Review: The Magdalen Martyrs

The Magdalen Martyrs by Ken Bruen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I work my way through Bruen’s extraordinary Jack Taylor series – this being number three – I keep looking for patterns. I find myself enjoying it all tremendously, and Bruen makes it all look so easy that I figure there has to be a secret weaving throughout it. If I could only bottle what he does, I’d be a better writer than I am.

There are clear elements: Jack disappoints everyone who gets close to him, especially the women foolish enough to fall for him. He stumbles through a crime that seems merely an excuse for much of the forward motion of the story, but it turns out to be neatly plotted as well, ending – as it does again here – with a nice twist that Bruen leaves largely to the imagination. (This after he spells out what will happen, setting up the downfall of someone who’s otherwise outsmarted him.) He reads a lot, hates his mother, and stumbles from the wisdom of one rundown, hard-luck Galwegian after another.

That is, I can see how the lyrics go, but I can’t imagine singing them with anything like his tune.

This one is, at last, a modest drop from the first two. (The Guards, well, good luck finding better noir than that. When you start on top of that mountain, you can go a long way down before you hit bottom. And, if these books are gradually getting less inspired, they’re doing so pretty slowly.) For me, the first sign of that is the way the paragraphs get longer. There’s a little more of the obligatory series business of explaining what happened in previous stories, of bringing people up to speed who’ve either not read the earlier ones or forgotten them.

That aside, there’s a similar despair running throughout this – a despair tempered by humor. In one scene, he’s lying in ambush for a tough guy who’s nearly killed him. He’s in a skid row alley, sweltering in the stink and the dark. It makes sense when a young drunk comes out and urinates nearby. What makes this Bruen, though, is that Jack shouts back at him that the least he can do is wash his hands.

Or there’s the time he tracks down an old frenemy. The guy’s in hospice, dying slowly from an awful cancer. So Jack leans in to him to whisper, and then punches him two or three good times in the face. It’s awful, but it’s beautiful too. It’s got that noir edge, and it’s got the old Dylan Thomas rage against the dying of the light. Where there’s life there’s anger, and Jack, if his despair never quite flares into rage, will nonetheless go down swinging.

It may be worth noting that Jack keeps changing his chemical dependency as well. In The Guards it’s alcohol. In The Killing of the Tinkers it’s cocaine. Here it’s Quaaludes. To Bruen’s credit, each book seems to respond to that changing addiction; thinking of it now, I can forgive some of the longer, slower paragraphs because, of course, that’s how such downers would work.

Anyway, read this guy. I’ve enjoyed some of the out-of-series Bruen I’ve read, but this is a great place to start. Give The Guards a chance, and I think it’s likely you too will find yourself jonesing for number four in the series before long.


View all my reviews