Ken Bruen

• Born: 1951
• Place of Birth: Galway, Ireland

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; police procedural; private investigator

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Detective Sergeant (later Inspector) Brant, 1998-; Jack Taylor, 2001-

Contribution

With the publication of the first Jack Taylor mystery, The Guards, in 2001, Ken Bruen found broad popular and critical acclaim within the mystery and detective genre. The popularity of this novel in Europe and later in the United States prompted the reissue of several of Bruen’s earlier works. The first three Sergeant Brant novels—A White Arrest (1998), Taming the Alien (1999), and The McDead (2000)—were collected and reissued in the United States as The White Trilogy (2003).

Bruen’s novels are significant for their treatment of two popular detective subgenres. As their protagonist’s penchant for Ed McBain’s novels of the 87th Precinct suggests, the Brant novels are contemporary police procedurals of a particularly dark and gritty nature. The novelty lies in the juxtaposition of the setting (London) and the narrative style, which is heavily influenced by American noir. The Jack Taylor novels are private investigator novels that are also unusual in their setting (Galway) because, as the narrator maintains, there are no private investigators in Ireland.

Bruen’s stature as a mystery and detective fiction writer is reflected in the number of awards and recognitions his works have received. The Guards was an Edgar Award finalist and Shamus Award winner, and several of his other novels have appeared on annual lists of best novels.

Biography

Ken Bruen was born in 1951 in Galway, Ireland, to a middle-class family. During Bruen’s childhood, Galway, on the western coast of Ireland, was a small town in which everybody knew everybody else. It has since become one of Ireland’s largest cities, with its share of big-city problems. Raised in a bookless household, Bruen described himself as a quiet boy who stood out in a society in which high value is placed on the art of conversation. His insurance salesman father did not encourage his reading or his quest for education. Bruen once stated that much of his life was spent trying to earn his father’s respect, even though his father was not impressed by the English degrees that he earned. Although his father did not outwardly approve of his writing career, Bruen once found a cache of clippings about his novels among his father’s effects, which he interpreted as a posthumous expression of paternal approval for his literary vocation.

After college and graduate school, Bruen spent many years traveling the world and holding a variety of jobs, including teaching positions in Kuwait and Vietnam, a position as a security guard in the World Trade Center, and acting jobs in low-budget films.

In 1978, Bruen accepted a teaching position in Brazil that led to a horrific experience that changed the course of his life. Arrested with four other foreigners in a Rio de Janeiro bar after a brawl, he was held without being charged for the next four months in a Brazilian cell where he experienced physical, psychological, and sexual abuse at the hands of his guards and fellow inmates. He retreated from these horrors into what he has described as a catatonia from which he spent a long time recovering.

On his release, Bruen moved to South London, where he would spend the next several years and where his career as a serious writer began to take shape. He also resumed teaching and met his wife, Philomena. After fifteen years in London, Bruen returned to Galway, where his daughter was born.

Several echoes from significant events in Bruen’s life can be found in his novels. The settings of South London and Galway, for example, are the most familiar towns in Bruen’s life. Additionally, his daughter was born with Down syndrome, like the character Serena-May, the child of Jack Taylor’s friends Jeff and Cathy. His brother and several members of his wife’s family struggled with or succumbed to alcoholism, and Bruen once said that a brother-in-law was the model for the character Tommy in American Skin (2006).

Analysis

After some early attempts at literary fiction and several well-received London-based crime thrillers, including Rilke on Black (1996), The Hackman Blues (1997), and Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice (1997), Ken Bruen achieved critical and commercial success with the publication of The Guards, a Jack Taylor novel, in 2001. Although his career as a novelist did not begin with the Sergeant Brant and Jack Taylor series, they are his most popular novels and among his most effective. In both series, Bruen brings a markedly American style to unusual settings like London and Galway. The literary influences Bruen claims are, with the exception of , more American than Irish: , David Goodis, , , , , Joseph Koenig, George V. Higgins, and . Bruen’s economy of language makes for a staccato read that effectively mirrors the thought processes of the characters. The plots of the novels advance at a breakneck speed.

