Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Hell's Door

I moderate a mystery reading group, the obviously titled Murder Ink, at the local Barn O' Novels, here in sleepy, sunny Palmdale. It's a fun group, a monthly break from the routine, although most months I'm the only guy in the group. And most of the ladies lean to the lighter end of the spectrum (or profess to).

Still, stubborn cuss that I am, I keep trying to occasionally slip some harder, darker fare into the mix -- a Chandler or Hammett here; a Robert Parker or Mosley there. And we try to mix things up a bit, ranging from new or newish writers to old classics (Doyle, Sayers, etc.) to off-the-beaten track cross-over stuff (Elizabeth Lowell, Isaac Asimov).

So, when someone suggested we "do" a Ken Bruen ("that Irish guy you're always talking about"), i jumped at the chance. Jack Taylor, the alcoholic ex-Guard turned Galway eye, the gumshoe with all the heart and hurt of a dozen dead poets, is one of my favourite P.I. series; a literate, uncompromising stroll to the abyss and back that gets me every time. And so I oh-so-subtly lead them to one I hadn't yet read, figuring it would be a good way for me to both catch up on the series (and revisit Galway, the "dirtiest city in Ireland") and meanwhile maybe ruffle a few smug suburbanite feathers.

Oops.

The Taylor series has always been on the dark side, but Priest (2007), the fifth in the series, is something else again, a bruising, brutal blast of sustained white hot rage and bottom of the glass despair as bleak and black as it gets.Taylor doesn't so much go for a look at the abyss this time -- he jumps in and does a few laps. This isn't slipping into darkness; it's a headlong dive.

In fact, the book kicks off with Taylor just finishing up a little dip, and he's dripping wet. He's fresh out of the looneybin, his mind short-circuited by prolonged abuse and raging guilt over the death of a child, with few prospects and fewer friends, facing a hollow and hopefully (but probably not) alcohol-free future. Meanwhile, a nun has just discovered the severed head of a priest in the confessional -- a priest recently accused of child molesting.

And then things get dark. Before the book is finally nailed shut, there will be murder done and a grisly sort of reckless, wild justice meted out, hearts and lives shattered, drinks drunk (or not drunk) and blood spilled, poetry and music (Springsteen, Cash, Zevon) evoked. And souls forever fucked.

Taylor's (and Ireland's) complicated relationship with the Catholic Church, the lies and wreckage left behind by Ireland's economic success, and his own thundering despair -- they're all here, all ratcheted up to ear-bleeding volume. I thought The Magdalen Martyrs, a previous book in the series, where Taylor took on the Church's systemic abuse of unwed mothers and his own tormented relationship with his mother, was fierce, but this one screams like the mother of all banshees.

What was I thinking?

And Taylor's a far cry from an affable character. In the hands of a weaker writer than Bruen, he'd probably be detestable and utterly unreadable. But Bruen does it with seeming ease, one of the freshest, most distinct voices in crime fiction today. He doesn't so much have style as an M.O.: the plots in the Jack Taylor series seem almost assembled, not written, a swirling jangle of stream-of-consciousness rants, random encounters, chance meetings, out-of-nowhere lists, quotes, fever dreams, newspaper clippings and poetry snippets, and even, sometimes, a little detective work. Holding it all together is Bruen's skill and fierce vision, and of course Taylor, a black hole of a hero if there ever was one.

So, yes, Taylor can be obnoxious and a bully, stupid and mean-spirited and nasty to those who would try to love him, a mostly charm-free, self-pitying grade A fuck-up whose tragedy is that he knows he's a fuck-up, but can't seem to keep the decks from tilting. But there's something about him. And there's always a tiny, tiny sliver of hope, of redemption, a compassion in each book that keeps me reading.

Of course, that tiny splinter invariably and inevitably becomes infected and has to be lanced, but hey, this ain't no Lifetime movie.

Long before Bush and Cheyney made torture fashionable, Taylor was doing it to himself.

He's a one-man weapon of self-destruction; a man whose adult life has been one long Sunday morning coming down, puncuated by lost weekends and bad choices. Because his real battle, of course, is not with the Church or the powers that be, with corrupt cops or Celtic Tiger criminals in their shirts and their ties, but with himself. His alcoholism, his obsessions with past crimes, real and imagined, his burning guilt as he slowly circles the last exit to Hell -- rarely has someone conjured up such a vivid and poetic sense of noir and somehow managed to transform it into an ongoing series. And it ain't that pretty at all.

But therein, maybe, lies its beauty.

