Do you like mystery novels? Do you like elegant writing? Here’s a name for you: Benjamin Black.
If you’re an avid mystery fan, you might already know this name. I didn’t. I was wandering around a used bookstore in Milwaukee a while back, kind of restless, annoyed and impatient with the flat, dull writing I had been running into recently. I reached up haphazardly and opened one of Black’s novels, read a page and a half, and said, “This guy is great!”
Never heard of the guy, so I Googled him and found he had won the Man Booker Prize. That certainly didn’t make any sense; this major annual award for the best original novel written in the English language does not usually go to a crime novel. Took me a while to realize Benjamin Black is the pen name used by John Banville to write crime novels. This guy writes exquisitely, whether it be “literary” stuff or mystery novels.
So far I have read four Benjamin Black books featuring a pathologist in 1950’s Dublin named Quirke. Some titles in this series,
Holy Orders
,
Even the Dead
and
Christine Falls
.
I can’t say these books are cheerful. They have a noir quality, with a troubled atmosphere and a dark history around Quirke’s past, his present, and his relationships with all the friends and family members he loves. He has a drinking problem, and, since it’s the 1950s, he and almost everyone else are constantly smoking cigarettes.
These stories don’t really have happy endings. Things are finally understood, truth is finally revealed, but justice is not always done. However compromised the resolution at the end, I find myself rooting for Quirke, glad he persevered through all the difficulty to learn the truth, even if the bad guy doesn’t go to jail.
All through Quirke’s difficulties, the writing is a joy. One element I’ve found delightful is how often the natural surroundings describe the feeling of a scene. Here’s a sentence at random: “The plane trees on the other side of the street rustled their leaves excitedly as if they were discussing these two young people standing there in the midst of a Sunday morning in summer.” How often do you find poetry like that in a mystery novel?
Beautiful writing helps beautify life. Maybe things in our lives are a bit gloomy right now, but I’ll gladly step, once more, into 1950s Dublin with Quirke, regardless of the cigarette smoke, and stretch out to solve another mystery, with the leaves of the plane trees rustling around me.
By Peter Sownie, is a retired gentleman who has lived in the Bay Area for 56 years, 35 of them working for large banks, while somehow remaining a basically good person. He likes to travel, ride his bicycle, visit libraries and bookstores, and have dinner with friends. When possible.