The White Trilogy

Although Bruen’s South London police procedurals have become known as the Brant novels, Detective Sergeant Brant shares the stage with several other significant characters, particularly in the first three novels in the series, reissued as The White Trilogy, where he has no more than equal billing with his boss, Chief Inspector Roberts. The police procedural often describes the actions of an ensemble rather than an individual. In the first Brant novel, A White Arrest, Roberts and Brant are referred to as R&B, rhythm and blues, in what seems like an echo of the team Fire and Ice in The Black Dahlia (1987) by James Ellroy, whom Bruen cites as an influence. Also introduced early in the novel is WPC (Woman Police Constable) Falls, who, as a Black woman, is Brant’s unlikely protégé. In A White Arrest, a serial killer called the Umpire is targeting the English cricket team, and a vigilante group is murdering drug dealers. As is common in the genre of police procedurals, the narrative is presented in the third person by a narrator who, although omniscient, does not divulge much about the inner lives or feelings of the characters—little more, at least, than the characters divulge to one another. Marital infidelity and the death of a dog are handled with dark humor amid allusions to British and American pop culture.

In Taming the Alien, the second novel in the trilogy, Brant travels to Ireland and the United States in pursuit of a fugitive with whom he finds a strange affinity, while WPC Falls struggles with an arsonist and the loss of a baby and Chief Inspector Roberts learns that he has skin cancer. The McDead, the third novel in the trilogy, pits Brant and Roberts against an Irish gangster over the death of Roberts’s estranged brother. As elsewhere in the world of Bruen’s London novels, revenge is presented as the best resolution available to the characters. The characterization is accomplished almost entirely through dialogue, with only limited commentary from the narrator, most of it darkly humorous.

Later Brant Novels

The line that separates the police from the criminals in the Brant novels is hard to identify. It has more to do with the point of view than with the intrinsic qualities of any of the police officers who are recurrent characters. Blitz (2002) opens with Brant assaulting and destroying the reputation of the police psychiatrist who is supposed to be evaluating him, framing one of his workplace enemies in the process. WPC Falls develops an unlikely relationship with a young, racist member of the British National Party, and Roberts tries to come to terms with the death of his wife. Amid the hunt for a serial killer who is targeting police officers, the various characters, all damaged in one way or another, support each other in small ways, almost as if by accident. The unlikely partnership between Brant and Porter Nash, an openly gay detective, is particularly interesting; Brant is violently unstable, but he is not a bigot.

Vixen (2003) pits the detectives against a female serial killer and further personal complications, and Calibre (2006) features a serial killer who targets rude people. In Ammunition (2007), Brant is shot by a crazed gunman while in a pub.

As is often the case with mystery and detective series, the Brant novels can be read out of order with only minimal difficulties; while there is continuity between them in terms of character development, each story is more or less discrete.

The Jack Taylor Novels

In contrast to the Brant novels, the Jack Taylor novels are much more closely related. The juxtaposition of these Galway novels with the Brant novels reveals the range of Bruen’s talents. These first-person narratives are introspective and almost confessional (though unsentimental), while the Brant novels are not. If the characters in the Brant novels feel guilt or remorse, it is not foregrounded in the narrative. The reader generally sees only as much of the characters as their peers would see. Jack Taylor, in contrast, is painfully aware of his sins and failures, though he often seems unable to rectify them. Character development, at least about the protagonist, is much more detailed and explicit. Taylor’s narration features lists, revealing the fragile discipline with which he hangs on to what is left of his life. It is also significant that Taylor is a voracious reader. His narration is full of literary allusions.

The first novel in the series, The Guards, shows Taylor wallowing in drunken self-pity, bitter over his dismissal from the police force until he agrees to help a woman find out what has happened to her daughter. He is aided by his friend Sutton. The reader is introduced to Cathy, a young English former junkie who tries to pass as Irish, and Jeff, the bartender she eventually marries. These tenuous connections form Taylor’s extended family. The novel ends on a dark note that refuses to glorify the loner lifestyle that generations of detective novelists have depicted as romantic.

