.  Information often comes in lightning-like installments from Cathy or Brendan; nature and time are often allowed to take their course, and often that’s the only resolution we have.  People might punished, not for the crimes they did commit, but for those they’re framed  for.   Jack, his own worst critic, readily admits his mistakes in foresight, follow-through, or judgment.  It’s hard to disagree, but it’s not the point.

These books are absolutely riveting.  Jack is compelling.  The pace seems intense, the revelations profound.  But it’s not based on the “mystery”;  it’s all in the character and the sense of place.   

Jesse Stone

I’m gotten pretty sick of Robert S. Parker lately– Spenser has gotten old, and I don’t mean just physically, what with all his honor and code mumbo-jumbo and the tedious Relationship dialogue between Spenser and Susan:

“And that’s what defines us?
“Our refusal to define us?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
I poured a little more 90-year-old Hidden Skye single malt and reached across the table to take Susan’s hand. Pearl IX, the wonder dog, barked.
“Yes.”

OK, so that may be a little harsh.  Parker can still tell a good tale, as he did in Spenser’s most recent outing, Now and Then, but the character no longer resonates with me the way he did in the earliest novels. Even Hawk fails to amuse.

This is not so with Jesse Stone, the main character of Stranger.  Sure, he’s got Relationship Issues with Jen, his former wife, but they’re easier to ignore.  The dialogue with his shrink is sort of Meaningful Breakthrough Cryptic, like getting caught in a closet eavesdropping on Spenser and Susan, but I’m fascinated by Dix’s (Jesse’s shrink’s) wardrobe and office, so that moves along.  Maybe it’s a little like skipping the description and metaphor in Moby Dick and just reading for plot, but it works for me.  Jesse and  his town are a breathe of fresh air.  I love his colleagues, especially the young cop Suitcase and the obligatory feisty female, and mother of four, Molly Crane, who mainly mans the desk.  She’s got some great lines here, and Suitcase blushes. 

The best part of the book, though, is the return of Crowe, Wilson Cormartie, who in an earlier book leaves town with ten million dollars and without harming the women hostages his gang of armed robbers has taken.  He’s a great character. He’s currently on a mission to find and bring back the daughter of a major Florida drug lord, a job he declines to complete when the instructions are tailored to include killing the girl’s mother.  There are subplots involving the gang the girl’s messed up with, have and have-not issues, Jesse’s drinking, and, regrettably, yes, his Relationship with his ex-wife Jen.  I liked it.

 

The Dramatist

The fourth in the Jack Taylor series, this is less about the case at hand than about Jack himself. It’s as if Yeats’ menacing beast, while Jack turns in a ”widening gyre” of  ”The Second Coming” (if I remember it correctly) approaches with an unwavering course Jack is helpless to avoid. 

Jack is clear-eyed and sober, and, if not signing happy songs in the street, he seems reasonably content at times.  Unresolved problems and annoyances drift in and out of view and prey on his mind: his tense relationship with his horrid mother and her failing health; his strained friendships with Cathy, who has assisted him with research in the past,  and her husband Jeff, the barman who has become his best friend; the swan boy from The Killing of the Tinkers; and his love for  Ann Henderson, recently married to a brutal guard who figures prominently in the story.  There are new things, too:  a vigilante group called the Pikemen; a new relationship with a strong and interesting woman named Margaret; new living arrangements at the old-fashioned Bailey’s Hotel, which come with warm friendships with Mrs.  Bailey, the eighty-something-year-old owner, and with Janet, her equally ancient cleaner; and an unwelcome request from Jack’s former drug dealer to look into the death of his sister, labeled a “death by misadventure” by the guards.  Because a volume of Synge’s Complete Plays and Poems, including Playboy of the Western World, was found under her body, Jack finds it likely something more was involved.  It becomes clear after another girl meets a similar fate with a copy of Playboy, a passage highlighted, found under her body as well.

The title character and the case of these mysterious deaths is important but hardly central to the novel; weeks go by when Jack does nothing about this case. It is Jack’s life, his viewpoint, that holds the narrative together, and Bruen brings us Jack’s life with great economy and poetry.  Jack’s is a riveting story.

places I’ve only been in mysteries

• Maggody, Arkansas (Joan Hesse’s Arly Hanks series)
• Lochdubh, Scotland (Hammish Macbeth series)
• Elizabethan England (Edward Marston’s theatre mysteries featuring Nicholas Bracewell)
• the Navajo reservation (Tony Hillerman)
• New Orleans (Linda Barnes’s City of the Dead)
• the morgue (Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series)
• 221b Baker Street

The Guards

Flat out, this is a great book. 

It’s not the first Jack Taylor book I’ve read, which is too bad.  It would have been a pleasure to read these in order but,  I happened upon the  Killing of the Tinkers first. And I’d read some of Bruen’s London Brant books before.  But this one is stunning.  Jack is the real deal, an incredibly interesting and real character who gets involved in riveting enigmas, yet whose character, friendships, and personal life remain the center of these books.  The dialogue is terse but friendly; characterization seems effortless and economic, but creates people you feel you know well and care about.  The idiom and geography transport you.  In all, Bruen creates as vivid a world and character as you can imagine. I’ve been to Galway, but that lovely tourist city is hardly the place of memory, pain, and darkness Jack inhabits.  When Anne Henderson, who becomes the love of his life, presents him with her problem, Jack, as always, must confront his past and his personal demons to make any headway.  As always, any progress comes at great cost.  That the violence of these stories does not seem gratuitous is probably an indication of how deeply we are involved in Jack’s world.

Ken Bruen in Wilkepedia 
the novels

Bust

It’s got to be some kind of a feat to write a novel where none of the characters are in any way sympathetic or appealing.  For me, Bust was that novel.  The main character, Max Fisher. who hires a hit man to kill his wife, was shallow, rude, gross  and despicable.  And that is even before he entertains the idea of murdering her.  Deidre, his wife, mercifully appears in the novel only briefly, yet manges to make him look good.  The object of his love, and his motivation, his secretary Angela, is more straightforward and ruthless, sort of like Bruen’s “Vixen” character.  Ultimately amoral and unpleasant, she at least thinks clearly.  Maybe she’s just Irish.  Or written by Bruen.  Her hitman boyfriend, Dillon, is pathologically creepy.  HIs wheelchair-bound nemesis and rival is almost as insane.  It’s hard to like the cops, dead or alive. It’s hard to like anyone.  Or care.

I wonder exactly how the logistics of writing a novel with another person works.  My guess is that Bruen and Jason Starr alternate chapters or points of view.  The novel has some drive and interest, but overall, it seems to me to be an exercise in writing a certain genre without a central focus or intent. It’s not that I always dislike noir, but I should have known straight from the cover (yick) that this was not my book.