Crime lines

“The way I deal with trauma is to write about it.”

Not a new thing for any writer, least of all a crime novelist. This is the kind of dark stuff that courses through Chandler’s The Big Sleep or Ellroy’s My Dark Places. Ken Bruen calls it The Bad Drop, a phrase that originates in Bohermore in his native Co. Galway.

“It means you can be a very easygoing person and put up with all kinds of shit but finally, when you’re back is to the wall, the Bad Drop will come into play and you’ll do anything to save yourself, and watch out for the ones who are tormenting you.”

Bruen’s tormentors were the jailors in the Rio de Janeiro prison in which he was wrongfully detained for four months in 1979 following an altercation in a bar. On his first night inside, they stuck his head in a bucket of shit. The second night they began raping him. After a couple of these sessions, when he became semi-catatonic, they left him alone.

No amount of drugs, drink or therapy could erase the memory of this season in hell, but shortly after returning to London Bruen began to write the nightmare out of his system.

“I came back from South America a shattered human being in every sense of the word,” he recalls. “I weighed about nine stone and I’m nearly six foot. They put us on this British Airways plane to London and I was just completely shattered and I couldn’t stop shaking, and this British air hostess came up to me and got me a large scotch and put her hand on my cheek, and I kind of flinched because no human being had touched me without violence for four months.

“She said, ‘I’m gonna get you a blanket sweetheart, don’t you worry, I’m going to mind you’, and for the first time in four months I wept because it was human contact. It was nearly too much for me… I had constructed this total shell where they couldn’t touch me and I was so far back in my mind, so detached from myself, a psychologist told me it was a very dangerous thing because you’re bordering on catatonia. But it was the only way I could protect myself. If I completely retreated then they couldn’t touch me.”

Can he bear to think of that time in any detail now?

“It doesn’t have the same kind of effect on me, I mean I’ll still get the odd nightmare where I think I’m back there. About three years ago I was offered a chance to go back as part of my teaching career and at the last moment I lost my bottle. I have a great friend who was in Vietnam and he never ever talks about it, but the odd time when he and I get together we mention, let’s put it this way, areas of darkness that we both understand.

“The very first time I met Eddie Bunker (noir legend, ex-con, screenwriter and Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs) he just looked at me and said, ‘You’ve done time’. Later on when I asked him about it he said, ‘It’s a look’. When you’ve been through extreme conditions, especially in prison, you always have a look that others recognise.”

Bruen has written about his jail time in a forthcoming autobiographical work for St Martin’s Press called Closure Of An Irish Kind, which will also deal with such subjects as the suicide of a friend, Down’s syndrome and cancer.

It will be something of a departure for the author, who has carved a niche for himself over the last 15 years as a writer of hard-boiled yarns such as The Hackman Blues, Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice, The Guards and his most recent novel The Killing Of The Tinkers. Bruen’s impending appearance at the Dublin Writers Festival as part of a special crime night alongside Paul Williams and Peter Cunningham marks a degree of recognition that he feels is long overdue.

“Let me just tell you about Irish writers festivals,” he says: “A couple of years ago I was invited to read down at a literary festival in Cork and a prominent Irish writer said to me, ‘You shouldn’t be here, you’re a crime writer’.”

Care to drop a name?

“I wouldn’t because he’d probably sue. I’m serious.”

Call it the Compost Principle Of Pop Culture: this year’s excrement becomes next year’s fertiliser, a seedbed of ideas that will eventually translate into the so-called fine arts. Pulp becomes posh with the pressure of time and accumulated critical distance.

It took half a century for Hammett, Chandler and Spillane to become part of the literary canon, but any impartial reader can see the link between the droll existentialism of the gumshoe and Camus or Beckett. In the case of someone like Paul Auster, the two combine as a kind of metafiction.

“I said that to someone recently, that so much of the dialogue of those guys could be Beckett,” considers Bruen. “Of course they turned up their nose at it because they don’t like Beckett being mentioned in anything but a very refined atmosphere. Two years ago Helen Carey, who runs the Cúirt festival of literature in Galwa, broke completely with tradition and had five crime writers on the bill and there was fucking murder. It was the first time I was ever invited to read in my hometown. She got absolutely crucified for it.

“But the literary ego is particularly prevalent in Ireland, moreso than any other country I’ve lived in. I know lots of gobshites in London, from Martin Amis on down, and they truly believe they’re God’s chosen people, but it’s a different kind of thing in Ireland, they sort of feel they’re keeping the flame of Beckett and Joyce and Yeats alive but only they are allowed to do so, which is absolute cobblers.

“My great hero is Derek Raymond. He went to school with Kingsley Amis and all the boyos and he said that while they were hustling and doing everything to climb the literary ladder, he had the down escalator all to himself.”

Bruen, born in 1951, was always buried in books. An introverted child, he spoke little until he was eleven years of age. For an Irish youngster, he says this was “the ultimate crime. Friends of mine have quiet kids and they’re getting social workers and psychologists, and I say to them, ‘For fuck’s sake, leave them alone, they’re just quiet, that’s their nature’. It’s not a sin and it’s not any mental handicap or anything like that.

“I can’t remember a time when I was a child when they usen’t to say, ‘Aw he doesn’t speak – he’s as odd as two left feet’. And then I went to boarding school and all the report cards said, ‘This child is retarded, the most he can hope for, if he’s lucky, is to be a dishwasher’. Thank god I kept the report cards. When I finally got my doctorate, for one moment I thought, ‘Fuck ye!’”

At 17, Bruen was offered a place in RADA, but he turned it down and instead went to study English and spent the next 25 years teaching in Africa, Japan and Asia.

“I’d such a lack of self-esteem I was afraid to take it up,” he says, “because to be an actor with the kind of family I have would’ve been like suddenly telling them back in those days, ‘I’m gay’. It would be that shocking. So what you had to do was go to college and become a teacher, something pensionable. But thank god young people today don’t buy into that mindset.”

When he returned to Brixton from Brazil, Bruen wrote a number of what he has called “mad, tormented books” like before turning to a life of crime fiction.

Notwithstanding the success of people like Jim Lusby and John Connolly, there’s still no real tradition of Irish crime writing – as Bruen pointed out in The Guards, there’s a natural distaste for the private eye or the spy or the informer in Irish culture.

On the other hand, the black humour and droll delivery of the gumshoe genre is eminently suited to

Hiberno-English. Bruen is presently completing the third book in The Guards trilogy, all of which are set in present day Galway, a collision between old world bars and bookshops and new age designer drugs and binge drinking, and told from the point of view of Jack Taylor, an ex-Guard turned private eye with an addiction to books, music, cocaine and alcohol.

There’s talk of film and TV adaptations in the works, but eleven books down the line, Bruen still feels like the uncouth gatecrasher at the lit-crit dinner party:

“Because I have a PhD they think, ‘Why don’t you work in a University?’” he concludes, “but I have spent time with academics and they’re an even bigger pain in the ass than writers.”