by The Guards
Jack Taylor (Book 1)
Ken Bruen
Minotaur Books / St. Martin’s Press (an imprint of Macmillan Publishers)
Jack Taylor is an ex-cop turned bouncer, and his creator’s prose hits with the jagged force of a shattered pint glass.
Most fictional detectives drink to numb the pain of the world. Jack Taylor drinks to numb the pain of himself, which, as Ken Bruen demonstrates in the ferocious and darkly comic The Guards, is a vastly more difficult assignment.
The late Ken Bruen, the master of Irish noir, introduces his most enduring antihero in this novel with a prose style that feels like a beautiful car crash. The sentences are jagged, fragmented and bruised, arriving in staccato bursts that mimic the thoughts of a man nursing a catastrophic hangover in a damp London alley.
Once a rising star in the Garda, Jack has been reduced to working as a bouncer and doorman, subsisting on a diet of Jameson, regret, and the occasional fistfight. When he’s hired to find a missing girl, the plot kicks into gear, dragging him through the neon-lit underbelly of London’s criminal fringe. But let’s be honest: you don’t read a Jack Taylor novel for the intricate puzzle-box plotting. You read it for the voice.
Jack is a walking disaster area, a man so steeped in cynicism and self-loathing that his internal monologues read like a twisted blend of Samuel Beckett and Raymond Chandler. Bruen balances the extreme violence and bleakness with a pitch-black humor that catches you off guard just when you think you need a moment to breathe.
The Guards is not a comfortable book. It is grim, profane, and relentlessly bleak. But if you’re in the mood for a detective who is as beautifully broken as the city he patrols, Jack Taylor is the guy you want waiting for you outside the pub. Just don’t expect him to smile. And whatever you do, don’t offer him a drink.
