Secret Dead Blog Recommends: Once Were Cops

Ken Bruen's novels are the closest thing we have to hardboiled poetry. Once Were Cops, his latest knockout standalone, muscles it even further in that direction, to the point where you're not sure where novel ends and poetry begins.

You can see it the moment you open the book. The pages aren't dense with paragraphs; there are shotgun-pattern blasts of sentences, dialogue, and sometimes, single words. You don't read it so much as let it assault you.

Ken's genius is that he packs so much meaning into each little pellet of birdshot.

He only describes something when he means it, not when he wants to fill out a graph or a page. He breaks out the dialogue so that you can really hear it, not breeze by it. He drags you into some psycho's world, and damn if you're not there, listening to him mumble in your mind.

Ken happens to be blogging this week at Moments in Crime, St. Martin's Minotaur's house blog, and in a post earlier this week, he revealed a bit of his process:

Like my novels, I actually write much lengthier entries and then root out all that sounds off.

I read it aloud and if it doesn't have that jagged tone of real speech, bin it.

Ken bins only the filler, never the killer. Once Were Cops has a beautiful twisting plot that never telegraphs its punches, as well as a collection of unsavory and sadistic fuckers that you somehow compel you to stay with them, no matter what unsavory and sadistic things they do. (And God, what they do in this novel...)

I can't recommend this one enough.