The Lock-Up - John Banville

 Banville used to write the Dublin Quirke series as Benjamin Black.   DI St John Strafford was always written as Banville (see Snow, reviewed below).   Apparently the two came together in April in Spain, with significant consequences.   Hence we have The Lock-Up, by John Banville, as the second Strafford & Quirke mystery.

To be honest, it's not that much of a mystery.   The villain of the piece is evident quite early on.   I don't much enjoy Strafford as a character either, though Banville does make him more likeable during the course of the book.   I also miss old Hackett, now DCI Hackett and looking forward to retirement.   Despite these reservations, and the odd quibble plotwise, I thoroughly enjoyed The Lock-Up.   Banville's skill as a writer of the very highest quality shines through in the characterisation, the interplay, the psychological insights.   

There's one scene, in which Tommy McEvoy, Hackett's onetime school friend, now Bishop Tom, summons the DCI "for a jar over at rhe HQ."  HQ, queries Hackett.   "Wynn's Hotel - don't you know that's where the clergy congregrate.   On a Saturday night you'd think you were in the penguin house up at rhe zoo."   His purpose is put jovial ecclesiastical pressure on the Guards to look elsewhere for a culprit.   It's as good as anything I've read by Banville.   And Molly Jacobs makes a convincing love interest for Quirke.

It's all high quality entertainment and a fitting development of the Quirke strand.

Even the Dead - Benjamin Black

I was so appalled by The Lemur that I have avoided anything by Black over the last couple of years. I was in two minds when I saw this on the library shelf. Had he cheapened or otherwise banjaxed Quirke, one of the best crime series of recent years? Mercifully not. If anything, I am heartily relieved to say, Quirke continues to get better.

Quirke's drinking has finally caught up with him. He is cloistered at Mal and Rose's house, wondering if he will ever go back to the pathology lab, when his assistant and prospective son-in-law David Sinclair pops in for a second opinion. Leon Corless, son of a notorious Irish communist, has been found dead in a burning car. David thinks young Corless was dead before the car hit the tree. So does Quirke. So does Inspector Hackett.


So the story gets under way. It is full of all the usual tropes - conspiracy, the Church, baby-farming, dark deeds of the recent past, and Joe Costigan, Quirke's equivalent of Professor Moriarty. But as ever with the best of Benjamin Black, it is the storytelling rather than the story that keeps us hooked. The gentle friction between long-established characters, the Byzantine interconnections of the tiny upper middleclass of 1950s Dublin, the steady plod of life's wheel. Malachy is ailing, David is restless, Quirke has a new woman in his life. Evelyn Blake is the perfect match for Quirke because she exemplifies everything familiar about his tight little world: she might be an Austrian psychiatrist but Quirke knew her late husband, a drunken doctor who worked at Quirke's hospital, and Quirke used that connection to get his daughter Phoebe a job as Evelyn's receptionist.


As ever, there is great pleasure to be had in characters who are only passing through: Leon's father Sam, whose politics have cost him everything including perhaps his only child, and the loathsome rent-collector/enforcer Abercrombie. Both men, one of them a widower, the other surely never married, live in ghastly rooms above shabby shops. Black takes obvious glee in forensically detailing the grot.

Holy Orders - Benjamin Black

The latest Quirke mystery shows Black on top form.  The last, Vengeance, was a bit of a dud as a mystery, albeit the quality of the writing was as superlative as ever.  This time the story is also up to the mark.  What at first sight is taken for the body of a naked boy is pulled out of the canal.  On closer inspection the body turns out to be an adult male, albeit a scrawny one.  Inevitably, the dead man ends up on Quirke's autopsy table.  "Jesus Christ," Quirke cries, "I know him."

And we're off.  All the regular characters are involved to a greater or lesser extent.  Hackett and Phoebe, of course;  Isabel, back from touring Ibsen to the provinces;  Malachy Griffin and Rose; and, omnipresent, the mystery and horror of Quirke's childhood, embodied in the present by the ghostly presence of the enigmatic Costigan.  There are new characters, some of whom I expect will return, notably the tinker king Packie the Pike.

Quirke has a new demon this time round.  He seems to be hallucinating.  We end with him about to receive his diagnosis.  I suspect I know what it is, having had something similar myself, so I certainly empathised wholeheartedly.  But I'll probably have to wait till next year to find out for sure.

Slowly but surely Banville/Black is building a classic canon.

A Death in Summer - Benjamin Black

The fourth of Black/Banville's Quirk Dublin series and the successor to Elegy for April, reviewed below (October 2012).  The standard is every bit as high and I admire the subtlety with which BB uses the Fifties to reflect on the present.  It would be giving too much away to say how in this instance, save to say it is Ireland's perennial problem.  As the indomitable Inspector Hackett puts it on the penultimate page, "It's the times, Doctor Quirke, and the place.  We haven't grown up yet, here on this tight little island.  But we do what we can, you and I.  That's all we can do."

The plotting is so superbly done in this novel - tightly integrated like a Swiss watch movement - that I find it impossible to comment specifically without giving the game away.  As it happens, I did guess whodunit for once.  Did it matter?  Not a jot.  The crime is merely the frame in which the artist develops his canvas.  The best period detective series around.   The latest Quirke is Vengeance, and between A Death in Summer and Vengeance came The Lemur, which apparently links Fifties Dublin with modern Manhattan.  Can't wait.