And… sure… some of the beatings.
The booze?
’Tis a sad tale, but I don’t drink Guinness or, god forgive me, even Jameson.
… Horror, I drink Bud…
Jack would indeed take a hurly to me.
The ordinary people of Galway, so beloved to Jack’s heart, they shout at me from cars… Jack has been a teetotaler for three books.
“Give the poor bastard a drink.”
Writing Jack has been all I know of heaven and hell. It drains me to write him, and I hope to Christ he’ll stop talking to me.
It’s too personal, too harrowing.
I write another series on UK cops… The main character is Brant, and writing those books is a vacation, a breeze… pure fun… or a short story… more time in the sun, but Jack…
Otto Penzler once said to me,
“Bruen, what is it with you, you get us to love characters and then you kill them?”
Indeed.
I read on one of those blog discussions, the big no-no is… don’t kill a child.
Gotcha.
Let me go classical here a moment, a little learned, or pseudo, if you prefer, or as our Irish teenagers in their new American tones say,
“Like, whatever.”
There is a quote from Aeschylus that is the real motivation behind Jack Taylor, at least for me. It best helps me write him.
Pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop
Upon the heart
And in our own despair,
Against our will,
There comes wisdom
Through the awful
Grace of God
The key word for me there is always… awful.
With Jack, I wanted to see just how much suffering you can inflict on one human being
Till he finally breaks.
Alcohol
Cocaine
Despair
Depression
Betrayal
Suicide
Murder
Jack’s been there.
Did quit smoking, though.
Not that he’s happy with it.
And those lists?
I’ve been asked so often,
“What’s with the bloody lists?”
I’ve studied chaos, damn, lived it most of me life, and one response to it is to make lists.
Try to impose order on a world spinning more and more out of control.
The later books, the lists got dropped, editorial decision more than anything else.
And quoting other mystery writers.
Because I love to. Not just my favorites, but also ones less known that maybe readers might pick up.
In Priest, I changed direction, went with simply Pascal’s Pensées. Jack steals it from a library in a mental hospital. Nothing else quite seemed to fit the mood of the book.
While I was planning the series, a couple of things were crystal clear in my head.