Review: The Killing Of The Tinkers

The Killing Of The Tinkers by Ken Bruen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not much given to the idea of detective series. For me much of the fun in a book is getting to meet a new character, and that’s gone if it’s someone we’re seeing again after a first – or a dozenth – earlier volume(s). On the other hand, Ken Bruen writes so well, with so sharp and comically sweetened a hardboiled edge, that I think anything he writes is worth a shot.

I don’t think this one quite reaches to the level of the first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards, but that’s a masterpiece, so it’s more than fine to come close. And this one comes very close. Especially with its killer ending, this steps right up to that level of true excellence.

Bruen writes here with the same inspired hardboiled mumbling as The Guards. Sometimes his sentences come out as poetry; more often they just stop short. If it’s not inspired, neither he nor Jack will waste our time in saying it.

That’s as true at the level of the chapters as it is with those sentences. Some chapters wind around an incident, taking us right up to something disturbing in the world or in Jack’s blighted soul. Others belch out an insight and conclude all within the space of a page or two.

So, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll listen to Bruen meditating on whatever he cares to share, be it the murders of a bunch of Irish Tinkers, the thrill-kill beheading of a bunch of swans, or the writers or singers he thinks are most neglected.

For much of this book, I paid only loose attention to the plot. [SEMI-SPOILER] Jack is sure he’s solved the mystery of the Tinker-killer early in the novel, and it becomes less a whodunit and more a how-to-get-revenge. In that light, I just enjoyed the prose and the constellation of other characters, especially Cathy – the ex-punk turned mother of a child with Downs Syndrome – and Kiki, the intellectual who marries Jack when he’s in a manic mood and repents when she sees him in full.

I’d read a bunch, put it down for a few days, and then pick it up with the same joy a little later.

And then, [FULL SPOILER] comes that ending. The last couple dozen pages make it clear Jack’s fingered the wrong man for the Tinker killings. His certainty has sicced some mean bastards on a nasty but ultimately innocent man. And it’s as hard as hardboiled gets when Jack confronts the man – his teeth ripped from his jaw with pliers – knows the truth for himself, and nods again toward his murder. What else is he to do? If he owns up to the mistake at that late date, then he’s a dead man himself.

The final page is note perfect in its leaving Jack disgusted with himself. He’s cleared a lot of money on the job, but he can’t take knowing what he knows. So he hires someone to kill ‘Mikey,’ the man he knows for the true killer at the last.

Bruen gives us all that in the space of a couple paragraphs. It’s a dark truth made all the darker in the telling. Yet it’s inspirational too in the discovery that someone so plugged into genre that he’s working in series has the capacity to hone the stiletto as he does.

So, yeah, I’m all in for the next one. I can’t imagine the next will be as good as this one, but if the slippage from this one (number two in the series) to number three is as slight as the slippage from The Guards to this, then I’m sure I’ll enjoy and admire it too.


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