The White Trilogy [Paperback]

Ken Bruen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 2003

In this book, a jagged, brilliant tour of London noir, Detective Chief Inspector Roberts and Detective Sergeant Brant are obverse sides of the same tarnished coin. They come up against some of the worst thugs, gangs, and lowlifes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hip, violent and funny vignettes of the mean streets of southeast London tie together this rowdy set of short novels by Bruen (The Guards), a modern Irish master of the hard-boiled. Collecting A White Arrest (1998), Taming the Alien (1999) and The McDead (2000) for first U.S. publication, this omnibus showcases the investigations of the aging Chief Inspector Roberts and the brutish Detective Sergeant Brant, with the assistance of the unlucky-in-love Woman Police Constable Falls. They don't always solve their assigned crimes, but know perfectly well if they can nail the occasional major criminal-"the white arrest"-they'll be able to keep their jobs. Among numerous subplots, they pursue a serial killer stalking England's winning soccer team, a vigilante gang hanging drug dealers and a hit man known as "The Alien" because he whacked a victim engrossed in the video of that movie with a baseball bat just as the monster pops out of John Hurt's chest. But quieter moments, such as Brant's visit to his home county in Ireland, are just as interesting. Bruen's relentless media references (to pop songs, noir movies, other crime novels, even H.P. Lovecraft and Jack Kerouac) may drive some readers to distraction, and his loose, ironic endings no doubt are too postmodern for traditional tastes. This is fun reading, though, for readers seeking something fresh.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Bringing together three short novels first published in Britain--A White Arrest (1998), Taming the Alien (1999), and The McDead (2000)--this paperback finds the past-hard-boiled Bruen unleashing a chaos of cops and robbers in southeast London. While chasing killers with generic names such as "the Umpire" and "the Alien," Chief Inspector Roberts and Detective Sergeant Brant dream of a "White Arrest" that will salvage their faltering careers; black WPC (Woman Police Constable) Falls looks for love and her place in the white, macho police force. Brief trips to America by Brant and the Alien provide Bruen with some comic fodder as his hard-as-nails Brits mock the Yanks for their lumbering obviousness and goodwill. The Morse-code delivery, the casually horrific violence, and the completely corrupt milieu prompt easy but not completely accurate references to Bruen as an Irish Ellroy. Ellroy's stories have grand structures and hidden moral centers, while Bruen's take sometimes frustrating left turns with no clear rationale. This stuff smokes like cordite, but it blows a hole in your stomach instead of filling your belly. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Justin, Charles & Co.; 1 edition (March 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932112022
• ISBN-13: 978-1932112023
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #812,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars High-caliber Noir with a Post-Modern Flair, January 3, 2005

By 

James Clar (upstate NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The White Trilogy (Paperback)

Irish author Ken Bruen is a leading practitioner of what has been called "postmodern noir." Three of his novels from the late 90's (A WHITE ARREST, TAMING THE ALIEN and THE McDEAD) have been collected in trade paperback format and entitled THE WHITE TRILOGY. Raw and violent, darkly humorous and, at times, poignant and moving, THE WHITE TRILOGY may be compared favorably to James Ellroy's "LA Quartet." While Bruen's books perhaps lack the scope of those latter novels, they more than match them in gut-wrenching intensity and inventiveness. To read this book is to tour a decadent and decaying London that tourists and visitors can only pray they never encounter.

The three novels that comprise THE WHITE TRILOGY trace the exploits of Detective Inspector Roberts and Detective Sergeant Brant as they track a gang of urban vigilantes who prey upon East End drug dealers. Simultaneously, they seek to identify the psycho who is murdering the members of the English National Cricket Squad and attempt to avenge the brutal murder of Robert's estranged brother at the hands of Irish gangster Tommy Logan. In the process the lines between right and wrong, good and bad, and between the coppers and the criminals gets more than a little blurred.

Roberts plays cool and calculating opposite the vicious and troglodyte Brant. Together the two represent a kind of twisted law enforcement yin and yang. But upholding law and order is less a priority for them than is maintaining an edge, getting ahead, punishing the "punters" and just plain surviving another day on the streets and at "the nick." Are these two buggers hardboiled? You'd need an ice pick to even put a dent in their collective persona. It's a good thing that Roberts and Brant are cops. If they weren't they'd make public enemy number one look like a bloody boy scout by comparison.

Bruen tells his story with clipped, staccato prose that jumps rapidly from scene to scene, often with only minimal transition. The net effect is a bit like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope with a broken lens. And this is a world in which loyalty has very little meaning, where retribution is the coin of the realm and where redemption - although theoretically still possible - is in very short supply.

THE WHITE TRILOGY can be read easily in one or two sittings. Indeed, it seems designed to be read in just that way - the literary equivalent, perhaps, of the proverbial weekend "bender." You won't have a hangover when you're finished but you will surely be gasping for air. Oh, you'll probably also be aching for a bit of the "hair of the dog" ... at least in the form of Bruen's next remarkable novel!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow-The "Bad Lieutenant" of Books, February 28, 2004

By 

POP "Noir By Night" (Hamsterdam) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The White Trilogy (Paperback)

This book was unreal and just served to reinforce my belief that when it comes to hard-boiled crime nobody does it better than the Brits! Bill James Harpur and Isles series, John Harvey's Charlie Resnick books, Russell James, Derek Raymond and Peter Turnbull's Glasgow P Division procedurals-the list goes on and on and is just breathtaking as one works through these writers. Anyway, The White Trilogy is dark, funny, cynical, tough,uplifting and hard to put down once you start. Let me put it this way, if you went to see the movie "Bad Lieutenant" and didn't walk out and are glad you didn't-get your hands on The White Trilogy. As much as I am into diversity in my reading material, after reading this book I am straight into Bruen's The Guards. Trust me on this-better yet take the "Bad Lieutenant" test by renting it and you'll know whether to invest in this gem.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply marvelous!, December 2, 2003

By 

Larry Scantlebury (Ypsilanti, MI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The White Trilogy (Paperback)

Rhythm and Blues, Chief Inspector Roberts and Sergeant Brandt, R&B, serve the Queen and the nation in southeast London, a very tough part of the world. They face a variety of professional issues and personal crises. Not to say the least of which is a murdering criminal force that they are asked to keep in check.

These are three short stories written between 1998 and 2000, joined together in 2003. The stories relate to eachother and while the joinder is not seamless, Bruen's writing is sufficiently jolting so that the stories feel contiguous.

Bruen writes like the fifties. You see Mickey Spillane and Phillip Marlowe. Tough stuff. Great dialogue. He writes sharply. There are vigilante assassins, cheating wives, men suffering from vainglory, cheating husbands all along with pugnacious prose and teary endings.

There's a sense of humor between the two men and the other characters. When Inspector Roberts is asked by Brandt how long it's been since he gave up smoking, Roberts says "five years, four weeks, two days and [looking at his watch] nine hours. More or less."

There's no morality here. In fact some have criticized Bruen and the Trilogy for that but I submit he gives us a series of freeze frames on the south and east of London, and morality is but an also ran.

Brilliant, brilliant stuff. I can't recommend him enough. Larry Scantlebury