Customer Reviews

London Boulevard: A Dark Twist on the Classic Story (Bloodlines)

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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After serving three years in prison for an assault he can't remember committing, Mitchell is out and about in London. An old mate sets him up with a flat and a job run by a loan shark and Mitchell gets beat up and finds he isn't crazy about that life. Then he gets set up as a live-in handyman for an ex-actress with money and cars and sex and everything seems to be going great -- except blokes from the loan sharking end have it in for him. Mitchell also has a crazy sister, Bri, and soon meets and falls in love with a beautiful and smart woman, Aisling, who returns his love. But with Mitchell enraging half the folks he meets and the rest turning up dead, both he and the people he loves are soon in danger. Can his increasingly violent methods keep them all alive?

LONDON BOULEVARD is one of the best books I have read this spring. Tough, gritty, written in an almost diary-like style, this is one of the few novels I truly had trouble putting down. I was sitting up in bed at one in the morning thinking, "Just a couple more pages, that's all," and before I knew it a couple more had turned into several more chapters. Ken Bruen has created a sordid tale of love and violence that is criminally easy to read. His characters aren't particularly loveable, but they aren't supposed to be. His pacing, plotting, dialogue all sizzle and leave the reader hungering for more right down to the slam bang finish.

My one complaint with this book, which has nothing to do with the author and his work, is the publishing press's horrible job. Periods are missing, commas and quotes are backwards, at one point a whole ten to twelve line blank chunk has been inserted in the text, the list goes on. I cannot believe a publishing company, even a small one called Do Not, could get away with this sort of mess.

In short, if you like hard boiled, fast paced, and tough talking little novels, LONDON BOULEVARD is a winner I couldn't recommend more highly.

I should say first that Sunset Blvd (which this book is an "homage" to) is my favorite movie. I was really excited by the premise of this book for that reason and in the beginning I really enjoyed it. The writer has a really engaging, fresh, readable style that I liked a lot and the book is true to noir form. And the beginning of the book is really great fun. Unfortunately, though, what was fun in the beginning started to look a little trite after awhile (how many other noir books can the main character mention? yes, we all read them and catch the references, but after a certain point it gets a little ridiculous to have the bad guy quoting Ellroy and such all the time). Also, you spend a lot of time in the middle waiting for the other shoe to drop, plotwise. And, I'm not sure the extra "fleshing out" of certain aspects of Sunset Blvd. make the story any more fun, especially when the author is really kind of just copying certain parts of the Sunset Blvd. story and explaining them more.

Having said that, though, I still really liked the premise, the author's style, and the characters. It's definitely a solidly good, three star book. It's just not *quite* as good a book as it seems to think it is, and much of it is just a little bit TOO much just ripped right out of Sunset Blvd. itself, so I was a little disappointed. I think it is definitely worth reading, though - I really like Bruen's style and will definitely read him again - I can see that maybe when he isn't riffing on another plot he's even better. Overall I think this is a very enjoyable novel with good characters and the only problem is that it takes itself just a little too seriously.

There is something about Bruen's writing which is unique and compelling. His characters are not likable, but we're drawn to them. His writing is spare and sharp. His books are dark and somewhat disturbing, but irresistible. His books are not for everyone, but they certainly are on my must-read list.

Bruen's no-nonsense powerful prose style is perfectly suited for this kind of noir sensibility, an even darker (if you can believe it) reimagining of the classic SUNSET BOULEVARD. Here you'll find professional heartless criminal, lovers unhinged by cruel affairs, and storyline steeped in a pulp atmospheric feel that goes a few steps farther than you'd ever guess.

Bruen is well-known for his Jack Taylor and Brant series, but give his stand-alone novels a chance if you've never done so before. They're possibly even gutsier, nastier, and more mesmerizing.

"Mitchell" is a hard guy. He is just out of prison after three years of payback for a brutal beating he doesn't remember. But best mate Billy Norton is waiting at the gate with a sweet setup for Mitch as the muscle for a loan shark. Though Mitchell's feeling are mixed. While the perqs that come with the leg breaking are good, he'd just as soon skip another stay at the gray bar hotel. When a job as a live-in handy man for aging actress Lillian Palmer falls into his lap, Mitchell takes a shot - if a somewhat tentative shot for the career criminal - at the straight and narrow.

