Crime novels are the literature of the crisis - the deeper the distortions of a society, the more material there is for authors. The Irish journalist and writer Declan Burke wrote "Slaughter's Hound" at the beginning of the decade, shortly after the financial crisis brought the "Celtic tiger" - since the 1990s the former poorhouse of Europe - boomed.
It had hit the real estate market particularly hard, which was quasi pulverized. At that time there was a standstill on the construction sites, unfinished office buildings stuck like skeletons in the cloudy sky. And the people were in shock.
"Slaughter's Hound" is after "Eight Ball Boogie" (originally released in 2003, in German in 2018) Burke's second thriller starring Harry Rigby as a hero of the rather bleak kind. The sequel plays a few years after the events in "Eight Ball Boogie", which culminated in Rigby killing his criminal brother, which earned him a longer stay in psychiatry.
Kathy Burke / Edition Nautilus
Author Declan Burke
Rigby lives in his hometown again, about which he has nothing good to say: "Sligo calls himself city, because it has a cathedral and heroin." The sprawling suburbs are just the leftover crumbs of the big gold rush. " Meanwhile, Rigby is no longer a private snoop and occasional journalist on the road, but drives taxi - he carries not only passengers, but also the occasional load of dope and cocaine.
One of his regulars - and few friends - is Finn Hamilton, whom he met in psychiatry. Hamilton, a hobby DJ with a penchant for elegiac sounds from Tim Buckley to Tindersticks, dies right at the beginning of the novel. And it's quite spectacular: after a fall from the 9th floor, it bangs directly on Rigby's taxi, which immediately goes up in flames. Suicide, as it initially looks.
Rigby is only asked by Hamilton's mother to look for a possible farewell letter - but soon the old instincts get through with the former detective. Something does not fit together here. It begins in its own contaminated way - you can identify as a reference the "dude" from "Big Lebowski" without its relaxed optimism. And soon he gets to do it with the genre usual mix of windy lawyers, ruthless criminals and gruff cops.
Rigby encounters questionable real estate projects and a large-scale art fraud, but ultimately leads him his way back to the family of the dead. An aged Irish money-lord who in his lethargy and decadence recalls the Sternwood family of Chandler's classic "The Great Sleep". Aloof, egomaniacal, with a penchant for self-destruction, both Hamilton's mother and his sister work. But is one of them a murderer?
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Declan Burke
Slaughter's Hound: crime novel
Publishing company:
Edition Nautilus GmbH
Pages:
384
Price:
EUR 20,00
Translated by:
Robert Brack
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Both Rigby novels are deep bows to Chandler and the classics of the film noir , written in the gutter sound, with a sense of darkest humor. The central theme of Chandler's "The Long Farewell" even gives "Slaughter's Hound" its structure: It's about male friendship and betrayal and loyalty beyond death.
But unlike Chandler's private detective Philip Marlowe, Harry Rigby is not a melancholy moralist. He deserves all the evil that happens to him. Rigby sleeps with the fiancee of one of his best friends, takes his twelve-year-old son on a drug deal and has no qualms about torturing a suspect.
A changing contradiction is this Rigby, for he is well-read with all the cynicism and all the contempt for humanity that he radiates - he quotes, among others, the US avant-garde William Gaddis, Marx and Shakespeare - and has a sense, albeit a very perverted one for justice. He is also endowed with tremendous tenacity. Similar to the eponymous Irish Wolfhound, he can not be dissuaded from a track once he has recorded the weather.
Rigby is beaten, lied to and cheated on, and comes just barely with the life of it. In the end, he sinks into despair: "Life was nothing but a meaningless bloody farce, only a tiny flicker, to become again void, dead matter." That's not all. But in places brutally funny.
Maybe Burke has his taxi-driver-dealer-detective spin around Sligo a bit too many times, lamenting him too often about the rottenness of the world, turning a little dirty thriller into a 380-page novel. But despite some lengths: "Slaughter's Hound" is the bitter, hard-hitting and rapid reflection of a society in an existential crisis - and an enormous reading pleasure, also thanks to the translation of the Hamburg crime author Robert Brack, Burke's unique sound has almost loss-free transferred to German.
