The White Trilogy

I’m two-thirds of the way into Ken Bruen’s The White Trilogy, the first three Inspector Brant novels amassed.  I was ok with the first brief novel of the trilogy, A White Arrest, but it wasn’t ’til the end of the second, the oddly named Taming the Alien, that I thought Brant had really hit his stride.  He is a most unusual and intriguing character.  Compelling, really, though not as angst-ridden as Bruen’s Jack Taylor.  In these books, you get a bit of backstory about Brant, and I feel his empathy for others and his vulnerability at least equal his pragmatic violence.  It’s not precisely that you identify with him, although he is clearly on the right side whatever his methods.  He also tends to bond with at-least-somewhat more straight-up cops, like his boss Roberts; Falls, a tough and riveting WPC, to whom Brant is inordinately kind but not condescending; Tone, so new to policing and star-struck by Brant; and D’Agostino, a NYC cop who falls under his spell despite her better judgment. You feel there must be something there, and there is.

In Taming the Alien, Brant ranges farther afield than usual, bonding memorably with a distant cousin, Pat de Brun, in Galway on his way to Shannion and hence to America.  Amazed by his warm reception, Brant manages to live up to his end of the human connection.  The Alien himself manages to do mayhem in San Francisco and get to Acapulco; Brant does follow him as far as New York City in order to retrieve half of a pair of thugs who have knifed him and killed a cop.  Bill from Rilke on Black surfaces again, as do a number of other characters from that novel and the first in this series. There are thugs galore.   In all, a very satisfying book.

A White Arrest, a novel that juggles introducing Brant and his South London police station; the story of “the Umpire,” insistent on killing England’s top cricket players; and a group of vigilantes who are hanging drug dealers is fun.  Brant is much more the sidekick of Inspector Roberts than in the later novels, and Roberts’ wife figures prominently. Bruen’s use of quotations and song lyrics predict the rest of the books, but the typography here is very effective.  Falls is a more important character than in the later books, and has her own Greek chorus and subplot.