Taming the Alien
By Ken Bruen
4/5
()
About this ebook
South London’s Chief Inspector Roberts and his partner, the reckless and thuggish Irish Detective Sergeant Brant, are at odds with who has it worse: Roberts, with a mortgage in Dulwich, a pregnant daughter in boarding school, and a dire medical diagnosis; or Brant, relegated to desk duty after getting knifed in the back, and living to see his complete Ed McBain collection destroyed by a psycho with a baseball bat. That particular nut job has been dubbed the Alien, a hit man so named for carrying out a skull-smashing job while watching Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, and hanging around in the spatter to finish the film.
But this time the carnage isn’t confined to southeast London. As Brant heads to New York by way of Dublin to catch the couple who knifed him and the Alien goes to San Francisco to pay a surprise visit to his former girlfriend, Bruen’s broad, brutal canvas once again shows why he’s been hailed as one of “the most original and innovative noir voices of the last two decades” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
Ken Bruen
Ken Bruen (b. 1951) is one of the most prominent Irish crime writers of the last two decades. Born in Galway, he spent twenty-five years traveling the world before he began writing in the mid 1990s. As an English teacher, Bruen worked in South Africa, Japan, and South America, where he once spent a short time in a Brazilian jail. He has two long-running series: one starring a disgraced former policeman named Jack Taylor, the other a London police detective named Inspector Brant. Praised for their sharp insight into the darker side of today’s prosperous Ireland, Bruen’s novels are marked by grim atmosphere and clipped prose. Among the best known are his White Trilogy (1998–2000) and The Guards (2001), the Shamus award-winning first novel in the Jack Taylor series. Bruen continues to live and work in Galway.
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Reviews for Taming the Alien
17 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In this entry to the series a criminal known as the Alien, has just been released from jail. He still pines after his ex-wife who has remarried and moved to America. So the Alien takes off for America to find her and murder her. Sergeant Brant is assigned to find the alien and bring him back. The book allows Bruen to get in some digs about the differences between America and Britain.3 stars
Book preview
Taming the Alien - Ken Bruen
Taming the Alien
Ken Bruen
mpFor Izzy Bain and Noel Bruen
Contents
To Fall falling have fallen in love
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Black as he’s painted
Exporting aliens
Ticket to ride
Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination
On break the 12th lament
Lies are the oil of social machinery (Proust)
They have to get you in the end Otherwise there’d be no end to the pointlessness (Derek Raymond)
In my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world any more. (Robin Cook)
Castro
Americana
London
To roost
Which bridge to cross and which bridge to burn. (Vince Gill)
Felicitations
A mugging we will go
Full frontal
Trying to recapture the great moments of the past.
Cast(e)
The American way
‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.’ (Opening lines of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’)
‘I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.’ (Bill Bryson)
‘The best the white world offered was not enough ecstasy for me. Not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music; not enough night.’ (Jack Kerouac)
Close call
‘Yada Yada’ or some such (Melanie)
Each angel is terrible (Rilke)
Brown is the new Black (London fashion guide)
Children’s program
‘One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichman trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humanness, with the capacity to love and understand people. We rely on the sane people of the world. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.’ —Thomas Merton
My kind of town (Ol’ Blue Eyes)
Applicant
Something in the way she moves
Montezuma’s Revenge
I have a need (Demian in ‘Exorcist III’)
Fist
I had a dream (ABBA)
Taming the Alien
Run for home (Lindisfarne)
Shooting
Acts ending – if not concluding
Brief debriefing
J is for Judgement (Sue Grafton)
‘Which party would you like to be invited to?’ ‘The one’, I said, ‘least likely to involve gunfire.’ (‘Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil’ – John Berendt)
About the Author
To Fall
falling
have fallen in love
FALLS KNEW THE GUY would hit on her. With such a short mini, it was nigh mandatory. She sat, tasted her drink, waited.
Yeah ... here he was.
‘Mind if I join you?’
‘Not yet.’
He gave a quizzical look. ‘Not yet you don’t mind, or not yet to joining you?’
Falls shrugged and tried to look at home in the bar. Not easy to carry off when you’re:
a) English
b) Female
c) Black.
He sat.
She asked, ‘Do you swim?’
‘What?’
‘It’s just that you have a swimmer’s shape.’
‘Yeah? Well, no ... no I don’t, not since Jaws, anyway.’
She gave a laugh. ‘There’s no sharks in England.’
He gave a tolerant smile. Nice teeth. Asked, ‘How long since you shopped on the Walworth Road?’
She laughed again, thought, Good Lord, if I’m not careful I’ll be having me a time.
He then proceeded to lay a line of chat on her. Not great or new, but in there.
She held up a finger, said, ‘Stop.’
‘What?’
‘Look, you’re an attractive man. But you already know that. We’d date, get excited, probably have hot sex.’ He nodded, if uncertainly, and she continued. ‘I know you’d have a good time – shit, you’d have a wonderful time – and I’d probably like it too. But then the lies, the fights the bitterness ... Why bother?’
He thought, then said, ‘I like the first part best.’
