The Dramatist [Paperback]

Reading Ken Bruen, as anyone who ever has will tell you, is like playing with fire; you know that your feelings, your emotions and your sensibilities are apt to get burned, but you just can't resist the almost primal allure of the heat and flame. Well, reading THE DRAMATIST, the author's fourth novel featuring alcoholic ex-Guard Jack Taylor, will make cauterizing a raw nerve with a blow torch seem like a pleasant diversion. With Bruen's trademark terse prose, dialogue as hard as Connemara marble and as sharp as an icy wind off the Irish Sea, this one will - to borrow a line from James Ellroy - leave you "reamed, steamed and dry-cleaned." And that's all before you get to the absolutely horrific and unspeakable denouement on the novel's penultimate page. All that yawns ahead of Jack Taylor at the end of this incandescent work is utter darkness and it seems impossible to conceive of a way whereby even he - the ultimate "survivor" - might find his way back into the light.

The three previous Jack Taylor novels suffered from the fact that, in them, the author devoted so much time and energy to introducing and exploring the tortured psyche of his main character that some elements of good plot development were neglected. Not so this time around. In The Dramatist Bruen manages to weave together an intriguing and wholly coherent story line with the kind of in-depth character study that is so much a part of what makes this series so blasted good. This novel is still largely character-driven, to be sure, but in it Bruen uses plot in service of character and not merely as a necessary but regrettable evil. All the pieces fit together here and all of Jack's chickens come home to roost. It's in this novel, in other words, that all of the fragmented, jagged and jarring aspects of Jack Taylor's life and personality - so painstakingly depicted in those three earlier books - coalesce and redound to Jack like some kind of high-voltage karmic thunderbolt. This is crime fiction written on the scale of Sophoclean tragedy.

If you are unfamiliar with Ken Bruen's work in general and with the Jack Taylor novels in particular, THE DRAMATIST is a great place to make the acquaintance of both. It represents the author firing on all cylinders. Fans of Bruen's work, and those already acquainted with Jack Taylor, be forewarned: nothing in those earlier novels will prepare you for what transpires at the end of this one. But, in retrospect, everything there should have done so.

Read the full text of this review first published in MYSTERY NEWS (August/September 2004)

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.

Ken Bruen's writing is exceptional. It's tight, involving, brutal, funny, and tragic all at the same time. While there is a mystery here, it is really the study of Jack that is the focus. Although I recognized the killer fairly early on, and I saw the end coming just before it happened, it made the end no less shattering. This is not an emotionally easy series to read, and certainly not for the cozy reader, but one I cannot rate highly enough.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 25 reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars