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.

new friends

It’s always fun to find a new (to you) author and character you like.  I hadn’t read any of Lisa Scottoline’s novels before, despite her prolific output, and I enjoyed Lady Killer immensely, especially for its main character Mary DiNunzio, a Philadelphia lawyer from the south side neighborhood.  A little like ’s Janet Evanovitch’s New Jersey heroine Stephanie Plum, Mary is a little more serious, and her sidekicks are a little less fun, but the writing’s top-notch and the story is great.  Who wouldn’t like the wild but good-hearted  “mean girl” client Trish  Gambone in leather and mile-high stilettos and her posse of manicurists and stylists.   The characters are wonderful, but it’s Philadelphia that’s the star of this book. I’m sure I’ll read more of Scottoline.

old friends

I thought I was all caught up on Lawrence Block.  I’d immensely enjoyed All the Flowers Are Dying when I read it shortly after it first came out in 2005. So many series seem to atrophy or to repeat themselves.  Block was still in tip-top form in that one.  It was quite a roller coaster, and several years later I recall that the scenes in the Virginia “correctional institution,” especially, were chilling, and all that stuff about capital punishment was all new information to me.  Sometime I pray that mystery authors really do their research; it seems that quite a bit of my information about prison, police procedure,  the Navajo tribe, and many parts of the world come from fictional accounts.  I remember reading  a mystery called The Mystic Policeman, situated in my neck of the woods.  It was OK, but the turns in the road, and the jurisdiction, details about the cemetery across the street from us were all wrong.  It was, well, so made up! Again, I digress . . .

Anyway, it was news to me last week when I discovered one of Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr’s novels I’d missed.  The Burglar on the Prowl  was published in 2005, and I felt like I’d neglected to send an old friend a Christmas card or something by ignoring it.  Bernie is charming.  He’s taught me most of what I know about breaking and entering.  It was great fun to get reacquainted with him and with his best friend, dog groomer Carolyn, owner of the Poodle Factory;  his friendly and somewhat bumbling police nemesis Ray Kirschmann; his bookstore; his cat; his after-work hangout, the Bum Rap; his multi-ethnic lunch routine; and his city neighborhoods and haunts.  It’s always fun to see him caught under a bed (here), or in a closet, or, generally, in the  wrong place at the wrong time.  It’s great to see him meet somebody suitable, stumble onto more than he bargained for, or get stuck in a milk chute.  He’s by far the most moral, self-effacing, and fun felon I know.  To say the plot of this Bernie adventure is involved is an understatement; its denouement, a traditional showdown in the drawing room times seven, rather tries everyone’s patience, including this reader’s.  But Bernie’s just plain fun.  Can’t wait for the next one.

Here’s Bernie in Wilkepedia and a list of the Bernie novels.

a Hollywood fairy tale, part two

I like Stuart Woods’ Holly Barker series.  I love his Stone Barrington series (with the possible exception of Two Dollar Bill).  But his writing is never breezier, more  instant wish-fulfillment than it is when he writes of his character Rick Barton.  In The Prince of Beverly Hills, Rick’s first outing, our hero moves up from beat cop to studio security head to motion picture tycoon to war hero and gets the glamor-girl movie star in no time flat– the girl, the gold watch, everything.   In this second installment of his story, post WWII Rick helps fight the dragon of cold-war commie hunters, the menacing red scare of the 1940s, when his friend, former New York playwright Sidney Brooks, is subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
That story is almost overridden by the filming of a gritty Western Sid has written and Rick is filming in not-yet-discovered Jackson Hole, WY.  It’s a fun ride and while the Oscars pore in, Sid’s life is restored, and Rick’s partner  literally buys the ranch.  Even in Woods’ world, it’s mystery lite.

 

out-of-print

I’d love to read the first three novels of Ken Bruen’s Inspector Brant trilogy, but it seems they’re out of print. I’ve enjoyed Ammunition, Calibre, Vixen, and Blitz when I “discovered” Bruen recently.  I’ve read one or two of the Jack Taylor novels, too, and they’re good, but somewhat more depressing than jaded, a tone I seem to prefer.  I’d like to finish up reading the  Brant books before I move on to other Bruen fare.  Anal, I know.  I mean, most authors don’t write a series with all one character, break free entirely, then begin with a new character.  There’s usually some overlap.  And then a collaborator.  Or, I guess,  a ghostwriter? 

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I found it would cost about $34 minimum for a used copy of A White Arrest.  Or $32 for the McDead, I’m not sure what for the Alien thing, and almost $50 for the combined White Trilogy.  I checked  the local libraries and used book stores, but no luck.  I guess I can try inter-library loan or wait until the books are re-released, which some booksellers seem to indicate will happen.  But all that takes so much planning and doesn’t smell of instant gratification, which is what, after all, a mystery fix is all about.  Oh, well…