Customer Reviews

The Guards

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Readers hoping for a light mystery that is full of intricate plot devices that will challenge their own powers of deduction while being taken on a thrill-ride of adventure should be well advised this is not the book for you. THE GUARDS reads like a celebration of hardboiled fiction, the mood is dark, some might even use the term nourish and the style is spare as Bruen has stripped the prose down to the bare bones.

The story focuses on Jack Taylor, an ex-Garda Siochana officer (Ireland's National Police Service) who was kicked out of the service after he punched a member of parliament in the mouth. He spends his time, when he's not sitting drunk in his local pub, working as a private detective. Or at least, he would be working as a private detective if Ireland recognised the profession. As Jack explains it, he just finds things for people, thanks to two qualities, patience and pig stubbornness, particularly the latter.

One day, while sitting in Grogan's bar working on his latest drunk, Jack is approached by Ann Henderson who wants to hire him to investigate the suicide of her daughter, Sarah. Ann is convinced that her daughter wouldn't kill herself and wants Jack to find the truth. Jack, drunk at the time, agrees to take the case. Once Jack starts working the case, it becomes obvious that he has a specific sense of right and wrong as evidenced when he targets his enemies. But he offsets that with a distinctly underdeveloped sense of self-preservation, or perhaps it's just dulled by alcohol abuse, as evidenced by the forthright approach he uses to confront these same enemies.

Written in the first person from Jack's point of view, it is narrated in terse, clipped sentences as though Taylor is telling us his story through tightly gritted teeth, absolutely exhausted by his ordeals. It is very reminiscent of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder series or George Pelecanos' Nick Stefanos series. Both of these series feature characters that battle constantly with alcoholism as Jack does. Further clues to the hardboiled qualities that Bruen achieves can be found in the quotes used at the start of selected chapters, the authors of these quotes include Ed McBain, Walter Mosely, Elmore Leonard and Pelecanos. At different times you can see the influence of each of these authors making their presence felt.

As a devotee of hardboiled fiction this book really appealed to me. It's dark and occasionally depressing but the character of Jack Taylor is an honest to goodness survivor greeting most setbacks with stoic good humour he becomes a strangely endearing character and I found myself cheering for him by the end. I think it is a worthy Edgar Award nominee.

By the way, between blackouts, a trip to the mental asylum, attempts at sobriety, recovering from beatings and cataclysmic falls off the wagon, Jack does actually put some time into the case he was hired to investigate. Whether he solved the case is neither here nor there really, the important thing is how he survives.

Here's a book that stands the typical procedural format on its ear. There isn't another novel like it anywhere. With exemplary skill, Bruen makes plot secondary to characterization, and splendid characters abound--primarily his hero Jack, a fatalistic ex-cop with a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humor, along with a great and vulnerable heart--and lists, of anything and everything. Chapter headers with quotes from here, there and everywhere--from popular mystery writers to classics. On top of all that, author Bruen writes about the disease of alcoholism with great accuracy and not a single maudlin note. The Guards reads like simultaneous gunshots to the head and the heart. It is a stunning accomplishment.
My highest recommendation.

I'm not sure where Ken Bruen came from. The "Publisher's-Editors" notes/reviews at the top of the intro recite "The Guards" as Bruen's debut novel. This is misleading as the book reveals nine other novels Bruen has written, The Guards being the tenth.

I am certain that if you read this one you'll be hooked. It's 2:30 in the morning and I couldn't put it down. That's the best compliment you can give an author.

Jack Taylor is often drunk. He hangs around drinkers and flirts with the insanity that constant drunkenness and binge drinking create. All of his relationships have been gunned down in the crossfire of alcohol. His friend Sutton is a vicious man that on rare occasions of sobriety, Jack rationalizes and explains to himself. He is kind to winos as in the ancient Padraig. He says 'I drink with'em; then buy them a foolish wreath when they die.' His closest friend is Sean, a bar owner. All of this takes place in Galway, Ireland, where Jack Taylor has disgraced himself and been cashiered out of the Siochna Guards, nearly impossible to do, and lost everything along the way.

