Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Hell’s Door

I moderate a mystery reading group, the obviously titled Murder Ink, at the local Barn O’ Novels, here in sleepy, sunny Palmdale, California. It’s a fun group, a monthly break from the routine, although most months I’m the only guy in the group. And most of the ladies lean toward the lighter end of the spectrum (or at least profess to).

Still, stubborn cuss that I am, I keep trying on occasion to slip some harder, darker fare into the mix--a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett here; a Robert B. Parker or Walter Mosley there. And we try to mix things up a bit, ranging from new or newish writers to old classics (Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, etc.), to off-the-beaten-track cross-over stuff (Elizabeth Lowell, Isaac Asimov).

So, when someone suggested we “do” a Ken Bruen novel (“that Irish guy you’re always talking about”), I jumped at the chance. Jack Taylor, the alcoholic ex-Guard turned Galway eye, the gumshoe with all the heart and hurt of a dozen dead poets, is the star of one of my favorite P.I. series--a literate, uncompromising stroll to the abyss and back that gets me every time. And so I oh-so-subtly led my group to one of the Taylor novels I hadn’t yet read, figuring it would be a good way for me to both catch up on the series (and revisit Galway, the “dirtiest city in Ireland”) and maybe ruffle a few smug suburbanite feathers.

Oops.

The Taylor stories have always been on the dark side, but Priest (2007), the fifth in that series, is something else again, a bruising, brutal blast of sustained white-hot rage and bottom-of-the-glass despair that’s as bleak and black as it gets. Taylor doesn’t so much go for a look at the abyss this time--he jumps in and does a few laps. This isn’t slipping into darkness; it’s a headlong dive.

In fact, the book kicks off with Taylor just finishing up a little dip, and he’s dripping wet. He’s fresh out of the looney bin, his mind short-circuited by prolonged abuse and raging guilt over the death of a child, with few prospects and fewer friends, facing a hollow and hopefully (but probably not) alcohol-free future. Meanwhile, a nun has just discovered the severed head of a priest in the confessional--a priest recently accused of child molestation.

And then things really get dark. Before the book is finally nailed shut, there will be murder done and a grisly sort of reckless, wild justice meted out, hearts and lives shattered, drinks drunk (or not drunk) and blood spilled, and poetry and music (Springsteen, Cash, Zevon) evoked. And souls forever fucked.

Taylor’s (and Ireland’s) complicated relationship with the Catholic Church, the lies and wreckage left behind by Ireland’s economic success, and the detective’s own thundering despair--they’re all here, all ratcheted up to ear-bloodying volume. I thought The Magdalen Martyrs, a previous book in this series, in which Taylor took on the Church’s systemic abuse of unwed mothers and his own tormented relationship with his mother, was fierce, but this entry screams like the mother of all banshees.

What was I thinking?

And Taylor’s a far cry from an affable character. In the hands of a weaker writer than Bruen, he’d probably be detestable and utterly unreadable. But Bruen does it with seeming ease. His is one of the freshest, most distinct voices in crime fiction today. He doesn’t so much have style as an M.O.: the plots in the Jack Taylor series seem almost assembled, not written, each a swirling jangle of stream-of-consciousness rants, random encounters, chance meetings, out-of-nowhere lists, fever dreams, newspaper clippings and poetry snippets, and even, sometimes, a little detective work. Holding it all together is Bruen’s skill and fierce vision, and of course Taylor, a black hole of a hero if there ever was one.

So, yes, Taylor can be obnoxious and a bully, stupid and mean-spirited and nasty to those who would try to love him, a mostly charm-free, self-pitying grade-A fuck-up whose tragedy is that he knows he’s a fuck-up, but can’t seem to keep the decks from tilting. Nonetheless, there’s something about him worth appreciating. And there’s always a tiny, tiny sliver of hope, of redemption, a compassion in each book that keeps me reading.

Of course, that tiny splinter invariably and inevitably becomes infected and has to be lanced. But hey, this ain’t no Lifetime movie.

Long before George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made torture fashionable, Taylor was doing it to himself.

He’s a one-man weapon of self-destruction; a guy whose adult life has been one long Sunday morning coming down, punctuated by lost weekends and bad choices. Because his real battle, of course, is not with the Church or the powers that be, with corrupt cops or Celtic Tiger criminals in their shirts and their ties, but with himself. Taylor’s alcoholism, his obsessions with past crimes, real and imagined, his burning guilt as he slowly circles the last exit to Hell--rarely has someone conjured up such a vivid and poetic sense of noir and somehow managed to transform it into an ongoing series. And it ain’t that pretty at all.

But therein, maybe, lies its beauty.

I can hardly wait to see what the ladies’ reactions will be. May God have mercy ...