Gun Machine
2013 hardback first edition
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| Author | Warren Ellis |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Hardboiled detective, thriller |
| Publisher | Mulholland Books |
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Publication date
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1 January 2013 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 308 pages |
Gun Machine is a hardboiled detective thriller by English author Warren Ellis. The novel, Ellis' second, was released on 1 January 2013 through Mulholland Books, and reached The New York Times Best Seller list. It follows Detective John Tallow as he becomes involved in a mystery surrounding several unsolved homicides. Ellis intended the book to serve as a contrast to police procedurals such as CSI, which he dubbed "bedtime stories".
Television rights have been sold to 20th Century Fox TV and Chernin Entertainment.
While answering a public disturbance call on Pearl Street, NYPD Detective John Tallow's partner of twenty years is killed by a depressed apartment tenant. Tallow kills the tenant but the brief exchange of gunfire opens a hole in the wall of an apartment, the inside coated wall to wall with firearms. The firearms are revealed to have each been murder weapons in hundreds of unsolved killings over the last decade, the trophy room of an extremely prolific serial killer. Tallow, assisted by a pair of forensic analysts Bat and Scarly, are given the nearly impossible task of finding the killer behind the murders.
Meanwhile, the book cuts occasionally to the perspective of the former owner of the guns, a man referred to as The Hunter, a high-functioning schizophrenic who perceives New York both in its modern appearance and as it appeared before the arrival of settlers. As Tallow works on the case he begins to understand the 'trophy room' has some greater meaning to The Hunter, discovering that the guns have a connection to the people who they killed, either a reference to the make or use of the gun or even puns. He believes the guns are selected for some higher purpose, that understanding the pattern and the purpose of the construction will help him discover the killer.
Eventually he unravels a conspiracy that ties a banker, the Assistant Chief of Police, and the CEO of a private security company to the mysterious killer, using him as a hitman for their own personal gain. Tallow, Bat, and Scarly ambush The Hunter at Tallow's apartment. Bat is non-fatally shot, and Tallow chases down and capture The Hunter at a police building that the Assistant Chief had given him access to hide in. Following The Hunter's capture the Assistant Chief is charged with the crime while the banker disappears out of country and the private security CEO kills himself with his wife. Tallow speaks with The Hunter, in prison and taking anti-psychotics for his schizophrenia, and confirms his suspicion that the room of guns was a Native American wampum, a kind of symbolic language made with beads. The purpose of the wampum in the killer's deranged mind, once completed, would be to supernaturally eject the White-European settler Americans from New York with all of its modern culture and return New York to its pre-industrial state.
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