A lovely woman, Ann, asks Jack to disprove the notion, public and private, that her teenage daughter committed suicide, and thereby proving that she was murdered. Jack begins to suspect that she stepped in front of harm's way from a part-time job she had at a business owned by shady characters.

There's a lot of James Crumley's "The Wrong Case" in The Guards. There is one enormous difference: we generally dislike Milo Milodragovitch and we can't help rooting for Jack.

Bruen's humor is infectious. Jack visits his father's grave when Ann takes him to see the marker for her daughter, Sarah, and mutters, "Da, I'm here by default. But aren't we all?" His assistant "finder," Cathy B. who is a (just past) teenage ingenue in the subculture of the Irish Rock world, is marrying another performer and asks Jack to give her away, explaining the criteria of her request, "You're the oldest man I know." Later, one of the characters asks of the recent disappearance of another character, "Did he die or did he go to England?"

Twists and turns up to the last page, retribution, reality, dialogue, sadness, introspection, coming to grips with the consequences of one's acts. This may be the best mystery I read this year! Kudos to Bruen.

This is a very slim volume which I was unable to put down and therefore read it in one day.Jack Taylor is a former member of the Guards-the Irish Police force-who was thrown out for belting a higher officer in the mouth.He is fighting a mostly losing battle with the bottle on a daily basis-sometimes winning but more often backsliding. He becomes what is known in Galway as a "finder"-private detectives being unknown, and is hired by a woman to solve the mystery of her teenage daughter's suicide.His quest leads him to a ring of molesters who seem to kill for thrills.We meet several of Jacks friends who are also living on the edge of society and although this should make it a dark,bleak book, somehow it avoids being depressing because of his masterly writing style.Ken Bruens habit of using just 3 words to summarise a point worried me at first until I realised that this was a perfect way to express,very succinctly,his whole point.Brilliantly done and can't wait to read more.

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. 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.

Maybe Ken Bruen is doing for Galway 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................

A gritty, alcohol-fuelled private investigator novel set in Galway, Ireland. This is very much in the vein of the 'down and out" detective novels I have read, but transplanted to Ireland and better written than most. There are some differences however as the main character, does not really solve or investigate anything but rather just goes from one drunken, blacked-out binge to another stirring up trouble that eventually solves many of the problems itself. I enjoyed the literary interest of the main character and the author uses this to add some great background flavour to the story. The Irish setting also provides for some unique characters, interestingly different local practices and settings.

It's a short book. I don't think I've read a book this fast before but haven't said that much of the quick finish was that I didn't want to put it down, enjoying the bleak but real world the author had created.

There's certainly no shortage of "drunk P.I." novels, yet somehow Bruen has created a completely compelling work.

As a former member of an elite Irish police force, Jack Galway now whiles away his time nursing drinks in a pub. Despite his fall from grace, Jack is still known as a man with a skill for finding things. Enter the beautiful older woman (one of many cliches this book gets away with) with the missing daughter, and Jack's back in action. Inevitably, he has encounters with all sorts of seedy types, leading to a resolution that may not satisfy some readers.

The story may not be original, but Bruen's writing more than makes up for it. A great read for fans of the P.I. novel, especially those who appreciate strong writing. Unfortunately, this book will likely be overlooked in favor of others, but for anyone interested it's definitely worth the time.

It took me awhile to get used to THE GUARDS. The author makes constant references to Irish rock bands and authors I'd never heard of. These allusions don't have a whole lot to do with the plot. The author is also prone to tangents. At one point the main character, Jack Taylor, goes to a barber shop, just to get a haircut; the barber puts gel in his hair and spikes it. There is no mention of the case he's working on.

