It was about two weeks ago we got the news Ken Bruen passed away. If you read Ken's Jack Taylor or Inspector Brant series, you know he infused every page with rage. You might call his writing "brutal poetry" as that's how he wrote prose. The violence and horror he depicted came to the reader like a long epic poem.
But in person, Ken was the kindest, most generous person to other writers. Quick to take an author he liked under his wing, he would nonetheless make it about something other than writing when you hung out with him. If he wasn't regaling you with stories of the people he met, he was listening to you. Because the stories all had to come from somewhere. Ken not only wanted to tell you where his came from; he wanted to know where yours came from.
I met Ken in 2004 at the Toronto Bouchercon. It was a year of firsts for me. My first novel was scheduled for the following year. It was my first trip to another country (during which my second day was spent, in part, at a Walmart and a McDonald's. But I did legally smoke a Cuban cigar!) I mingled, met some of the people I'd spoken to only online or at book signings. One of them tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, Ken Bruen's taking a bunch of us up the street to an Irish pub. You're invited."
Me? Yes. Ken read a bunch of our stuff. So a handful of us, including our own Brian Thornton and Jersey writer Dave White, ended up a couple of blocks from the Intercontinental where the Jameson flowed, and so did the Molson. (Well, one of us insisted on drinking Guinness. "Dude, the famous Irish guy is drinking Molson. We're in Toronto!" "It's an Irish pub.")
Ken was partially, though not entirely, responsible for crime fiction writers of a certain age developing an obsession with Tom Waits. But Ken could personalize it, too. He me into a five-year binge of the late Rory Gallagher's work. Prior to meeting Ken, I knew Gallagher is one of those who floated in the same orbit as Clapton, Page, and Beck. Usually, I heard him on other people's stuff. But getting the CDs direct from Ireland was a revelation.
And of course, there was the writing. The Guards grabbed me and threw me to the ground. I've read all but the latest Jack Taylor novels. The best was The Dramatist, but the ending was so harrowing I can never reread it. He could do that. He could put a reader through the emotional ringer yet leave them wanting more.
And now Jack's story is done. And Brant's. And Max's, his raucously funny series cowritten with Jason Starr (who knows a few things about putting readers through the meat grinder.) And unfortunately, Ken is gone. We miss you, buddy.
Jim, when you shared this news on the Short Mystery list, I responded but hardly anyone else who'd known Ken came forward. So I'll repeat what I wrote there:
ReplyDeleteI'm terribly sad to hear that Ken Bruen is dead. I hadn't seen him in years, but in my novel-writing and conference-going days in the mid-2000s, we were on schmoozing and hugging terms, and that meant a lot to me. Ken was the noirest of the noir, his characters all booze and Irish angst, and I was the nice Jewish girl from Queens who wrote about alcoholics in recovery and got Agatha noms. (Jack Taylor's sobriety was more like sitting in the bar playing chicken with a shot of whiskey.) Yet he took me seriously. The raw rage and cruelty in his books was hard to take, but the man himself was kind, a real sweetheart. Bruen's Ireland was as authentic as it gets. I would read passages aloud to me Irish husband (not a crime fic guy), and he would say, "Yep. He got that right. That's exactly how it is." Terrible Irish mothers and terrible Irish priests in Galway and in working class New York were pretty much the same. Ken and I had a memorable time together on the infamous Booze Panel at Bouchercon Baltimore in 2008 along with Jason Starr, Con Lehane, Michelle Gagnon, and Ali Karim, the moderator, waving a bottle of gin like a conductor's baton. Ken Bruen wasn't just a damn fine writer. He was a damn fine person as well.
Wow, superlative eulogies by two people I respect. May all of us be so blest.
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