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My journalism teacher always claimed the only thing that couldn't be edited was the Ten Commandments. I'd like to offer up THE GUARDS as an example. I've avoided Ken Bruen since an unsuccessful attempt to read THE WHITE ARREST a couple of years ago -- it was too left-field, even for me. But I devoured THE GUARDS at one sitting and then moved straight on to the next in the Jack Taylor series, THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS. Jack is an alcoholic private investigator, based in Galway in the west of Ireland. He has never got over his father's death, and was thrown out of the gardai -- the Irish police force -- because of his over-fondness for the pop and for punching a member of parliament. So he drifts around the city's spit-and-sawdust pubs, keeping dubious company, and with fragments of novels, poetry and films crowding his thoughts. One day a woman walks into the pub which acts as Jack's unofficial base, and asks him to investigate her daughter's suspicious death. Jack takes on the job, and, with the help of his enigmatic artist friend Sutton, discovers other young women have died in equally dodgy circumstances. In many ways, though, this fairly standard PI assignment becomes almost secondary to Bruen's take on a man whose life is bumping along the bottom and who is forced to examine his relationships and friendships with those around him. Bruen's prose is spare, sharp and diamond-honed. He can capture in an almost throwaway phrase images and dialogue that some of our more over-blown crime writers could never achieve in a million years. You can 'hear' Jack and the supporting cast -- Cathy the goth singer, Sean the pub landlord, Mrs Bailey and Janet from the hotel. You can 'see' beneath the thin hippy-dippy bohemian layer presented to tourists in Galway. This is an Ireland you will never encounter in any of the tourist guides, peopled by characters you'd cross a motorway to avoid. But Bruen presents us with a scarily-real flawed hero for our time.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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