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Review
"Irish Writer Ken Bruen is The Finest Purveyor of Intelligent Brit-Noir." The Big Issue
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Sunday Tribune
There is something strangely compulsive about turning the pages of The Killing of the Tinkers, Bruen’s twelfth novel.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Killing of the Tinkers is two hundred and fifty-three pages of the best dialogue I have ever read. Believable, in-your-face, and real; you are there, sitting across the table, eavesdropping at the next bar stool. It leaps off every page and makes you part of Jack Taylor's world. The reviews of Ken's work tend to focus on the dark side. But that's not all that captured me. I was grabbed from the first sentence of the first page by the self-destructive soul of Jack Taylor; a soul that could only be cauterized by alcohol and cocaine. Yes, that's dark. But it's too narrow an assessment. If you have a dark side ( and how many of us have, if we're honest) you will find a memory or two in the lost evenings and anguished mornings of Jack Taylor. But where there is dark, there must also be light. And that light is there, perhaps dim at times, but it's there. It's there in the women who love him, in the people who still trust him, in the friends who care for him, in himself too: his ability to pick himself up again, his sense of justice, his attempts to find and punish the evil ones. There's the humour too, always there, black humour maybe, but it's the fabric that saves Jack Taylor and the people who populate Ken Bruen's Galway from absolute despair. Yes, Jack Taylor finds his anaesthetic in cocaine and alcohol. But he also finds it in books. It seems at times that he could just as easily be tempted into Charlie Byrne's as into his local pub. If you love to read (and I suspect you wouldn't be reading this unless you do) you'll be able to 'stack' Jack Taylor's selections on your own book shelves as you get lost in this dark trek through the netherworld of Galway.
But you also get to travel the streets and meet the people of the real Galway, from Forster Street to Hidden Valley, from Vinny in Charlie Byrnes to Declan in Zhivago's. Maybe Ken Bruen is doing for Galway in The Killing of the Tinkers what Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses: giving us a map of a Galway that is rapidly disappearing under the paws of the Celtic Tiger.
That's it. Buy the book, tell your friends, buy some more................
And next time you see me absorbed, intoxicated, in the shelves of your favourite bookstore in Galway, you know I'll be sampling the sources of my drugs. ....Jack Higgins, James Patterson, Jeffery Deaver, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly and Ken Bruen..... .........
Pat Mullan
May, 2002.
Format:Paperback
THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS by Ken Bruen is about Jack Taylor, ex Irish copper, returned to Galway from London, who is hired by a Tinker to find out who is murdering young Tinkers. It's noir, which means that the protagonist is a drunk, an addict and a sleazeball who spends most of the book engaged in some fleshly or chemical pleasure. It's also modern writing, which means that every sentence has been stripped to the minimum and the prose flows like a telegram.
The lead character is a walking cliche with an annoying habit of quoting authors at a rate of about one every two pages. Maybe it's to bulk up the (slim) page count? Or to let us know how clever Bruen/Taylor is? Who knows? I thought it pointless and frustrating. Yes, I like Lawrence Block and Ed McBain too, but when do we get to the investigation?
Well, you don't. Taylor's style of investigation works thus: phone up friends who are actually capable of doing things. Drink, do drugs, destroy marriage. Receive information. Drink, do drugs, nearly destroy friendship. Take on a case about some loon decapitating swans. Drink, do drugs, hook up with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Tell the tinkers you think you know who it is, let them kill the suspect, realise you got the wrong man. Drink, do drugs, etc...
Sure, some of the characters are interesting. Sure, the prose is fast. Sure, it's a quick read. But it has a fatal flaw for a book about a private investigator which is that he barely does any investigating. It takes him till around page 100 to even start (in a 250 page book) and even then he barely does anything. Most of the book is really about what its like to be an alkie/addict ex-cop self-destroying. Which is OK but nothing you haven't read before done better. It isn't a lousy book but it does feel like a waste of time.
The lead character is a walking cliche with an annoying habit of quoting authors at a rate of about one every two pages. Maybe it's to bulk up the (slim) page count? Or to let us know how clever Bruen/Taylor is? Who knows? I thought it pointless and frustrating. Yes, I like Lawrence Block and Ed McBain too, but when do we get to the investigation?
Well, you don't. Taylor's style of investigation works thus: phone up friends who are actually capable of doing things. Drink, do drugs, destroy marriage. Receive information. Drink, do drugs, nearly destroy friendship. Take on a case about some loon decapitating swans. Drink, do drugs, hook up with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Tell the tinkers you think you know who it is, let them kill the suspect, realise you got the wrong man. Drink, do drugs, etc...
Sure, some of the characters are interesting. Sure, the prose is fast. Sure, it's a quick read. But it has a fatal flaw for a book about a private investigator which is that he barely does any investigating. It takes him till around page 100 to even start (in a 250 page book) and even then he barely does anything. Most of the book is really about what its like to be an alkie/addict ex-cop self-destroying. Which is OK but nothing you haven't read before done better. It isn't a lousy book but it does feel like a waste of time.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
There is something compelling about this book; that the hero is flawed beyond what some authors would chance for their characters, that the story is pacy, and punchy. I suppose my major gripe is Bruen's writing. To my mind, portraying a world where the characters are fighting for time doesn't necessarily mean leaving out half the words... I've heard of editing, but this is ridiculous! It's as if the author, in trying to create an in-your-face protagonist and some snappy dialogue, ended up with a narrative voice bundled with every conceivable noir clichè. It gets extremely irritating:
"Went out. Bought cigarettes. Malboros. Had pint"
At times it's like some sort of delusional diary.
Very black and white in its characterisation too... like I said, I'm in two minds. While I admire the author for not flinching away from exploring the darker side of human nature, I want to hit him over the head with the Oxford dictionary.
"Went out. Bought cigarettes. Malboros. Had pint"
At times it's like some sort of delusional diary.
Very black and white in its characterisation too... like I said, I'm in two minds. While I admire the author for not flinching away from exploring the darker side of human nature, I want to hit him over the head with the Oxford dictionary.
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