At the beginning of the novel, Jack Taylor has just been kicked out of the Garda Siochana, the Irish police force, for drinking too much. According to Taylor, the Guard would tolerate anything unless you were a public disgrace. Taylor then becomes a sort of Irish private eye, except instead of spying on people, which isn't kosher, he finds things for people. He is called in to investigate the suicide of a young woman. He spends most of his time in Grogan's, a famous Galway City bar, drinking instead.

When he does begin to investigate the suicides, there have been ten of them, all young girls, all working at the same place (I'm not sure where because it was abbreviated, but it sounded like the Irish version of a McDonalds or KFC), he finds he has a pederast on his hands. His friend, Sutton, a former bartender he knows, helps him confront the manager.

Along the way, Jack Taylor drinks too much and winds up in a mental institution. He has other issues, besides alcoholism. He hates his mother for one thing, and he falls in love with the mother of the original suicide.

His friend Sutton is an almost mystical figure. Besides owning a pub, he is also an artist, and he was once in the military. He's as much a drunk as Taylor, if not worse. When Taylor goes on the wagon, he leaves liquor around to tempt Jack.

One of the reasons I chose THE GUARDS was because I spent a week in Galway City a couple of years ago. The only place reference I recognized was the Spanish Arches, but I think Bruen has hooked me again. There's an ad for his most recent work, THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS, at the end of the book, and I've always found them fascinating.

I liked the book, but if you are looking for a mystery with an intricate plot line or a series of murders with a lot of action in between, I wouldnt recommend this one. What the author does well is create a dark atmosphere in and around the city of Galway, and introduces his main character, Jack Taylor, who will be featured in subsequent novels. The book is mainly a vehicle about Jack. We know next to nothing about the girl whose death he is supposed to be investigating, or her mother Ann for that matter. I liked some of the other characters, especially the singer Cathy. I would read more of Bruen's books just to find out more about these people. However, I agree with other reviewers that the style is minimalist; there is an awful lot of white space with only a few sentences to a page, and the book is stretched to nearly 300 pages. Without more meat, I couldn't give it 5 stars, but it did hold my interest. I only wonder whether Jack, a serious alcoholic, is going to make it through another book before he drinks himself to death. I'll have to pick up the next one to find out.

Other reviewers have given you their take on the mystery element, the literary allusions, and Bruen's counterparts among which he is compared and ranked. I wanted to add, as a Galwegian once-removed, that Bruen captures well the transition of his hometown from a 1950s overgrown and decaying village into today's bustling tourist trap, gentrifying, selfish, and greedy. Like much of contemporary Irish life, the values of the past, however limited and blinkered they were, have collapsed and only a few like Jack Taylor uphold, on his better days and especially when he can back up his better nature with a bit of cash to share with those worse off than he (which is saying a lot)some humanistic generousity.

Bruen, interviewed on a website devoted to his works, has spoken of his wish to portray this secularising, grasping, and yuppified cityscape, and how it collides with those left on its remodelled streets in the gutter and at the barstool, too fragile to keep pace with a world around them that's too suddenly changed for not the better, despite the economic boom. All of this context comes very sparingly in this novel, and even the gardai to which the title's given over gain barely a supporting cast role. Jack's tale, unlike the cover blurb that links Elmore Leonard to James Joyce, by contrast takes nothing from the Irish forebear that for all his genius and ego has overshadowed those (like Bruen) who labour in his wake.

Instead, I would place Beckett as the true inspiration. After I had sensed this in The Guards, I found the author verifying Sam as one of his influences. The spare, bitter, yet somehow life-affirming and defiantly tender nature of Jack and those with whom he struggles to bond makes this book stick in my memory. I do not read "crime fiction" normally, but a desire to read about Galway today makes this, the first in a series that is nearing the half-dozen mark (abroad; American publication lags and has just reached three at the time of my post), valuable not only for its first-person testimony to a changing city, but for depths of honesty and humanity that lurk subtly under self-lacerating and chemically-altered surfaces.