Snow - John Banville

 As Benjamin Black, John Banville wrote the Quirke mystery novels and one of the Raymond Chandler continuation novels (most, if not all, reviewed elsewhere on this blog).  Under his real name Banville writes award-winning novels in the modern Irish tradition.  Here, at last, he combines his two output streams - a police procedural set in County Wexford in the Nineteen Fifties.

Quirke, now the state pathologist, is out of the country on his honeymoon no less - a beautiful touch which tells us immediately the territory we are in and who will probably not be joining us there.  Instead we have a new character, Detective Inspector St John Strafford, a mid-thirties teetotal singleton from the Protestant Ascendancy, which makes him something of an exception in the Dublin Guards.

On Christmas Eve he is called to attend the death of a priest at Ballyglass House,  This is in itself unusual: what is a Catholic priest doing at a Protestant house?  It gets worse.  Father Tom Lawless hasn't just fallen down the stairs.  He has walked down the stairs, leaking blood from a stab wound to the shoulder, across the hall into the library where he has finally collapsed and, for good measure, someone has gelded him.  This sort of thing doesn't happen to priests.  Priests don't get murdered in Ireland.  Priests definitely don't get their genitals hacked off.  Where are they, by the way?

The Osborne family are all decidedly odd.  Colonel Osborne likes to play the squire but his second wife is more than a little mad and his children, Letty and Dominic, are somewhat on the wild side.  There are also assorted staff and the villagers who congregate at the local pub.

Banville is so good at this sort of thing because he rises above genre.  Irish history permeates every character, informs every crime and demands a cover-up at the highest level.  One of the best scenes in the book is Strafford's interview with the Archbishop.  The writing, throughout, is that of a master novelist at the very top of the game.  There is another Strafford novel, April in Spain.  I look forward to reading it.