Sad Bastard [Paperback]

Hugo Hamilton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2001

Pat Coyne is back. Injured in the line of duty, he is now out of work with too much time on his hands. Living alone, he’s become more obsessive and volatile, developing a fetish for women’s knickers. When a body washes up on the docks, the prime suspect is none other than the former Guarda’s son, Jimmy. Like father like son, both Coynes are notorious for their sweeping spells of self-destruction. But while Pat’s motives lean toward cleaning up the world’s messes, Jimmy possesses a taste for mayhem. Coyne’s estranged wife blames him, his mother-in-law berates him, and his therapist labels him psychotic. When a duo of criminal thugs try to kill his boy, Coyne decides that it’s up to him to straighten things out.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Penzler Pick, December 2001: Fans of Bill James and Ian Rankin will want to run, not walk, to get a copy of this gritty urban crime comedy set in a contemporary Dublin where even the likes of Pat Coyne is seeing a therapist. On leave from the police force after sustaining serious burns in the line of duty, he's forced to show up for sessions with one Ms. Clair Dunford to qualify for disability pay.

He wasn't taken in by her motherly approach--Coyne was thinking compensation as he answered her routine questions with the maximum degree of neurosis, presenting an alarming impression of total human wreck. Depression. Irrational fears. Memory loss. Lack of concentration. Post-traumatic stress disorder! By Jesus, Coyne had them all.

There's more going on in Coyne's life. His wife, Carmel, has left him, and some small-time local crooks are trying their best to kill his son, Jimmy. Plus, no longer sworn to uphold the law, Coyne can watch a shoplifter with disinterested appreciation of her technique, then impulsively, and imaginatively, intervene to get her off the hook.

It's a bloody, topsy-turvy world, he realizes, once he learns that she's a Romanian who has paid to be smuggled into Ireland. In the bad old days, before the country's economic miracle, people paid to get out--but nothing's sacred anymore, not even his own teenaged daughters' innocent flesh. Did Pat Coyne ever imagine he'd be the kind of dad who'd be ferrying his girls to get their belly buttons and noses pierced?

A straight line does exist between the Romanian shoplifter and the corpse of poor Tommy Nolan, a harbor bum whose death by drowning Coyne knows wasn't an accident. Hugo Hamilton is in no hurry to draw that line in this sequel to the equally colorful Headbanger. What he prefers to do is prove himself once more a master of constructing sentences you find yourself reading again--even reading aloud--and relishing. --Otto Penzler

From Publishers Weekly

The eponymous antihero of Hamilton's sequel to Headbanger is once again Pat Coyne, a down-and-out Dublin police officer given to paranoid rantings and delusions of grandeur: "He shouted at the radio, railing against corruption as if it affected him personally. Every change in his country, every sign of progress was an assault on his persona." It hasn't been a good year for Coyne: he has been out of work since an injury during a traumatic fire; he's separated from his wife, Carmel, a New Age healer whose affections he desperately wants to win back; and his son, Jimmy, a young man with "a vocation for pure mayhem," is still living with him. Out on a bender one evening, Jimmy inadvertently steals a bag of money from thug Mongi O Doherty, who then kills Coyne's friend Tommy Nolan when he happens upon the scene. Jimmy becomes a suspect in Tommy's murder, but even worse, he's got Mongi on his tail. Plenty of other characters are thrown into the mix, including the bothersome Sergeant Corrigan, who is investigating the murder; Ms. Dunford, Coyne's platitude-spouting therapist; and Corina, a Romanian woman who owes Mongi money and is befriended by Coyne after she is caught shoplifting. For all Coyne's bluster, there is something sad and vulnerable about him; he is reminiscent of a (slightly) more well-adjusted Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, as Roddy Doyle might have imagined him. There are plenty of hilarious scenes in this short novel, and Hamilton ties them together skillfully, but audiences will have more fun tracking Coyne's various tribulations if they first read Headbanger, released in the States earlier this year.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 193 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows; 1 edition (September 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568582064
• ISBN-13: 978-1568582061
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,549,237 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not sad at all!, May 20, 2000

By 

Jeremy Smith (West Yorkshire, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sad Bastard (Paperback)

Hugo Hamilton writes with an excellent style. There's plenty of characters in this book, all of them fairly interesting and well-explained. The book reads well, and the overall arc of the plot is like several episodes of a soap-opera. My only complaint is that speech from characters wasn't quoted in quotation marks, it was hyphenated like this:

-Well, that's a nice necklace you're wearing.

But it was fairly funny in places. There's so much going on and it's all so original and well-detailed.

Well done, Hugo.

2.0 out of 5 stars Nowhere Man, March 19, 2004

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sad Bastard (Paperback)

This book picks up the story of middle-aged Dublin policeman Pay Coyne, who was introduced in Hamilton's book Headbanger. In that earlier tale, Coyne turned from a misunderstood family man into a one man crimebuster, a la Dirty Harry. This book finds him separated from his new-age healer wife, and living in a dingy apartment, wrestling with depression and what sounds like post-traumatic stress following his disability after a quixotic attempt to rescue someone from a fire. Much of his time is spent staring into beers down at a dockside pub, one of the few places he can stand to be around other people. That's where a meager plot develops, revolving around a local thug's scheme of smuggling Eastern Europeans into the country illegally in a fishing vessel. This leads to a murder, a bag of missing cash, and trouble for Cone's wild teenage son. Meanwhile, as in Headbanger, he discovers a young woman who needs protecting-here an inept Romanian shoplifter. None of this is particularly gripping, however. It feels somewhat forced, as if Hamilton knew he needed to have some kind of story to keep readers interested. 'Cause the emphasis seems to be on Coyne's disgust with modern Ireland, as he rants over and over about how awful it all is. He takes on somewhat of the air of a mad prophet in all this, lurching around town, pining for his wife and family. While it's not your average picture of Dublin, it's not a very compelling read either.