Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (John Banville)

That little parenthetical statement (John Banville) after the author’s name — what do you suppose that’s about? Sometimes a well known literary author will take a pseudonym so they can branch out into genre work, or vice versa — a genre author will shyly release his attempts at literary fiction under a pseud. But everyone knows who “Benjamin Black” is — his name and picture are on the jacket copy, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Let’s put it down to a whim.

And what a happy whim it was. Christine Falls is a tip-top thriller. Quirke and Malachy (or Mal) were brought up as brothers by an influential Irish judge. They married sisters. Quirke was the loser all round — he didn’t get the sister he wanted, and the one he did get, died. He casts his lot in with death, as a pathologist, while Mal casts his with life as an OB to the fashionable set. When Quirke finds his brother in the morgue altering records on a young woman named Christine Falls, Quirke can’t let it go. In fact, that’s his quirk — he can’t let anything go, not after rivers of drink, not after a beating.

This being Ireland at mid-century, the mystery involves the Church as a matter of course. The trail takes Quirke to the other side of the Atlantic, to Boston, where his father-in-law hopes to buy his way out of Purgatory with the help of an accommodating order of nuns and priests, the kind made notorious by The Magdalene Sisters.

Christine Falls incorporates the common ingredients of the mystery thriller: tangled family relationships, a hard-drinking misfit protagonist, shadowy powers-that-be, money, violence, loss. And yet Black never lapses into cliche. The book is a writer’s workshop in how to maintain tension in a scene:

She was on her knees on the hearth, stacking up kindling in the grate and wondering where she could have put those matches, when she heard them behind her. When she looked over her shoulder they were standing in the kitchen doorway. Everything slowed down suddenly, as if a huge engine that she was inside of had switched into its lowest gear. She was struck by the things she noticed — that the fat one’s hair was a coarse, rusty color in the electric light and that his shapeless sweater was hand-knitted, and that the one with the hooked nose was redder than ever in the face and that the cigarette he was holding between a tobacco-stained finger and thumb was a roll-up. She saw too, perfectly clearly, what she knew she could not be seeing, the smashed pane of glass in the corner of the back door just above the latch, and felt the cold black night air pouring in through the hole. And why had they turned on the wireless? For some reason that was the most frightening thing….

In the end, Black affords his characters very little poetic justice. Some get what they deserve, but most don’t, just in the way life tends to go. Bulldogged Quirke is poised to come back in another book with another mystery in his teeth, for which we as readers can be thankful.

Related links:

• The Mysteries of the Dead