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.

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.