Book Review – The Hackman Blues

Author: Ken Bruen
Publisher: The Do-Not Press
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 1998

A job of pure simplicity. Find a white girl in Brixton. Piece of cake. What I should have done is doubled my medication and lit a candle to St Jude – maybe a lot of candles. Add to the mixture a lethal ex-con, an Irish builder obsessed with Gene Hackman, the biggest funeral Brixton has ever seen, and what you get is the Blues like they’ve never been sung before.

The opening line of The Hackman Blues is one of the greats of all time for one reason, never before has an opening line cut so efficiently to the heart of the entire book. More amazingly Bruen does so in just three words. “BRADY BAD FUCKED.”

At the time of its release this might just have been the most unsympathetic, if not down right loathsome, group of characters to grace the pages of a crime novel in quite a while.

While not quite nearing sympathetic status Tony Brady as a gay, manic depressive tough guy who has gone of his meds, does manage to be an interesting and, at times, complex character. He is perfect as a protagonist because you want to read about his exploits and see what he does next, so in other words, he is compelling. As Brady becomes an increasingly complex character it becomes harder to slot him into simple designations of character judgments such as “love him” or “hate him” because viewing him in such simplistic terms takes away from the character as a whole.

The Hackman Blues manages an excitement level that matches a roller coaster at times as it veers quickly off to the left then climbs to soaring heights before plummeting into abyss like lows. In this book you will see Brady go from stomping somebody to having sex with a stranger all with in the span of a few pages.

Like Dispatching Baudelaire, The Hackman Blues offers up a bleak view of and a biting commentary on the post-Thatcher years in London. In this case though it’s those who were on the negative end of Thatcherism.

The ending of The Hackman Blues doesn’t offer up hope or redemption but instead is filled with a certain amount of melancholy as it offers up a ticking time-bomb ending. If motive comes into play then I do have to wonder if Tony Brady’s final acts were those of a dying gay man angry at a world the wouldn’t accept him. A ex-hard man using the only weapon left in his arsenal to strike one last blow.

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