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.

Ancient Light - John Banville

 I've read Banville's Quirke novels, written under the name Benjamin Black.   I've read his Philip Marlowe take, again as Black.   I've read his other crime novel, Snow, written under his real name.   bBut Ancient Lights is my first proper Banville novel.

Ancient Lights is the third in his third trilogy, the concluding part of the story of Alexander Cleave and his only daughter Cass.   This only features Alexander, Cass having committed suicide in Italy.   Cleave is a stage actor, called out of semi-retirement to play the part of the notorious fraud 'Axel Vander' who assumed the identity of the real Vander who died during World War II.   This will be Alex's first film role.   He is drawn into the project because it seems the fake Vander was the same village in Italy as Cass when she killed herself.   Alex's co-star in the movie is the fragile star Dawn Devonport (again, not her real name) who suffers a breakdown during filming, then accompanies Alex to Italy to see if he can find anything that might explain Cass's death.   This is not a later-life affair with the much younger Dawn.   Alex somewhat takes on the part of her recently deceased father, and she, in turn, becomes a daughter he can protect from her demons.

All the while he is reliving his first affair, as a fifteen year old in Ireland, with the mother of his best friend, Billy Gray.   He uses his movie fee to pay the film's scout, a woman called Billie Stryker, to try and track down Mrs Gray, only to discover his memories have been playing him false.

There's a fascinating interconnectedness to the twin storylines, which Banville plays like the master he is.   His prose is brilliantly crafted, the main characters drawn in profound depth.   The only character I thought I didn't get enough information on is Alex's wife Lydia, but I guess she plays a bigger part in the earlier novels, Eclipse and Shroud.   I certainly intend to find out.   I shall be reading a lot more Banville this coming year.

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.

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.

The Lemur - Benjamin Black

Now, I have always approved of Banville's secondary career as Benjamin Black.  I have reviewed most if not all of his oeuvre on this blog.  OK, I didn't like Christine Falls as much the other Quirke novels, but I loved the faux Chandler of The Black-Eyed Blonde.  It is scarcely a secret that I am drawn to novellas, largely because they are all I can write myself in my current condition, so when I saw this slim volume by Black sitting on the shelf I had to have it,

Woe is us, for we are undone.  This - and I have to be blunt because Banville-Black is a major writer with a reputation of which he is prickly proud - is execrable scrapings from the barrel base.  What is the bloody point?  It's short but it is not a novella because a novella is as long as it needs to be whereas this is as long as Black can stretch the tissue-thin plot.  The characters are all horrible without a single redeeming virtue, and that's only the main characters, the other participants have no character.  The character who might just have sparked some empathy, the titular Lemur, is the victim in the so-called mystery.  The obvious solution is someone we have never encountered and therefore don't give two hoots about.

It's set in some ghastly super-rich New York milieu in which multimilliionaire Big Bill Mulholland is ex-CIA (yawn) but still wants his forty-something son-in-law, the Irish super-journalist John Glass (don't give me that, Banville, I've read Irish newspapers) to write his biography, which - surprise, surprise - quickly uncovers uncomfortable truths.  Glass is too lazy to do any writing, his wife is a sexless rich bitch, his mistress is a Boho artist who splashes paint about to no effect, and stepson David is Tony Curtis sending up Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot without being in any way amusing.

It's awful.  It's like the American  TV super-soaps of the 1980s and just about as insightful.  It will be a while before I go near a Banville-Black again.

Christine Falls - Benjamin Black

You have to start a series somewhere; I just wish Banville/Black hadn't started the Quirke series here. This opener is by some distance the least interesting of the series and if I hadn't read all the others before finding Christine Falls my involvement would have ended here.  Of course there has to be a certain amount of exposition when you set up the series, and the minimal amount offered here merely proves my point.  The problem throughout Quirke is the rather preposterous domestic arrangements of Quirke, his adoptive brother Mal and the Crawford sisters (and, in later volumes, the sisters' stepmother Rose).  Couple that with an overheated transatlantic Catholic conspiracy and you are on sticky ground.  It is a tribute to Banville's measured writing style that he manages to keep us involved to the end.  But he does.  Personally, I'd recommend new readers start with one of the others, all of which I liked.

The Black Eyed Blonde - Benjamin Black

Black's latest book stays in the post-war decades but switched from Dublin to Los Angeles and revives Raymond Chandler's legendary private dick, Philip Marlowe (and also, apparently, uses a projected title from Chandler's notebooks).  Chandler's books were never about plot, other than that it should be impenetrable, and all about tone.  Black manages to capture both.  Oddly, given John Banville's eminence as a writer of literary fiction, he seems to miss out on the zing of Chandler's prose.  Observations on twinkling streetlights are all very well but they don't come near "Down these mean streets".  With that single reservation, though, this book is a joy.  I wouldn't like to see Black abandon Quirke altogether but I would relish another trip to LA land.

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.

Vengeance - Benjamin Black

Vengeance (2012) is the fifth of the Quirke Dublin novels, now rebranded Quirke Mysteries, presumably to tie in with the forthcoming TV series.  Banville-Black writes as beautifully as ever and his distillation of period is flawless - but he does tend to forget that these are supposed to be a) mysteries and b) thrillers.  There is no mystery here - I still have no idea why a suicide needs a witness - and zero thrills.  It's a sort of Agatha Christie, dirty-deeds amid the middleclass, without the plotting but with greatly enhanced literary ability.

I don't mind the lack of plot; Black could write a shopping list and I'd still read it.  The continuing characters are developed further, the one-off characters, by and large, are distinct and well-drawn, if a little devoid of purpose.  I do wish Black had avoided the twins trap.  The same cheap trick ruined Colin Dexter for me and Monsignor Knox was making a rule forbidding it.  It's just lazy.

None of these quibbles will prevent me reading more.  The sixth Quirke Mystery, out now in hardback, is Holy Orders.  Can't wait.

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.

Elegy for April - Benjamin Black

It's no secret - it says it on the cover - 'Benjamin Black' is feted Irish novelist John Banville.  His series character Quirke (no first name, naturally) is an alcoholic Dublin pathologist.  The twist or signature of the Quirke novels is the timeframe - Ireland in the 1950s, depressed, priest-haunted, drink-sodden.  What makes the novels very special indeed is the depth of characterisation so effortlessly rolled out by the author; even walk-ons who exist solely to plant the clues are enlivened and distinguished with little tics and traits.  Take for example decrepit old catwoman Miss Leetch:  "Gradually it became clear, if that was the word, that in the chaotic lumber-room that was Miss StJohn Leetch's understanding, the fellow that April might have gone off with was not one but many."  Classy stuff.

Essentially this a story about disfunctional families - Quirke's own (surprisingly complex for a foundling) and the Latimer family whose daughter is the missing April and whose father was the poster boy for the General Post Office siege of 1916.  The writing is deft but deeply layered, the plotting clever without ever being mechanical.  Not all loose ends are tied up, which increases our involvement.  Who was it spying on Phoebe in her flat?  Maybe we find out in a subsequent book.  I shall certainly be laying hands on another Quirke a.s.a.p.

Black has a great website.  The big news, apparently, is that Quirke is the BBC's next big literary detective.  Gabriel Byrne plays our hero.  Could be great - Byrne in Usual Suspects or Miller's Crossing form - or it could be eyewateringly dull like that psychiatrist thing he did for subscription TV.  I'll have read the books by the time it airs, anyway.  I strongly suspect I shall also be trying one of Banville's 'straight' novels.