Jack Taylor is the archetypal private eye;
an ex-cop with a dangerous alcohol intake and a lippy attitude,
but operating in the hard boozing Irish city of Galway rather than
LA or New York. His client in the first novel, the mother of a
drowned teenager, sums up Taylor and every other noir detective
who ever went down a mean street: "They say youre good
because youve got nothing else in your life."
Despite his clients hardly glowing
endorsement and his own past among the titular Guards, the Garda
Siochana, Taylor does not do that much detecting. He may find the
reason why teenage girls have been going off Nimmos Pier,
but even this is discovered by a rootless English girl and not
Taylor himself. Instead his priorities seem to be getting drunk,
coming off the drink and getting drunk again, and his unsettled
relationships with friends and family, notably his bitter mother
and drinking buddy Sutton, a self-consciously enigmatic character
who takes on an increasing menace as the novel progresses.
The sequel begins with Taylor returning to
Galway after a year in London where he has managed to supplement
his alcoholism with a cocaine habit. No sooner is he back than he
has a client. Tinkers have been turning up dead in the city and
the Garda, in keeping with their long standing attitude to
Southern Irelands indigenous victims of oppression, are
paying no heed. Unfortunately for the travelling community, that
means Taylor is their best hope of finding what is going on. With
an Anglo-Irish policeman taking over the sidekick role from
Sutton, Taylor is even more spectatcularly inept in this
investigation. This time it is an ex-Guard with a heavy dose of
religion who effectively solves the case for Taylor and the reader
will be well ahead of the detective when Taylor is given a
description of the killer and then fails to notice he is with
someone who matches it perfectly.
Bruen and Taylor certainly know the
tradition they are following. Scattered all the way through are
quotes Bruens crime writer heroes: Elmore Leonard, Walter
Mosley, George Pelecanos and Ed McBain. Its a brave writer
who name-checks such authors in his own fiction, but perhaps that
is the point. Taylor may have the aspirations, the image and the
addictions, but that doesnt make him a good detective.
No tricky clues, no breathtaking deductive
leaps, but what Bruen does give us is a bone-saw sharp
characterisation of a man too screwed up by his own weaknesses to
even be labelled an existentialist, even though this is something
the over many literary allusions are pushing us to believe. That
too and lashings of atmosphere. Take a trip with Jack Taylor and
you are with him in the bars of Galway and take it from one whos
been there, they are good bars to be in.
|