2 out of 5

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“You look like Basilio after Robinson got through with him.”

“He… walked to the jukebox and played “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones.  You can’t get much louder than that.”

Both of these quotes are from the same page of Hamill’s ‘Guns,’ an attempted Ireland / NY-soaked revenge tale that I refer to as ‘attempted’ because – with those quotes as examples I’ll try to further explain – Hamill’s world-building always feels assumptive, and not earned.  In other words, this reads like a story by someone who read another story about the same thing, enjoyed it, then wrote some fan-fiction about it.  Which is super offensive considering that Hamill is a totes respected child-of-Irish-immigrants-raised-in-Brooklyn journalist and that this book was written much closer (’83) to the era it depicts (70s, I think – another fucking problem I had with the thing) than the era in which I’m reading it, suggesting it should come across as a lot more legitimate than it does, BUT OH WELL WENT THE RUN-ON SENTENCE.

Reporter Sam Briscoe is writing about IRA nonsense while visiting his Uncle in Ireland.  A la Patricia Highsmith, Hamill takes the opportunity to write a travelogue, which I understand is a style of writing of interest to people, but does nothing to me without some context.  And for Pete – in a very journalistic manner, I suppose – context is just a matter of saying, “ah, Ireland,” or “ah, Brooklyn,” and then telling us that so-and-so crossed that bridge over there.  It’s a rattling of facts.  Perhaps if we like journalistic rattling of facts, this would endear us to Mr. Protagonist Briscoe, but all it did for me was set up a mighty barrier of disinterest that I never got past, and we all know that if you don’t care about / don’t like your lead, it’s a tough job to care about / like the book in which they’re starring.

Yes, ‘Guns of Heaven’ bored me rather immensely.

So Briscoe’s Uncle gets shot, which stirs some of Sam’s Irish passion, and he then agrees to do a job he maybe shouldn’t do, which unfortunately results in his daughter being kidnapped.  Note: this is on the back cover (for the most part), but it doesn’t actually happen until page 179 out of 250, so methinks our back-blurb writers were struggling to find the points of interest here as well.  Cue some scuffles and musings over the pointlessness of the IRA struggle, and the clumsy emergence of what’s sort of presented as a red herring character as the main heavy.  This isn’t a twist, per se, so much as Hamill poorly establishing our focus.  (At least to me.)

Not much positive to say here, eh?  There are some good moments, when the action heats up, and there’s an evangelist sub-plot that’s a lot more interesting than the other sub-plots, but it ends up being too peripherally involved to do the book too much good.  And Hamill’s by no means a poor writer, I just never felt properly immersed in ‘Guns,’ which, really, I think is a big draw of most (*cough* of the better) era-specific noir fiction.