Gun Machine by Warren Ellis

I love clearance sales. I particularly love clearance sales at used bookstores. 2nd and Charles, both locations near me, have excellent selection and an almost arcane reasoning for placing things in the clearance sections. For example, I found a brand new Meg Rosoff novel and one of Warren Ellis's novels in perfect condition.

I immediately dove into the Ellis novel and couldn't put it down. Warren Ellis is more well known for writing graphic novels such as Transmetropolitan and Fell but he has also written two novels. I tend to appreciate Ellis for his unabashedly brutal treatment of politics and power dynamics. He has a wicked sense of humor that he bends to his subjects and characters. And he has a severe case of potty mouth which I appreciate in certain settings.

Gun Machine is a gritty cop intrigue that borrows heavily from the hardboiled and noir novels of early and mid twentieth century. Detective John Tallow is world weary and disconnected until his partner dies in front of him leading to the discovery of a cache of hundreds of guns that have each been used to kill exactly once. Tallow is deeply intelligent but not in a way that stretches credibility and slightly crazy in damaged by life kind of way. He reminds me both of Dashiell Hammett's Philip Marlow and Ellis's own Spider Jerusalem (albeit more lucid and less insane).

The plot is pure intrigue and conspiracy. Tallow has to figure out the identity of the most successful serial history to prowl the streets of Manhattan.  Question number one is how did this killer manage to escape notice? Who's protecting him and why? The answer to these questions get Tallow deeper into a mess of department infighting and corruption.

This was a fun read. If I have one criticism, it is that they interplay between Tallow and his two CSU sidekicks is highly reminiscent of the relationship between Ellis's three main protagonists in Transmetropolitan: Spider Jerusalem, Yelena, and Channon. It's not much of a criticism really since that was a very fun set of characters too but it all did kinda feel like a lost issue of Transmetropolitan.

Nice quick read with short chapters. There's plenty of action to keep things moving, but Tallow's a thoughtful enough character that there's plenty of solid exposition to ground the narrative.Because of the copious amounts of foul language and violence, I can't put it in my class library, but I would give it to the occasional student.