Review: The Dramatist

The Dramatist by Ken Bruen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve spent much of my time reading the first four of Bruen’s Jack Taylor books trying to figure out what makes them so good. The plots do matter – the twist at the end of The Killing of the Tinkers pushed that one back into elite territory, and I found myself gripped at the end of The Magdalen Martyrs too.

And this one definitely falters in the plot department. Where we’ve had political complications and individuals with deep and troubled backgrounds, this one turns on a too-conventional serial killer (so he’s obsessed with John Millington Synge) and a socially conservative paramilitary group of guards. Neither is anywhere near as satisfying as we’ve seen.

Still, while I find this one a definite step down, I still very much enjoyed it, and that’s lead me to another theory about what makes Bruen so good here:

When Hemingway developed what I understand as the hardboiled style – when he created the tone that Hammett and Chandler refined into genre – he did so laconically. Hemingway fights with language; he teaches us to leave most things implied rather than said. Hammett picked up on that most dramatically, leaving real (and sometimes haunting) gaps in his explanations. Sam Spade and the Continental Op are some sick and twisted guys, a fact we don’t see that clearly for a long time because they keep so much to themselves.

As the genre evolved, though, the challenge for each new writer became how to give us a sense of an inner monologue. If a mystery unfolds too quickly, it has no power. While it’s unfolding, though, our detectives have to deal with something. Lots of good writers have given their detectives intense personal lives to wrestle with – like Lawrence Block, Walter Mosley, or dozens of other solid hardboiled success stories. Still, there’s always the difficulty of giving the hero someone to talk to. Without the still profound skill of a Hemingway, we need to hear something from the guy who’s doing the sleuthing.

What Bruen does with Jack Taylor – and, from what I’ve seen, with some of his other heroes as well – is give him an inner “dialogue.” That is, because Jack is always reading something, he’s never entirely alone with his thoughts. Bruen name-drops other writers in what I take as a generous appreciation of his colleagues (he does that so well in Bust that I took 3-4 good recommendations from him) but also as a solution to the what-does-my-detective-do-when-no-new-crime-is-happening conundrum.

I don’t know that I could pull it off myself. For one thing, my life is already too saturated with books, and my challenge as a writer is to find real-world things to refer to. Making books so central a touchstone would just add to the weakness I’m always fighting.

But Bruen gives the impression that he knows the hopeless streets and the alcoholism of Jack’s experiences. His novels work because he doesn’t seem to be showing off when he veers into pictures of the bottom side of addiction and despair. He seems to know it, and literature is one of the ways he’s kept from succumbing to it.

Anyway, I’m still on this train, and I’ll get to the next one in the series pretty soon. I’m hoping the somewhat lazy plotting gets a makeover, and I’m hoping I won’t get too frustrated by the lengthening descriptions of what’s happened to Jack in earlier episodes.

And, above all, I hope I can forgive Bruen for [SPOILER] what he does to Jeff and Cathy’s baby in the closing pages. That may set up some freshly inspired self-loathing, but it may also mark one gimmick in a series that I find I no longer have the patience for.


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