guards

DOUBLE IRISH SHOT

Ken Bruen’s

THE GUARDS & THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS

Brandon £9.99 pbk each

Reviewed by Calum Macleod


 

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 you’re good because you’ve got nothing else in your life."

Despite his client’s 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 Nimmo’s 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 Ireland’s 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 Bruen’s crime writer heroes: Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, George Pelecanos and Ed McBain. It’s 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 doesn’t 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 who’s been there, they are good bars to be in.