The Mean Streets

Ammunition

by Ken Bruen

St. Martin’s Minotaur    $13.95

ISBN 0-312-34145-8                                     

August 2007      

(Full Review - Mystery News October/November 07)                                              

Who’s the biggest Ed McBain fan on the planet? Anyone who reads Ken Bruen’s iconoclastic novels featuring the exploits of the cops in the Southeast London Squad knows the answer to that question. It’s the incorrigible, irascible, nearly sociopathic DS Brant. Imagine Brant’s mood therefore when he hears of McBain’s death. Pissed off doesn’t even begin to tell the story. So it is then that the good Sergeant finds himself seated at the bar in his favorite pub as Ammunition, the seventh offering in this series, opens: “Brant was on his third whiskey, knocking it back like a good un. He was feeling real bad … and nothing could ease the loss he felt. He muttered: ‘Fuck’. The barman, highly attentive to Brant’s needs, asked: ‘Yes’? Brant gave him the graniteeyes, said: ‘I want something, you’ll know.” Moments later the pub door opens. In walks some bloke with a gun. Before you can say “Fat Ollie,” the guy empties the magazine in the general direction of Brant. The policeman is hit, but it’ll take more than one guy with a gun to bring him down. If you thought Brant was angry when he heard the news about his literary hero, wait till you see what he’s like when he gets out of the hospital. If revenge is a dish best served cold then DS Brant is the iceman and he friggin’ cometh!

The question in Ammunition is not “if” Brant will get his man but “when” and “how.” That, and just how much damage he will do to his colleagues in the process. I mean, let’s face it; there’s no way you could assembly a more dysfunctional group of cops in one place. The Southeast London nick is like the 87th Precinct on crack. (And I’m willing to bet that’s just the identification Bruen intends his readers to make). The Chief Superintendent is only upset because Brant survived. DI Roberts, Brant’s sometime partner, is just surprised that it took someone this long to take a serious run at the guy. With Brant’s “help” – and with Brant there is no such thing as a “free lunch” – WPC Falls has just passed the sergeants’ exam. Before she can even celebrate her stripes an old friend pays her a visit; remember Angie James the whack job from Vixen (2005)? Well, she’s out of prison and wants to settle a few old scores. The only person vicious enough and smart enough to take her on is Brant but is Falls willing to sell her soul to the devil for some help? This time around, for sure, that’s what it will take. Finally, Porter Nash, the squad’s openly gay officer and, remarkably, the person closest to Brant, gets roped in by a gung-ho anti-terrorist expert from Texas. Before you can say “Yippee-ki-yay, Motherfucker,” Nash is fighting for his professional life. All in a day’s work for the cops in a London no tourist should ever see.

With an ensemble cast, multiple plot lines and absolutely lethal staccato prose, Ammunition is Bruen at his mordant best. The madness and mayhem that ensues in its pages all butdisguises the sharp social critique leveled by the author. In Bruen’s postmodern calculus, theline between good and evil, right and wrong has been nearly obliterated. In order to survive the cops need to be even more vicious, more ruthless than the criminals they pursue. “Not for the first time,” DS Falls wonders, “what the fuck happened to her once bright vision of police work, some skewered notion of righting wrongs, doing the best you could, and all that good Oprah crap.” All that matters these days, alas, are results, the bottom line. In the meantime, anarchy basically reigns on the street. For all of that, it’s not the violence or even the amoral ethos that’s most disturbing when you read Bruen. What really gets to you is the gnawing suspicion that this is more than fiction. As you read you keep trying to convince yourself that things really aren’t that bad. But then you pick up the newspaper or watch the news and you begin to think, maybe this Celtic lunatic is onto something after all.

Not to worry, however, on its most basic level Ammunition is another high-octane romp through the mean streets of Southeast London with one of the most entertaining tour guides working in the genre today. Slowly but surely Ken Bruen is doing for the police procedural in the 21st century what McBain did for it in the 20th … taking it to another level entirely. You’ll be safe enough as long as you don’t start peeking around the corner or poking through the rubbish with your shoe. If you do that, well, you just might catch a glimpse of the abyss that lies waiting there just beneath the surface. And as a man that’s been there and come back ... for real! … it’s the abyss that most interests Bruen.

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