From this backdrop, the prolific Ken Bruen literally rips out another savage crime novel with more grit than Jones Beach and Bruen's trademark black humor. Lillian Palmer, deliciously demented and coming complete with a sexual appetite that belies her years, provides a bizarre twist to what otherwise may have been a pedestrian and often-told story of betrayal and retribution. But the real brilliance in the author's twisted logic comes in the form of "Jordan", Palmer's mysterious butler who proves to be so much more. Bruen's staccato dialogue and disregard for small annoyances like punctuation or other literary convention add to the quirky appeal of Mitchell and the eclectic cast of thugs and wankers that follow him through the pages of this razor-edged page turner, which should keep you guessing right up to the bloody last sentence.

Adding to Mitch's (and Bruen's) sandpaper charm is an uncongruous and unabashed love of crime fiction and the authors that pen them, with references to Andrew Vachss, Dennis LeHane, and other masters of crime who are liberally quoted and add credibility and depth to an already addictive storyline.

If you haven't read Bruen yet - an unforgivable injustice that he remains relatively unknown, at least on this side of the Atlantic - then "London Boulevard" is a great place to start what you can expect to be a long, entertaining, and brutal acquaintance.

In this fast-paced variation on "Sunset Boulevard" set in London, the protagonists are a small-time thug, an over-the-hill actress, and various violent characters whom the thug manages to enrage. All are enjoyable, though none is likable. The action and dialog are fast and furious and extremely clever, with the whole thing taking about three hours to read. Fans of Elmore Leonard and James Ellrod should cotton to Ken Bruen.

It's not revealing anything secret to write that this is Ken Bruen's English version of "Sunset Boulevard". In fact, the cover of the book says it is "a dark twist on the classic story". That being said, it has a lot of differences, as only Mr. Bruen can write, and he writes very, very well.

There's the younger (but in this case a middle-aged ex-con) man, the older stage (not silent screen) star, and the gloomy mansion with the strange butler, who is a lot more than he seems, and a lot more than the one in "Sunset Boulevard".

This being a Ken Bruen book, you expect a lot of mayhem and murder, and you will not be disappointed. The writing is always first-rate, and the story moves along so swiftly because the reader just can't wait to see how the ending of this story compares to the original. I won't spoil the ending, but will just say that this is a book well worth reading, particularly if you are an avid Ken Bruen fan, as am I.

For mystery readers, Ken Bruen is the best kept secret around. For a while it was George Pelecanos but I believe that now the title of "superb, excellent but underappreciated" has been passed to the former Galway English teacher.

I read Bruen's "The Guards" last year and then followed that up with "The White Trilogy," both literary journeys well below the surface of the pool where the bottom feeders live and ply their trade.

Mitchell serves three years for aggravated assault in a London prison. One imagines almost a sullen Steve McQueen-like character, Mitchell never had a recollection of how the crime actually happened since he's a black out binge drinker. We are left to imagine that it was the circumstantial testimony of the victim and Mitchell's good mate, Billy Norton, that get him the sentence.

He gets out and tries to go straight but there's an entire cadre of people who keep setting up roadblocks for him. Billy meets him after his release and wants him to go into the loan shark collection business with him. Briony, his lovely sister, keeps telling him that she and her husband Frank will meet him for dinner, but Frank's been dead for 5 years. And Lillian, the aging actress who hires him to be a handyman on her enormous estate, wants him to be full service handyman. All this while he finds true love in Aisling, who loves him and wants to marry him, and in all of this confusion . . . he does too.

Ken Bruen is like James Crumley, high praise for both. There are no sensitive remarks between buddies and it's sure not written for the movies. It's a stark, tough life. Not everybody makes it and those that do are never the same.

The publishing is of poor quality, with occasional improper spacing, incorrect punctuation, missing periods, reverse quotation marks. But the quality of the work is extremely good. 5 stars. Easily 7 or 8. Larry Scantlebury