Prisoner in Brazil, teacher in Brixton, crime writer -the Galway boy who refused to talk has a tale to tell now, reports Lorna Siggins

No one messes with the Claddagh swans in Galway. No dirty industries that release foul substances down the River Corrib, no dockside energy companies that might have "little accidents". So when seven of the city's treasured birds are decapitated in a fortnight, it seems a little odd that the Mill Street gardaí don't have time to investigate . . .

But then if they did, Jack Taylor would be out of a case. And cases are something that Taylor, and his good mates - coke, drink, coke and more drink - cannot do without. Oh, and there's the occasional woman, as long as she doesn't interfere too much with real life in Grogan's, Nestor's and other Galway hostelries.

For Taylor is a full-time alcoholic,and former garda-turned-private detective, whose latest adventures are the subject of the third novel in a Brandon Press series by Irish crime writer Ken Bruen. Whereas the swans serve as a sub-plot in the second of the trilogy, entitled The Killing of the Tinkers, the "maggies" (or women who were packed off to the Magdalen laundries) are the theme of his new book.

Bruen is probably better known abroad than at home. He has sold film and television rights to several of his 12 novels, is already writing his 13th and 14th, and has been translated into Albanian.

Writing his first book was almost an accident. Born in Galway in 1951, he was a quiet child and voracious reader who was regarded as something of a problem because he rarely spoke in his early years. At 17, he had designs on acting and auditioned for RADA. Although he was offered a place, he says he didn't have the courage to resist the teasing at home and studied English at college instead. After doing a Masters, he took to the road, teaching English as a foreign language in Africa, Japan and Asia for the best part of 25 years.

Yet the "quiet child" landed himself in trouble. In 1979, he arrived in Rio de Janeiro to take up another teaching job and was one of five Europeans arrested after a fight in a bar. His four months of imprisonment, abuse and torture were to leave an indelible mark, and one which he clearly does not like to dwell on, beyond referring to "that whole south American thing".

By the time he was released and put on a plane to London, he was just six stone in weight and traumatised. His friends back in Brixton asked him to help out teaching, but "I wasn't sure if I was able to return to anything", he recalls.

At this stage, he had begun writing as a way of trying to heal his wounds. His first novel was about an Irish boy who attends funerals as if they were football matches, and several more were to follow as he worked through his catharsis.

"These friends said that they had a whole group of kids - and they used that terrible term, 'marginalised' - and they were setting up a co-op to try and get them some basic education," Bruen says. "On the surface, these kids were the toughest characters you could ever come across. You mention a book and they'd just throw a knife at you. They didn't want to know.

"I wanted to write a crime novel, and thought that if I did one that imitated their dialogue on the streets, they might be interested. and I could try and sneak literature in by the back door. As soon as the book - entitled Rilke on Black - came out and they heard it was about Brixton, they started to look at it. One of the best moments I had was when one of the kids came up to me and asked: 'So who's this dude Rilke?'"

He tried the same experiment with his next book, entitled Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice. "Again, I had three or four of these young black kids asking me: 'What's with this dude MacNeice?' And they loved it."

He remembers a colleague warning that "whatever about getting them interested in books, you'll never get them interested in literature". And yet, "like everything else, if you come at it from a different perspective, there's a way around".

He believes his experience in South America helped him to relate to the pupils. "I was so traumatised, and they recognised a similar wounded person," he says. "So all those barriers broke down, and the minute I met them I started to heal. And, of course, the fact that I did 'time' gave me credibility straight away."

During those London years, Bruen developed a reputation as a "cult writer - as in good reviews, no sales".

"I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton the critics didn't actually know I was Irish," he says. "In fact, when I gave a reading in Brixton for Rilke on Black, all the brothers turned up, expecting a black guy."

Latterly, he has been associated with the growth of "neo noir" British crime writing, which is said to have been heavily influenced by north American authors. It was nurtured by Maxim Jakubowski, who established two crime imprints and opened the Charing Cross Road bookshop, Murder One. The common thread in such writing is the contemporary issue, or issues, which has allowed the writers to appeal to a wider audience while also identifying with a distinct location and a regional dialogue.

For Nicholas Blincoe, the "set" has been Manchester, while Jeremy Cameron is rooted in Walthamstow, and Brixton had its Bruen . . . until he decided to return home. That was seven years ago, when he and his wife felt that Galway would be a better environment for their only child, Grace. So it was only a matter of slipping back into familiar dialect, finding the familiar haunts like Griffin's Bakery, Eyre Square's Ó Conaire statue, Charlie Byrne's bookshop, Woodquay and Hidden Valley, and finding contemporary locations for younger readers, such as Zhivago Records and the Róisín Dubh.

Several of his characters are instantly recognisable, such as "Mike Shocks", as one of the city's press photographers. However, some things have to be sacred - the names of the pubs in the Taylor series are fictional.

Bruen began with The Guards, in which Taylor, himself an avid reader of north American crime novels, is introduced as the disgraced cop who was flung out of the force for bad behaviour. He is asked to investigate the death of a 16-year-old girl. His quest, in between many binges, does not exactly highlight Galway as the picture postcard city of the tribes; tribal, yes, and troublesome, and worse at times.

Taylor was beaten up by two former colleagues in the first novel, but he is loyal to the last. He still hangs on to his Garda all-weather coat, fondly known as "item 8234", even though the Department of Justice keeps writing to him and asking him to send it back. At this point, Bruen almost anticipates questions about the Morris tribunal, and whether it will be the subject for a later episode.

"If you put all the reports from Donegal together in book form, no one would believe it," he says.

His latest novel, The Magdalen Martyrs, was written long before the recent film and television treatment of this subject. "Someone suggested I change the title, but the more that is said and written about this the better," he says. He lived around the corner from the Magdalen laundry in Galway city.

"You could play in the Fair Green in those days, and sometimes you would catch a glimpse of these poor unfortunate girls, and the sense I had as a child was that they had done something awful," he says. "Sometimes they were put in there because families just had too many kids. There was an old woman I knew on the Claddagh who had been in there, and the subject with her was almost akin to a 'vet' who will not talk about Vietnam. Even now that there has been all the publicity, it still haunts her and she is still afraid."

He is aware that crime writing as a genre is not taken seriously here - "we have no tradition, we are the masters of the short story, drama, theatre" - and recalls the "outcry" over the decision by former Galway Arts Centre director Helen Carey to include it in the Cúirtliterary festival several years back.

"We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such," he says. He refers to a feature in this newspaper a few weeks back which, he says, gave the impression that John Connolly was the only Irish crime writer.

"Yet you have Jim Lusby, Colin Bateman, Eugene McEldowney, myself - and there are a number of novels coming out by young writers which really are very good. In about four to five years, we are going to have 10 to 15 very good crime writers, mark my words.

"A guy came up to me some time back in Galway and told me that I seemed to be doing well at this crime business, and he might try it. He asked if it was alright to phone if he had any queries, and I said 'sure'. So he did call one day, and said: 'Listen, I have a problem. I just can't write badly enough, I keep lapsing into literature'."

The Magdalen Martyrs by Ken Bruen is published by Brandon Press, Eur12.99