Quick Review: Gun Machine

If I were more internet savvy I would earn 3 cents by linking you to
Gun Machine (2013) by Warren Ellis

I liked it.

Read if you like: Cop shows, detective novels, Chuck Palahniuk, Warren Ellis.
Avoid if: you don't like those things, or if you don't like lots of graphic violence.

"And the problem is always the same: the world has stopped making sense, and the cops have to use Science to force it to make sense. That's the heart of every cop show.  Give yourself to a cop show for an hour, and it'll show you a breakdown in the ethical compact, and the process by which that break occurred, and how it is fixed and made to never happen again.  That's why everyone loves them."

 -Bat, p. 243

"Gun Machine" has much of the same gonzo energy as Ellis's "Transmetropolitan", the simultaneous love and disgust for the city and the people who live there, but here condensed quite nicely by the formula of the detective story.  It's a quick read, snappy, the story shaping up within the course of just a few densely-plotted days.  While the main character is a bit of a cipher--classic blank-slate PI kinda gig--he's not carboard, and the book ends before you can figure out how much is simply obscured by the trauma it starts with.

Supporting characters are illustrated quickly and well--the manic lab sidekicks are particularly well-done, and really not that unbelievable if you've ever met manic lab types.  Ellis has a remarkable way of distilling the politics, corruption, and general system-ness of bureaucracy in just a few quick sketches, which he deploys in splashes to paint the administrative machinery above Detective Tallow's head.

Great dialogue and narration, really wonderful pacing control, a handful of extended and gruesome scenes of violence, enough pop references to feel hip without being overwhelming, all packed into a lean detective story drenched in Manhattan history and geography back to the original Native American inhabitants.

Seriously, this cop discovers a room packed with guns, arranged in some kind of occult pattern, each of them connected to an unsolved homicide.  If that doesn't sound like a book you'd read, don't.