"I've been thinking of America. Get me a pickup, rifle on the rack, dog on the front seat, a coonhound of course, Hank Williams on the speakers. Americans appreciate a decent killer."

Not a conventional police procedural, though it is set in a London police station and involves the solving of crimes, it is nevertheless definitely in the noir category. I picked it up, probably as a cheap Kindle deal, with no prior knowledge of either the book or the author. As it turns out this is the 6th (or something like that) in the Inspector Brant series, and I think my enjoyment of the book suffered due to my not having read the prior entries in the series.

The plot involves a serial killer who is murdering people who exhibit bad manners or rudeness. This was an interesting concept, but I think the book is a little too short to do it justice. The writing is good, and the dialogue crisp and realistic.

I feel that I would have appreciated the characters and their interactions more had I read the previous books. I'm not sure I want to go to the beginning and start another series, but it quite possibly would be rewarding to do so. Critics have compared the series to the best of classic noir.

3 stars

First Line: "Shit from Shinola."
Last Line: "'Don't you have any manners?"' ( )

I enjoy Ken Bruen's writing style, and the narrator is a good match for the English / Irish characters. Even though it's a crime story involving a serial killer, it's not full of gore, and killer's targets don't have many redeeming qualities, so the book stays enjoyable throughout. ( )

LOVED IT. OMG SO FUNNY. THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK I'VE READ BY KEN BRUEN, BUT NOT THE LAST. HOPE HIS OTHER BOOKS ARE AS GOOD AS THIS ONE. ( )

When your favourite authors start dying even the most reasonable reader should be forgiven for becoming a nervous, obsessed, idiot hoarder of books that can, after all, be re-read should the unthinkable eventuate. Despite an overwhelming desire to continue this hoarding behaviour, eventually the yearning for books like CALIBRE becomes too strong and, as a result, I'm no longer hoarding CALIBRE. (DISCLAIMER: I have no information whatsoever with regard to Mr Bruen's state of health... it's just that he's a favourite author and there's always the chance that any one of my favourite authors could beat me out the door....)

I'm not 100% sure what called me to this book over the last few days, but I found myself inexplicably incapable of looking past it when scanning the shelves for a little something to fill in a hot weekend. Which plan failed dismally as I read it in a single setting. Not because the book is 192 pages long, because it was so extremely, gloriously readable.

Of course we're talking Bruen here, so it's rapid-fire dialogue, recited by unconventional characters, with a healthy disdain for the rules or much in the way of propriety. There's also the most marvellous dark, dry humour - personally I thought Sergeant Brant's method for becoming the British equivalent of author Ed McBain had a weird sort of merit, although I doubt his colleague, who was being set up for a systematic fleecing of his ability, would agree....

CALIBRE, as with all of Bruen's novels, is not for everyone. We're not talking straight-forward police procedurals here, nor are we necessarily talking much in the way of complicated plots. What we are talking is a sense of noir, of the dark side, of black humour and somehow, disconcertingly so in some places, realism. Favourite author or not favourite author I'm going to have to snap out of hoard mode and get back into reading (and re-reading) all of Bruen's books. ( )

I really enjoyed Ken Bruen’s, The Guards, in which I met Irish ex-cop Jack Taylor for the first time. I was taken with Bruen’s unusual style and his love for all the classic crime novelists who preceded him so I looked forward to reading something else from him.

Bruen has two crime series going at the moment, one series of four novels featuring Jack Taylor and another of three Inspector Brant novels set in London. Calibre, from the Inspector Brandt series, largely maintains the tone and style that I enjoyed in The Guards, but it didn’t work as well for me as a reader this second time around.

The sparsely written novel centers around the “Manners Killer,” a man who has taken it upon himself to rid southeast London of as many belligerently rude people as he possibly can. Unfortunately for them, he decides that the best way to do that is to kill them in what he, at first, hopes will appear to be nothing more than regrettable accidents. Soon enough, the killer decides that he would like some credit for his good deeds and starts to mail taunting letters to the Southeast London police squad. That’s when Inspector Brandt decides to put a stop to all the nonsense.

As in The Guards, the main thread of his plot soon becomes relatively secondary to Ken Bruen; his novels are more about characters and atmosphere. The Southeast London police squad is manned by an assortment of characters who have more in common with the criminals they confront everyday than with the public’s general concept of what makes a good and honest policeman. Brant himself, an Ed McBain want-to-be, remains a successful street cop only by playing by the rules of the street and shows little concern for the law he has sworn to uphold. And the cops with whom he works everyday, both male and female, are so much like him that it’s only a matter of degree.

I think that Calibre is a worthy tribute to Dashiell Hammett but I soon started to wish that Bruen was not so intent on out-Hammetting Hammett and that he would put a bit more meat on the bones of his characters. I would like to know more about them than Bruen tells us, cops and robbers alike.

Rated at: 3.0 ( )