‘Gun Machine’ targets NYC crime with grit, action

The Big Apple of Warren Ellis' novel Gun Machine isn't rotten to the core. The surface of his New York City, though, is a violent place where hundreds of firearms can lie, on display and woven together as a metal fabric, in an ordinary apartment.

Best known as a comic-book writer, Ellis has a penchant for twisting the conventional, as he does in the cyberpunk journalism world of his comic Transmetropolitan or the weirdo-noir bend on the private-eye genre with his first novel, Crooked Little Vein. With Gun Machine, the British scribe tackles the police procedural, although it's bloodier and more intriguing than any episode of Law & Order or CSI, and arms it with gallows humor, high-tension action scenes and an unlikely hero.

Detective John Tallow of the NYPD's First Precinct is living the everyday life of an average cop — a love-hate relationship with his partner, a messy residence, an unambitious work life — until one day, on a routine disturbance call, he watches his partner's head get blown off by a naked man with a shotgun.

Tallow kills the assailant but finds something that alters his entire existence in the building: a highly secured unit full of 200 guns ranging from ones produced in the 1800s to the present day, tied to just as many unsolved murders in the area.

Unlike Dirty Harry, though, his day is not made by offing the bad guy. Instead, he finds a much worse bad guy out there — a man referred to as "the hunter" who has connections with the Native American origins of Manhattan itself and, after years of killing, can blend in with the hubbub of the big city. Tallow also doesn't make any fans among his fellow police officers and, almost as a punishment for accidentally digging up decades of cold cases, is assigned to take care of all of them.

While he's on the bad side of most of the force, Tallow finds help in the form of two eccentric crime-lab geeks, Scarly and Bat. He'll need them, too, as the serial killing that the hunter has been doing ties into some of the city's biggest power players.

Ellis spreads a certain amount of grime and coldness on the book's locale and characters — a flintlock pistol from 1836 gets restored to working order, but there is a sense of rust and grit with so much old metal and bad deeds around, plus a serial-killing villain whose actions are subhuman on one hand but impressively and historically methodical on the other.

The writer has often proven prescient: He wrote of a school shooting in an issue of the supernatural comic Hellblazer prior to Columbine, and Gun Machine arrives just as this country seems on the cusp of revisiting gun-control laws after the Sandy Hook tragedy.

Gun Machine subtly hints at the inherent violence of humanity, both with its antagonist and through squawks over a busy police scanner. Yet at the same time, the novel gives us a protagonist to root for more because of it — an average cop with nothing special other than enough fortitude, loyalty to his partner and a sense of right to make a hunter the hunted.