Ken They Do It? Yes They Ken …

There’s a story about Sir Kenneth of Bruen (right) that may or may not be apocryphal, even though he tells it himself, about the time he did a reading alongside a well-known British author. The lady in question was first up on the podium, and held up a copy of her latest novel, and a copy of Ken’s, which latter was noticeably slimmer than her own doorstop. “That,” she said, indicating her novel, “is what I call value for money.” Cue hoots of laughter, the jape being done in the spirit of joie de vivre, etc. Ken being up next, he held up the same two books, and indicated the well-known British author’s novel. “That,” he said, “is what one of my books looks like before I take out all the crap …”
  Ken’s books are, of course, so stripped down they’re in danger of being done for public indecency. Which may or may not explain why he’s bagged so many movie options recently: the novels are so sparely written, they are – c.f. James M. Cain – practically movie scripts even before some cack-handed screenwriter gets his grubby mitts on them.
  As Gerard Brennan reports over at CSNI – where he scoops me yet again, natch – Ken’s ONCE WERE COPS has just been picked up by yet another Tinseltown outfit, which makes it three novels he’s got in the movie pipeline now: BLITZ, with Jude Law on board; LONDON BOULEVARD, with Colin Farrell and Kiera Knightley; and ONCE WERE COPS. I’m also hearing rumours that an Irish production company have picked up THE GUARDS, and have optioned the entire Jack Taylor series, with a view to committing the battered bard of Galway to celluloid.
  The Big Question: Has the long overdue arrival of the Jack Taylor novels on the movie-making scene come too late for the man who was at one point so hotly tipped to play Taylor, David Soul?
  The Bigger Question: Who should play Jack Taylor in the movies?

UPDATE: a little bird gets in touch all the way from Galway to say that I should keep my shell-like to the ground for news on AMERICAN SKIN getting a movie deal … in, like, the next day or so. Crikey! They’ll have to invent a new Oscar at this rate. “And the Oscar for Best Movie Adapted from a Ken Bruen Novel is …”

A GONZO NOIR: Ken Bruen Speaks

God bless Sir Kenneth of Bruen (right, portrait by KT McCaffrey). I was in Galway on Friday night, and got an email from Sir Ken saying he’d received his m/s copy of the current humble offering, and that he’d be back to me within a week with a verdict. Which was all kinds of good news.
  He emailed me again on Saturday afternoon, to say he’d read the book in three hours straight. Sir Ken being Sir Ken, he was extravagantly generous with his verdict, the gist of which runneth thusly:

“A GONZO NOIR is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, Author of AMERICAN SKIN

  People, you have no idea how much I’d love to believe I can write as well as John Fowles …
  Anyway, that’s the first official reaction to A GONZO NOIR. It’s a nice buzz, and for a couple of reasons. The first, obviously, is that it’s from Ken Bruen, which is just terrific. Also, the fact that Ken has an eye for the screwy narrative, for playing around with the conventions and bending things out of shape, is a nice bonus, because A GONZO NOIR does its best to bend things out of shape, just a little bit. And that bit about reading it in three hours straight … well, that’s just about the best thing a writer can hear.
  Today was one of the good days, folks …

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

It’s a good week for Sir Kenneth of Bruen, people – LONDON BOULEVARD has just been short-listed for the SNCF ‘Best Foreign Crime Novel’ award in France (ooh la-la, etc.). Nice one, Sir Kenneth. To celebrate, we’re giving away – courtesy of the lovely folk at Brandon Books – three hardback copies of AMERICAN SKIN for free, gratis and nuffink. First, the blurb elves:

Stephen Blake is a good man blown in bad directions. He and girlfriend Siobhan, best friend Tommy, IRA terrorist Stapleton, and a particularly American sort of psychopath named Dade, are all on a collision course somewhere between the dive bars of New York and the pitiless desert of the Southwest. This is the long-awaited American novel by Ken Bruen, the hard-boiled master of Irish noir.

  Nice. To be in with a chance of winning a copy of AMERICAN SKIN, just answer the following question.

Is Ken Bruen’s rock ‘n’ roll alter-ego:
(a) Iggy Pop;
(b) Keith Richards;
(c) Kris Kristofferson;
(d) Jerry Lee Lewis?

  Answers via the comment box, please, leaving an email contact address (using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam-munchkins) by noon on Tuesday, September 30. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Bruen Up A Storm

God bless The Rap Sheet, which does all the heavy lifting by interrogating Reed Farrel Coleman (Jim Winter on thumbscrew duties) and discovering that he has a new novel coming out next year called TOWER, a collaboration with (dum-dum-DUM!) Sir Kenneth of Bruen. That makes it, by my reckoning, at least four novels Ken Bruen was writing at some point in the last twelve months – TOWER, ONCE WERE COPS, SANCTUARY and THE MAX, his latest Hard Case Crime collab with Jason Starr.
  Meanwhile, Brandon Books are issuing AMERICAN SKIN in hardback on this side of the pond, with the very handsome tome hitting a shelf near you on September 9th. Paula Murphy of the Mater Dei Institute of Education at Dublin University is on the case, with an extended essay entitled ‘Ken Bruen’s AMERICAN SKIN and Postmodern Media Culture’, which kicks off thusly:

Analyzing Ken Bruen’s novel AMERICAN SKIN, this essay argues that his crime novel illustrates the necessary tension of postmodern identity in the Western world; a tension between individual national and cultural identities and the universalizing force of globalization. The novel is set in Ireland and America and has characters from each country. However, rather than resolve the tension between native and acquired identities that the novel sets up, Bruen chooses to set his novel in the larger socio-cultural scene of the globalized, postmodern world. Consequently, the novel uproots identity from its national context and situates it in the heterogeneous flux of postmodern culture …

  For lots more in a similar vein, jump on over here …

“It’s Writing, Jim, But Not As We Know It.”

How time flies, eh? It seems like it was only last week when we were letting you know that Ken Bruen’s latest, SANCTUARY, is due in June from Transworld and that – woah, that was last week. And now the Edgar-nominated Sir Kenneth of Bruen gets in touch to let us know that ONCE WERE COPS (funkadelic new cover, right) will be St Martins’ lead title come September, and that “it’s darker than AMERICAN SKIN”. Crumbs! Has Bruen cracked the whole ‘multiple universe’ malarkey at the heart of quantum physics, and marshalled all his theoretical selves to write novels at virtually the speed of light? And can we get a (theoretically infinite) Star Trek episode out of it? Hmmmm. Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

Bruen Up A Storm

It’s tough keeping up with everything Ken Bruen (right, with the uber-glam Tess Gerritsen, righter) is up to these days, people. Apart from publishing Cross this side of the pond and American Skin over yonder Stateside, he’s released A Fifth of Bruen through Busted Flush, a compilation of all his early novellas and short stories featuring an intro by Allan Guthrie. “A beautiful book ... a must-have for all Bruen’s fans,” says Jon Jordan of CrimeSpree Magazine over at Amazon, and he should know … Meanwhile, Bleak House have released These Guns For Hire, a hardboiled short story collection featuring Ken’s Punk, and you can hear him reading it over here somewhere-ish … and if that wasn’t enough, there’s his second collaboration with Jason Starr, Slide, which will be published by Hard Case Crime in October with the delicious tag-line, ‘Beauty is only sin deep’. Oi, Bruen – leave some room on the shelves for the rest of us, ya bum!