Master of Noir | The Dramatist: A Novel

Ken Bruen Does it Again | The Dramatist: A Novel | Ken Bruen

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	• The Dramatist: A Novel Ken Bruen St. Martin's Minotaur, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Sometimes You Just Can't Win

Jack Taylor is a man defined by his vices and weaknesses. Essentially, he is a man whose life has been largely consumed by an abuse of alcohol, pills, cocaine and nicotine. Taylor does nothing half way and his weaknesses have ensured that his personal life is a wreck; he runs women off at a steady pace and his closest friends are the two octogenarian women who run the failing hotel at which he's taken up permanent residence. But, hey, things are looking up for Jack. He's been off the dope and booze for a few weeks and he's even thinking about giving up cigarettes - all because his dealer has been given a six year prison sentence and Jack doesn't have the energy to locate a new supplier.

It is when Jack's dealer summons him to the prison to ask for help in finding out why and how his sister was killed that Jack reluctantly resumes his non-paying work as a private detective. The Dramatist is Ken Bruen's fourth Jack Taylor novel, and this time around, Bruen offers a more elaborate and detailed plot than in the previous three. Even so, Taylor's reluctance to get involved in the investigation of what he soon realizes was a murder and not an accidental death allows the author to detail Jack's daily struggles to remain sober and to rebuild the personal life that drugs and booze have taken from him.

This is the heart of the book and, along the way, Jack watches his mother's steady deterioration, is confronted by an old lover while struggling to maintain a new relationship, is challenged by one of his few friends to confront a group of vigilantes and is threatened by a deranged killer. Ultimately, the murder investigation is brought to a successful climax but that was not the most intriguing part of the book for me as a reader and, in fact, the killer's identity came as no great surprise. Rather, I found myself fascinated by the train wreck that is Jack Taylor's life. I rooted for him as he managed to stay off the booze after each personal crisis confronted him but I didn't really expect him to manage it. His personal history filled me with skepticism that his abstinence would last despite the fact that he continued to surprise his friends and even himself by remaining stone cold sober no matter what life tossed at him next.

But be warned: even my skepticism did not prepare me for the ending of this book. I was stunned at its suddenness and power. The Dramatist is the first Ken Bruen novel that I've read without thinking about, and admiring, the author's style more than the novel's plot. Jack Taylor fans will consider this one to be a classic.

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Master of Noir

criticising Ken Bruen at this point is a little like complaining that Michaelangelo's David has big hands. Bruen has a fluid and compelling style, a touch for dialogue like Elmore Leonard and a unique Irish voice. He does like to pepper his stories with references to pop songs that few have ever heard but this is a minor vice. His problem, if he has one, is that he is lacking that great Irish talent, a sense of humor. Especially in noir novels, the depression and gloom can be oppressive without a touch of lightness. Bruen's South London novels are much better than his Jack Taylor series in this respect. This novel has an ingenious plot but there are moments of unnecessary horror, to the point where you wish Taylor would just have a drink. But these are minor carpings. Bruen is the master of this field and always worth a read.

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Ken Bruen Does it Again

Ken Bruen's three previous Jack Taylor novels established the Irish cop as a complex, sarcastic, conflicted, and utterly fascinating anti-hero in a world of murky shadows and dangerous back alleys.

Now he does it again with The Dramatist, a book that is at least as good as the Guards (my personal favorite) and maybe even a little bit better because Bruen's handling of the emotional complexities of the story gets beter with each book.

This is compelling reading. Go out and get it now.

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Makes Hell Look Like a Happy Place

There is some small injustice in describing Ken Bruen's "The Dramatist" as simply "noir". While all of Bruen's writing is bleak - in-your-face crime fiction with no regard for inane political correctness or modern niceties, "The Dramatist" reads like a chainsaw to the gut - an emotional tour de force that will leave fragments of Bruen's broken prose haunting your subconscious weeks after you've turned the last page. Yeah, this is black - Stygian black, about as dark as fiction gets.

Galway ex-Guard Jack Taylor is back, who as a favor to his imprisoned former drug dealer is pulled into the investigation of the death of a college student. The apparently accidental fall down a boarding house staircase, while tragic, looks benign enough. Except for the unexplained volume of Irish playwright J.M. Synge ("A Playboy of the Western World") tucked under her body. But what seems to initially be an unexplained coincidence turns sinister when a similar fate visits another student. As expected from Burke, the mystery of the apparent murders, while compelling, fades a bit into the background under the ferocity and intensity of the irreverent and unrepentant Jack Taylor. And as always, the ridiculously well read Bruen spices this bare-knuckled tale with an eclectic collection of quotes from Synge (as expected), Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, Sean Burke, Matthew Stokoe, and several more. The Irish melancholy and fatalism reads as thick as a Galway sea fret as Taylor lumbers through the crimes and busted love affairs as well, leading to a climax that while fitting with the tone and timbre, nonetheless hit me like a two-by-four between the eyes.

The prolific Bruen continues to write like nobody in the business today. I'll concede, if you enjoy beautiful action hero-type people straight from People Magazine, complete with neat and happy little endings to wrap them up, then Bruen's jagged tales of sparsely written brutality may have you billing OT with your analyst. But if you're looking for that off-the-beaten track maverick who'd prefer to rewrite the genre than follow the pack, get to know this guy.

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Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober---off booze, pills, powder, and nearly off cigarettes, too. The main reason he?s been able to keep clean: his dealer?s in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the soiled, sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn?t, can?t, because the dealer?s sister is dead, and the guards have called it "death by misadventure.? The dealer knows that can?t be true and begs Jack to have a look, check around, see what he can find out. It?s exactly what Jack does, with varying levels of success, to make a living. But he?s reluctant, maybe because of who?s asking or maybe because of the bad feeling growing in his gut. Never one to give in to bad feelings or common sense, Jack agrees to the favor, though he can?t possibly know the shocking, deadly consequences he has set in motion. But he and everyone he holds dear will find out soon, sooner than anyone knows, in the lean and lethal fourth entry in Ken Bruen?s award-winning Jack Taylor series.

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