Ken Bruen: The Hardluck Stories Interview
In Spring 2004, Hardluck Stories published what became its most famous piece of nonfiction: Duane Swierczynski's interview with Ken Bruen, the Galway-based author of the Edgar-nominated The Guards. What began as an innocent hey-let's-lob-a-question-or-two via email slowly morphed into a freewheeling conversation that spanned twenty-six thousand words and covered such weighty subjects as family, sin, God, crime, music, and booze. This page preserves the story of that conversation and its context.
How It Happened
Swierczynski had been a hardcore Bruen fan since picking up The White Trilogy on a whim, stunned by how much raw energy Bruen packed into so few words. When the zine's editor proposed a short interview, Swierczynski couldn't say yes fast enough. Short — yeah, right. The problem, he explained, was that Bruen is that rare interview subject who asks questions back and genuinely cares about the answer. At one point Bruen wrote: isn't this just the best interview ever? We can get it in the Guinness book of records. It has everything — sadness, compassion, smart-ass-ness, feeling. He even took time to teach his interviewer handy Gaelic noir phrases: bowsie (thug, shithead — or accountant), airgead (the bucks, the green), bhi curamach (be careful out there, just like in Hill Street Blues). The published version trimmed the full correspondence but kept Bruen's text essentially untouched: clever, passionate, thoughtful, heartfelt.
Who Bruen Was in 2004
The interview caught Bruen at the hinge of his career. The Guards had introduced alcoholic ex-cop Jack Taylor and earned an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America; The Killing of the Tinkers and The Magdalen Martyrs had followed, with The Dramatist on the way. In parallel ran the Brant police procedurals — Blitz, Vixen, and the rest — and standalones like Dispatching Baudelaire. In Bruen's world, as Swierczynski put it, evil is a force of nature rather than a plot contrivance, and you never know who's going to get hurt. Within a few years Bruen would be one of the most decorated crime writers of his generation, with a Shamus Award and multiple Edgar nominations, and Jack Taylor would reach screens in multiple adaptations.
Why the Interview Mattered
The piece did three things at once. It documented the friendship economy of the 2000s noir scene — Bruen was famously generous to younger writers, and the interview shows that generosity in real time, blurbing-energy turned conversational. It demonstrated the web-zine form's advantage over print: no magazine could have run anything close to this length, but a zine could let the conversation breathe. And it modeled what a genre interview could be: not promotion, but two writers talking honestly about faith, addiction, grief, and the moral weight of crime fiction. The interviewer went on to a major career of his own, in novels and comics; the interview reads today like two careers igniting in one email thread.
The Form It Invented
The interview's afterlife is its own story. Long-form, email-native author conversations are common currency now — newsletters and podcasts run them weekly — but in 2004 the format barely existed, and the Bruen piece became a quiet template: let the subject write rather than talk, keep the questions human rather than promotional, and publish at whatever length the conversation earns. Later zine interviews, including Hardluck's own Crumley piece two years on, inherited that blueprint, and interviewers across the genre press still work from it whether they know the source or not.
Reading It in Context
The interview ran in the Spring 2004 issue under guest editor Charlie Stella — the full table of contents is in the Archives — and Bruen returned to the zine repeatedly afterward: the story To Have and To Hold in Borderland Noir, Punk in the Horror/Crime issue. His thinking about noir also threads through the zine's craft writing; the essay Lessons in Noir takes two of his Jack Taylor novels as its primary texts. For the other pillar of Hardluck's interview legacy, see the James Crumley interview.