Thriller: What have J.M. Synge and Charles Baudelaire got in common? Not a lot, you might think; and to all intents and purposes you'd be right. Yet here they are, both looming large in a pair - though not a matching pair - of thrillers by the Galway-born writer, Ken Bruen.
The Dramatist is the fourth book in Bruen's series featuring the disgraced ex-garda Jack Taylor; Dispatching Baudelaire is a stand-alone story set in Thatcher's London.
The Dramatist opens with a chastened, sober and almost respectable Taylor breakfasting on Lemsip and Greek yogurt. Before long, however, he is enmeshed in an investigation into the deaths of two female students. Unfortunate accidents? Perhaps - except that a copy of a book by Synge, of all people, has been left with each of the bodies. To add to Taylor's problems an old case has resurfaced to give him grief - and he is about to have an unpleasant run-in with a bunch of extremely nasty vigilantes.
The central character in Dispatching Baudelaire, Mike Shaw, is a stockbroker whose idea of a wild night out is to take his girlfriend Brenda to Pizza Hut. That's until he meets Laura; to-die-for gorgeous and very possibly psychopathic.
He is, of course, mesmerised.
Then she takes him home to meet her papa: and if Laura is dangerous, her rich, powerful and utterly depraved daddy is nothing short of lethal.
So far, so unremarkable. On the one hand, an alcoholic ex-cop gets his act together; on the other, an innocent is corrupted. Standard storyline fare. With Bruen, however, the secret is in the style. Set in a Galway so noir it practically has an event horizon, The Dramatist is a pacy, staccato mix of deadpan police procedural and hilarious weirdness.
Not OTT hilarious, and definitely not soft-boiled hilarious, as - unwisely - are so many crime thrillers these days. This is more bite-your-bottom-lip hilarious; as in the scene where Taylor is beaten to a pulp by an off-the-wall vigilante who then proceeds to lecture him - in considerable socio- historical detail - on the virtues of the pike as an offensive weapon.
Dispatching Baudelaire, meanwhile, is an exercise in studied viciousness. Sassy, sexy and utterly cynical, it's really pretty far removed from the more or less reliable moral certainties of the thriller genre.
Written in the early 1990s it is, as Bruen points out in the introduction, haunted by the ghost of Margaret Thatcher - "if you had to reach for a description of the spirit prevalent then, paranoia would fit best" - which makes its obvious relevance to contemporary Dublin all the more unsettling.
If that was all there was to Ken Bruen, it would probably be enough. But there's plenty more. For all his hard edges he has a startlingly soft centre, which manifests itself in the occasional wry reference to Anthony de Mello, Scott Peck, and the desirability (or otherwise) of attending Mass on Sundays. His way with dialogue is reminiscent of Ed McBain at his wacky, wonderful best. Then there are the quotes with which both books are liberally sprinkled: Baudelaire, obviously, and a plethora of fellow crime writers in The Dramatist, including Henning Mankell, James Lee Burke and Joe Lansdale. Bruen knows his thrillers, and the quotes are an integral part of the mix, carefully chosen and subtly used. Lee Burke and Lansdale are also, oddly enough, previous winners of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, for which Bruen's The Guards - along with the eventual winner, Ian Rankin's Resurrection Men - was nominated this year.
But Bruen deserves a special award of his own for producing a pair of Irish literary thrillers which are not only impeccably literary, but genuinely thrilling into the bargain. To quote Carl Hiaasen: double whammy, dude.
• Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