In The Killing of the Tinkers (2002), Taylor has returned to Galway after a year of hiding out in London only to be commissioned to investigate the murder of young “travelers,” a nomadic group originating in Ireland and found in the United Kingdom and the United States. The novel is also fascinating because it features a crossover between the Jack Taylor series and the Brant novels in the person of Keegan, a British police officer with a predilection for the novels of Ed McBain.

In The Magdalen Martyrs (2003), Taylor is in worse health and spirits than ever and assists a mysterious character by locating a person formerly associated with the Magdalen laundries, prisonlike facilities created by the Roman Catholic Church to house prostitutes, unwed mothers, and other women deemed to be in trouble.

The Dramatist (2004) opens with a reformed Jack Taylor, who no longer drinks or uses cocaine. His former dealer, now in jail in Dublin, enjoins him to investigate his sister’s death, which has been incorrectly ruled an accident. Taylor’s literary training serves him well as he works to solve a case that the police do not even acknowledge as murder.

In Priest (2006), Taylor has just returned to Galway after a stay in a mental institution, suffering from guilt at having perhaps caused the death of a child. He is called to investigate the murder of a pedophile priest whose decapitated body has been found in the confessional.

The nearly twenty-book Jack Taylor series continued with several novels, including Sanctuary (2008), Green Hell (2015), In the Galway Silence (2018), and Galway Confidential (2024). He also published numerous stand-alone novels, like Merrick (2014) and Callous (2021), and short story collections, such as A Fifth of Bruen: Early Fiction of Ken Bruen (2006). Like the best novels in any genre, Bruen’s detective novels ultimately defy being pigeonholed in a particular category. They are detective fiction, certainly, but they are so stylish and concise that they reward literary analysis. With many mysteries, the compulsion to read is abrogated by the solution to the puzzle or the mystery itself. However, Bruen’s novels, like the best novels in any genre, are worth rereading.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sergeant Brant is introduced in A White Arrest (1998) as a corrupt, brutishly violent London detective feared and respected by his peers. An antihero, Brant is a rage-filled, pugnacious bully who maintains a complicated but curiously loyal relationship with the few detectives and police officers whom he respects. He occasionally betrays an interest in Irish culture and is an avid reader of Ed McBain, the American author of police procedurals. He respects strength and sees violence as a necessary tool for law enforcement. He places little trust in the legal system, preferring to mete out justice in an ad hoc fashion.
• Jack Taylor is a Galway-based former member of the Garda Síochána, the police force of Ireland. Expelled for drinking and substance abuse, he now occupies a gray area between the law and the criminal world and is viewed with distrust by both sides. He works as a private investigator—or a “finder,” as he calls himself in The Guards (2001), the novel in which he is introduced—in a country where, he says, there are no private investigators because they are viewed as informers or traitors. His circle is a relatively narrow one. He maintains an antagonistic and guilt-ridden relationship with his mother and her priest and a few delicate relationships that could barely be called friendships, apparently based on circumstance and necessity, with his bartender, his landlady, and a former colleague from the Guards.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2013.

Breen, Jon L. “The Police Procedural.” In Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, I-II, edited by Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan. New York: Scribner’s, 1998.

Clark, David M. "6 Transculturality and Ken Bruen’s Crime Fiction." Transcultural Insights into Contemporary Irish Literature and Society: Breaking New Ground. Routledge, 2024, p. 87.

"Jack Taylor Series." GoodReads, www.goodreads.com/series/50920-jack-taylor. Accessed 20 July 2024.

MacDonald, Craig. Art in the Blood: Crime Novelists Discuss Their Craft. F+W Media, 2011.

Murphy, Paula. “’Murderous Mayhem’: Ken Bruen and the New Ireland.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 24, no. 2, 2006, pp. 3-16.

Swierczynski, Duane. “Through the Looking Glass: A Conversation with Ken Bruen.” Mystery Scene, vol. 88, 2005, pp. 36-37.