‘Anyway, you’re too old.’ And it crushed him. One fell swoop and he was out of the ballpark. No stamina and they hadn’t even started. It didn’t feel good.
‘Oh hell,’ she thought. ‘Revenge is supposed to be sweet.’
Her father, in a rare moment of sobriety, had said: ‘If you’re planning revenge, dig two graves.’
He sure as Shooters Hill was in one, and she was contemplating the second. All because Eddie Dillon had smashed her heart, her trust into smithereens. The married bastard.
• • •
Roy Fenton tasted the tea, went, ‘Euck ... argh ... and called to the waitress.
‘Yo, Sheila, how can you fuck-up a tea bag?’
Sheila didn’t answer. The Alien was known in the Walworth Road cafe and most of south-east London. What was known was his reputation, and that said people got hurt round him.
His cousin had been part of the ‘E Gang’. A group of vigilantes who’d hanged drug dealers from Brixton lamp-posts until they’d been slaughtered in a crack house on Coldharbour Lane. Smoke that!
No one called Fenton ‘The Alien’ to his face. At least not twice. He read his poem, chewed the tea:
UNTITLED
And he had his books,
second-hand
and nearly twenty, neatly stacked
A tape recorder, German made, some prison posters
Same old ties, some photos too
And the camera, convincing lies.
For the booze
a Snoopy mug,
two shoes too tight
And English jeans
A silly grin with still,
the cheapest jacket
off the rack during some sales.
A belt
its buckle made of tin ... and clean
with undies, unmatched songs
and a hangover
God bless the mark
the usual London cover.
A watch
Timex, on plastic strap.
He stopped. Remembering ... When Stell had come to the ’Ville, him six months into the three years, and said: ‘Ron, I got pregnant.’
And he didn’t know what to say. ‘I dunno what to say.’
And she’d begun to weep, him asking, ‘What ... what’s the matter, darlin’?’
And her head lifting, the eyes awash in grief.
‘Ron ... I had an abortion.’
And he was up. Remembered that. Head-butting the first screw, taking down a second without even trying and then: the clubs, the batons. Raining down on him, like the purest Galway weather. Harsh and unyielding.
Did three months on the block, lost all remission and got an extra year. Not hard time, hate time. Fuelled and driven by a rage that never abated. The head screw, a guy named Potter. Not the worst; in many ways a decent sort. Still some humanity lingering. He gave a hesitant smile, almost put his hand out. No chance.
But tried anyway.
‘Give it up Ron, she’s not worth it.’
Fenton spat on his tunic.
The other screws moving forward but Potter, waving them back, said, ‘Have this one on me, Ron.’
• • •
He’d searched every pub in north London. Should have known better than to step outside the south-east in the first place. Jeez ... North! Highbury and shite talk.
Word was, she was in San Francisco. OK. He could do that ... but he would need a wedge, a real buffer. He was working on it ...
During lock-down he’d begun to write the poem. One toilet roll, with a midget William Hill biro. Gouging it down.
One of the nick fortune tellers saying: ‘I can see yer future, Ron.’
‘Yeah? See a double scotch anytime soon?’
The tier sissy who’d blown him then saw the poem, said, ‘You should send that to a magazine.’
Gave him a fist up the side of the head, said, ‘Don’t touch my stuff.’
But got to thinking ...
One lazy Saturday, Millwall were two down, he’d idled through a magazine and these words hit him like a pool cue:
POETRY
FREE APPRAISAL
CASH PRIZES
PUBLICATION
So he sent it off.
‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’ The psycho Dex used to say it all the time. Dex, they found him in a bin liner on a heap in Walworth. An old copy of The Big Issue down his Y-fronts. Liked to read, did old Dex. And talk. But talked too much. A black chick took his throat from ear to mouthy ear.
She was dead ’n’ all.
Since Derek Raymond died, so did all the characters.
He sent the poem.
They replied:
Dear Ronald,
If we may be permitted the liberty of addressing you thus ...
Fenton thought, ‘Uh-huh, watch your wallet,’ but read on:
Our panel of specially selected judges have chosen your poem to go forward to the Grand Final. The winner receives a thousand guineas.
All entries will be published in a lavish volume that all good book stores must have. As you’ll appreciate, the cost of printing is high for a book of such quality. For a stipend of fifty pounds, we can reserve your own engraved copy. Please hurry as demand is limited.
Of course, your donation in no way affects the outcome of the Grand Final which, as we stated, is for ONE THOUSAND GUINEAS!
We eagerly await your prompt reply.
Yours,
P Smith, Co-ordinator
The World of Poetry Inc.
He wrote back:
Dear P. Smith,
Take my end outta the thousand large.
Yours,
R.Fenton
Convict.
IF YOU TURNED right on the Clapham Road, you could walk along Lorn to the Brixton side.
Few do.
Brant had his new place here. The irony didn’t escape him.
Lorn ... forlorn.
Oh yeah.
Since he’d been knifed in the back, he’d been assigned to desk duty, said: ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers.’
His day off, he’d go to the cemetery, put flowers on PC Tone’s grave. Never missed a week. Each time