Our Man Bruen
The noir of Ken Bruen
I’m a sucker for a subscription.
Comics, magazines, wines, boxes of cool shit arriving monthly, I’ve tried them all. There’s something that gives me the squeaks every time I come home and there’s a surprise on my doorstep, especially if there’s something new I haven’t discovered. I used to subscribe to one of those monthly Geek boxes, where you’d get toys ‘n’ T-shirts ‘n’ shit, and I finally had to quit, because I just don’t have enough room in life for all this delightful stuff. I still have favorite T-shirts from some of those boxes.
So, back in the early aughts, it was an easy choice for me to subscribe to Hard Case Crime books. I’d discovered them through Stephen King’s “The Colorado Kid,” and after reading it, I saw a notice in the back pages for a monthly subscription to their books. I love a good noir, and paying basically ten bucks a month to get either a new book by a modern author, or a fresh reprint of an old classic, was money well spent. And the books themselves were little wonders: small, old-school paperbacks, the kind I read a thousand of growing up, with beautiful painted covers, lurid and pulpy in the old school fashion. I discovered a number of my new favorite authors this way: Christa Faust, Jason Starr, and Charles Ardai, from them just randomly showing up on my doorstep.
(Sadly, they no longer use the subscription model for their books. Nothing gold can stay.)
And then, there came upon my chamber door, “The Max,” by authors Jason Starr and Ken Bruen, with its amazing “women in jailhouse cages” cover by Glen Orbik.
I was intrigued by the cover alone, and I’d already gotten into Jason Starr, but this Bruen cat, I’d never heard of. Irish, his bio says. Well, good start, always love a scrappy Irish writer. So I start reading the book, and within one chapter, I realize two things:
a) this is the third in a series of books, and
b) I need to stop reading “The Max” and start from the first book.
Not because I was confused, but the language, style, and humor had already won me over, and I needed to know the whole story.1
Thus began my fascination with Ken Bruen.
He’s got a complicated backstory, teaching English in foreign lands for twenty-five years, including four months time in a Brazilian prison after a bar fight, that he has many times readily admitted traumatized him.
He began writing books after that, and after penning five early novels in a more “literary” vein, he shifted to crime fiction.
I can safely say, his writing is like almost nothing I’ve seen before. He writes
spare,
poetic,
(and yes, sometimes repetitive) books,
designed to elicit vibes more than plot.
In fact, his plots, or the large lack of them, are what interested me in his solo books the most.
His main recurring character, Jack Taylor, is a former Garda Síochána (or “Guard,” or Irish cop), now a pseudo-P.I. He’s got a reputation for getting results, so people keep hiring him, and usually for the most fucked-up, tragic jobs you can think of.
Missing kids,
dead persons,
even murdered swans.
And the funny thing is: Jack Taylor doesn’t do much to solve any of these. He asks his friends for help, pays a few people to dig for him, while he fucks off, reads books, drinks and drugs, and complains about everything under the sun, including:
Religion
His mother
Being sober
Being drunk
Sunshine
Rain
Every so often he stumbles upon a lead (the stumbling usually being literal and drunken), and once a book he usually sets himself a small mission to accomplish, but by and large, the “mysteries” tend to sort themselves out, with little to no help from Jack. The novels tend to be him trying not to self-destruct, almost always by drinking, and usually failing. Along the way, he usually gets severely beat up (by the fourth book he’s got a full mouth of false teeth and a pronounced limp; in later books, he starts losing fingers), harangued, and though he has brief romances, those usually end badly as well.
It’s fascinating.
The books are like weird little poems. In every one, you will find:
Random lists
Scads of references to books and music he likes
Epigraphs
Quotations
I once started making my own lists of the books and authors he mentions, hoping to try them out for myself, but the sheer volume of them probably means I won’t get to even a small percentage in my lifetime. Whatever else Bruen has done in his life, reading seems to be his proudest accomplishment.
(Though I seem to remember discovering Matthew Stokoe’s book “High Life” from Bruen, that I, um… enjoyed? That might not be the right word for so nasty and down in the dirt a novel, but I got a kick out of it. But it’s the only book I know of where another writer reviewed it within the pages of his own fiction story.)
His books are remarkably bleak. His protagonists are only happy when they’re in love, reading books, listening to music, or drinking that first sip of Jameson or Guinness after a long abstinence.
Otherwise, life is grim, hard and nearly unbearable.
Thematically, he seems to be writing about how Ireland is changing. Old buildings Jack remembers are knocked down (mostly bars), replaced by coffee shops. And the more things “improve,” the less they seem to change. Though, Jack often wonders if he’s the one who can’t or won’t change. The new world seems to confound him, but he also seems glad for the old world to be gone, because it generally represents horrors and abuses, like the Magdalene Laundries and the Catholic Church.
And really, who can blame him. With child murders, rapes, and animal carpentry as his main connectors to society, one wonders why he keeps persisting in trying to “solve” crimes.
Jack probably couldn’t tell you himself. Probably the same reason Bruen writes: he feels compelled.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that much in these books is somewhat autobiographical. To what degree, who knows, but I sometimes feel like I know Bruen better than Taylor.
As well; Bruen has a special needs daughter, who shows up more than once in his works under the name Serena May. He writes of how Serena May’s birth is initially a tragedy for the parents, who can’t handle the thought of not having a “normal” child, but she quickly becomes a beacon of love and unfiltered emotion.
(Being a father of a special needs kid myself, I, to my shame, can relate to the initial feelings, and happily, to the subsequent ones.)
Bruen strikes me as an interesting combo of Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh. He’s got the bare-bones language, the obsession with horror and self-torment, and of course, the love of mind-altering substances. Throw in allusions (or perhaps delusions) of literary metaphor, and an occasional joke; Bruen can be quite funny, but it’s usually pitch-black.
And if funny is what you’re looking for, I’d say start with the one I started with: “Bust,” written by Bruen & Starr (and followed by three delightful sequels, “Slide,” “The Max,” and “Pimp.”)
If you wanna skip right to the bleak, start with the first Jack Taylor book, “The Guards.”
If you want a mix of humor and bleak, he’s got a cop series, starting with “A White Arrest,” which seems like his take on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. They’re sorta goofy, but they have their own charm.
He’s also got a number of non-series books with one-off protagonists, ranging from drunkards and ne’er-do-wells, to thieves and serial killers.
All of whom read a lot.
Several weeks ago, I started a re-read of the earlier Jack Taylor novels, in anticipation of catching up on the series. I’m about three or four books behind, because Bruen, like many of my many favorite writers, is incredibly prolific. I was caught up a few years back, but they started stacking up on me. It’s already difficult. Every time he mentions another author, I want to read whichever book he name drops immediately.
So this may take awhile.
STORIES…
Speaking of noir, here’s some fer yuh:
… AND PODCASTS
Join us for “The Hold Up,” and “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans!”
And listen to our interview with Michael Pereira, founder of The Autism Voyage blog, over at “Sensory Overload!”
© 2025
And kudos to either Starr or Bruen for writing the line “… shitting out me organs…” I swear I laughed for three days straight after that. Ask my wife, she’ll roll her eyes and confirm.
I read a lot of Bruen a long time ago and what I remember is that Jack Taylor did not do much detecting.