I can hardly wait to see what the ladies' reactions will be. May God have mercy....

Tales of (Yankee) Power (Senor?)

Wouldn't you know it? I just fling out an article on the P.I. genre and politics in the latest issue of Mystery Scene when this one comes wandering into my sights.

The corridors of power, it turns out, are even nastier than Chandler's fabled mean streets, although in Gary Phillips' fierce new book, Politics Noir: Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power, a collection of politically-charged tales from the dark side from some of the best of the HB and noir crowd, sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart.

This book is about as in your face as it gets, an unapologetic no-holds-barred slice of venom aimed at the powers that be and the corruption that is. To be sure, a lot of these nasty black-hearted stories have nothing to do -- theoretically -- with the current administration per se, and as editor, Phillips' attempts at a fair and balanced tone in his intro are admirable. But the actual stories (including his own) make it pretty clear which side of the line most of these writers are coming from -- and are all the more powerful for it. Contributors include Mike Davis, Darrell James, John Shannon, Robert Greer, Twist Phelan, Ken Wishnia, Pete Hautman and Sujata Massey, and I haven't come across a dud yet.

This is primo stuff, angry and pissed off, its bleak cynicism and impotent despair perhaps best summed up by a character in Ken Bruen's heartbreaking contribution, "Dead Right": "Call it politics. I call it shite."

I call the entire collection an essential read. Try to get it done before November...

A Long Hot Summer from Now On...

Not much to report, really.

Except that I think the heat's really getting to me this year. I tell ya, Poodledale's like a "friggin' oven," as my dad would say, like a desert or something. And forget this "dry heat" crap. For some reason, even though we haven't had enough rain to fill a damn bird bath this year, it's humid. So not only are we now suffering temperatures usually reserved for cooking poultry, but the heat lingers on, even after the sun sets, the air clinging to you like tight, damp clothes.

Maybe the heat's what made me do it. But I made a shocking discovery last week -- I'm going bald!!!

Yes, I was shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED!!!!

So, dopey from the heat (which may also explain why I enjoyed the latest installment of the DIE HARD franchise -- easily the best one since the very first one) and perhaps even inspired a little by Bruno's battered chromium domium, I took my trusty old Trac II in hand, and whacked it all off.

I'm still not sure why. Boredom? Vanity? Anger at those damn follicles going AWOL? The vast fortune I'll no longer have to blow on cheap shampoo and combs?

Beats me, but except for a few nicks and an embarrasingly pale pate (I look like a Q-Tip), the operation was, uh, successful.

The reaction?

Decidely mixed. I look a little tougher if I scowl, I think, (GREAT! Now small children cry in my presence and customers ask if someone else could serve them) but mostly I still look like a doofus.

Ah, well...

On the crime fic front, I just finished reading Ken Bruen's THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS from a year or so ago-- don't know why it took me so long to get to it -- partly perhaps in honour of D.L's recent return from Ireland. This makes the second great P.I. novel I've read this year that's set in the Emerald Isle (the first was Declan Hughes' powerful and disturbing THE COLOUR OF BLOOD, which I've already raved on about elsewhere).

Not that Bruen's novel is any less powerful or disturbing. The Celtic Tiger may be roaring, but there seem to be an awful lot of pissed off Micks out there who wouldn't mind skinning that cat. The hero of THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS is, of course, perennial fuck-up Jack Taylor, the all night drug prowling wolf ex-guard half-ass Galway private eye who never met a lost cause (or a pithy quote, be it Shakespeare or Springsteen) he didn't embrace. Dependably undependable, he's roped into two cases this time out: investigate a possibly evil (but sexy) stepmother who may have bumped off dear old dad, and to track down an "angel of mercy" who once worked at the notorious Magdalen laundries (the laundries were essentially sweat shops run by the Catholic Church where pregnant single women and other ill-behaved -- ie: "uppity" -- women were sentenced to what amounts to slavery and torture for their sins).

The anger is palpable and visceral; like Hughes' book, it rises off the pages in waves like steam heat. And yet there are also tender, poignant moments as well that will shred your heart. Nobody writes like Bruen, and few even dare try. Which is, perhaps, just as well. In the hands of lesser writers, the subject matter would be simply a grisly hook, a cheap thrill to get the punters into the cheap seats.

Not Bruen, though. He's a man on a mission, and I suspect it's more than just delivering a good read, although of course he does that -- in spades. There are souls in torment here, stacked up like kindling, and Bruen holds the match.

Burn, baby, burn.