Apr. 7th, 2015 02:53 pm
Matching the detectives
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muckefuckShortly after having the Old Man order me the first Jack Taylor novel, I spotted the next two for sale cheap at Powell's and picked them up as well. I didn't question the wisdom of this until I was about halfway through the second book and finding it a bit too reminiscent of the first. Taylor has got to be the laziest, most incompetent investigator in fiction. He doesn't seem to do anything but blow his entire advance (which is always ridiculously generous for no really good reason) on booze and drugs and then sit around waiting for someone else (who he is invariably a total bastard to) to do all the legwork before secretly murdering several people in cold blood and then claiming all the credit for cracking the case.
Just as I longed to see Holmes just once deduce something completely off base, I said to myself, "The only thing that would make this book interesting is if he ended up getting the wrong guy." Which--being such a total fuckup--he did, and that hooked me back into the story. And the series, since Bruen always leaves some hooks dangling in the background. So I went right into the third book, which is different enough because Bruen gets slightly more inventive formally and because it mines a rich vein of Irish shame to power the plot. But I don't think I laughed nearly as much as I did when reading The guard. Also, Taylor's bibliomania is not wearing well. If Bruen wants to talk about his favourite authors so much, maybe he should start patronising Goodreads.
In search of a palate-cleanser, I stumbled across another detective series, "Hop-Çiki-Yaya" by Turkish author Mehmet Murat Somer. The investigator, a transvestite computer programmer, is just about the polar opposite of Taylor. If anything, she's a bit too competent, with an array of skills and contacts that would be excessive even in a GURPS campaign. Somer has gone on record that he wanted to turn traditional stereotypes on their head and so gave her "contrasting and considerable talents". The character is fun, and it's only occasionally noticeable that Somer himself isn't gay or trans.
We'll soon see if he's inventive enough to make the series interesting once the novelty of the milieu runs thin. I talked up the book to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu and he immediately ordered the next two in the series. I may wait for him to read them first and review them for me. To tell the truth, I was taken aback by his leap of faith. "You liked him," he said. "Yeah, but we don't always like the same things." Which is something of an understatement. The only crossover point in our reading I can recall over the last couple of years is Alexander McCall-Smith, and whereas he's read basically everything the man's published, I read one slim volume of short stories and decided it contained enough tweeness to do me for a year or more.
Now I'm trying to finish up The informer by O'Flaherty, which I was ready to give up on until the Derryman from across the street urged me not to, while I look for another foreign language read to replace Fuentes. La cabeza de la hidra took me way longer than expected and has some pretty squicky bits that left me, at best, ambivalent towards the protagonists. I'm feeling the need for some German, but everything I have seems so dull at the moment. Maybe I should just go ahead and order the Grjasnowa which caught my eye last year.
Just as I longed to see Holmes just once deduce something completely off base, I said to myself, "The only thing that would make this book interesting is if he ended up getting the wrong guy." Which--being such a total fuckup--he did, and that hooked me back into the story. And the series, since Bruen always leaves some hooks dangling in the background. So I went right into the third book, which is different enough because Bruen gets slightly more inventive formally and because it mines a rich vein of Irish shame to power the plot. But I don't think I laughed nearly as much as I did when reading The guard. Also, Taylor's bibliomania is not wearing well. If Bruen wants to talk about his favourite authors so much, maybe he should start patronising Goodreads.
In search of a palate-cleanser, I stumbled across another detective series, "Hop-Çiki-Yaya" by Turkish author Mehmet Murat Somer. The investigator, a transvestite computer programmer, is just about the polar opposite of Taylor. If anything, she's a bit too competent, with an array of skills and contacts that would be excessive even in a GURPS campaign. Somer has gone on record that he wanted to turn traditional stereotypes on their head and so gave her "contrasting and considerable talents". The character is fun, and it's only occasionally noticeable that Somer himself isn't gay or trans.
We'll soon see if he's inventive enough to make the series interesting once the novelty of the milieu runs thin. I talked up the book to
monshu and he immediately ordered the next two in the series. I may wait for him to read them first and review them for me. To tell the truth, I was taken aback by his leap of faith. "You liked him," he said. "Yeah, but we don't always like the same things." Which is something of an understatement. The only crossover point in our reading I can recall over the last couple of years is Alexander McCall-Smith, and whereas he's read basically everything the man's published, I read one slim volume of short stories and decided it contained enough tweeness to do me for a year or more.Now I'm trying to finish up The informer by O'Flaherty, which I was ready to give up on until the Derryman from across the street urged me not to, while I look for another foreign language read to replace Fuentes. La cabeza de la hidra took me way longer than expected and has some pretty squicky bits that left me, at best, ambivalent towards the protagonists. I'm feeling the need for some German, but everything I have seems so dull at the moment. Maybe I should just go ahead and order the Grjasnowa which caught my eye last year.
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