Review of Holy Orders by Benjamin Black (2013, Picador)

Jimmy Minor, a newspaper reporter, is retrieved from a canal where he’d been dumped after a savage beating. The corpse ends up on Quirke’s slab in the pathology lab. Quirke is familiar with the reporter, who is a friend of his daughter, Phoebe. Along with Inspector Hackett, he starts to investigate the death following two clues: a letter to a priest and a note concerning tinkers. This is a reasonably long book about a quite simple case. There was plenty of opportunity to turn it into a more complex or interesting investigation by exploring the Church, newspaper or tinker angles and leveraging in intrigue and conflict through them. Instead, there is the start of a thread related to Jimmy’s newspaper that goes nowhere, and the Church thread kind of goes the same way. Instead, what we get are long passages concerning Quirke’s state of mind and his relationships to those around him, and dozens of pages about his daughter and her life that’s stuck in a rut. Interesting in their own way but introspective and they barely move the story forward. The result is a book much more about the characters than the plot, yet the characters were not that fascinating.

Review of Elegy for April by Benjamin Black (Picador, 2010)

1950s Dublin.  State pathologist, Quirke, has just spent six weeks in an institution drying out.  His daughter, Phoebe, has become concerned as to the well-being of her doctor friend, April, who has seemingly disappeared.  Phoebe enlists Quirke’s help to discover what has happened to the wayward daughter of a 1916 rising veteran and niece of the Health Minister.  While Phoebe tries to extract secrets from April’s other friends, Quirke calls on help from Inspector Hackett and tackles April’s family, who seem more concerned with possible scandal than the well-being of April.  Despite veiled threats to discontinue their investigation, Quirke and Phoebe continue to search for the missing woman, becoming increasingly concerned as to her fate as they slowly discover some of her secrets.

Elegy for April is the third instalment of the Quirke series and the best so far, in my view.  The story concerns the search, against the family’s wishes, for a female doctor who has disappeared.  The strength of the tale is its evocative atmosphere of fog and smoke, family and secrets, and scandal and power, and its focus on the sexual politics of conservative Ireland in the 1950s. Black evokes a certain mood, sense of place and social relations that draws the reader into a gloomy, drab Dublin.  Although a pathologist, Quirke is cast as a kind of disillusioned, drunken, anti-establishment PI who challenges convention and blunders his way towards truth and love, often losing as much as he gains in the process.  While the plotting is stronger than the first two outings it still seems to play second fiddle at times to the atmosphere, characterisation and social context, and the denouement felt somewhat contrived and strained.  Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable read and has persuaded me to persist with the series.

Review of The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (Picador, 2007)

In the late 1950s, two years after his fateful investigation into the death of Christine Falls, pathologist Quirke is still working in a Dublin hospital.  He’s made an awkward truce with his daughter, who is now in her early twenties, and he’s given up drink.  When an old acquaintance from his college days asks him not to perform an autopsy on the body of his dead wife to save her from the stigma of suicide, Quirke cautiously agrees.  Deirdre Hunt has been recovered from Dublin Bay.  Only she didn’t drown.  Nevertheless, Quirke decides to keep that information to himself and to perjure himself at the coroner’s hearing.  Fascinated by the case, however, he starts to poke around only to find his daughter having an affair with Deirdre Hunt’s business partner.  Moreover, Inspector Hackett has become interested in the death and Quirke is left wondering if he made the right decision to help Billy Hunt.

Compared to many contemporary crime fiction novels, which have a relatively quick pace and are packed with melodrama or dramatic action, The Silver Swan is quite sedate.  Benjamin Black’s (John Banville) style is understated, atmospheric drama, told with a steady cadence of unfussy prose.  It is well suited to portraying the drab city streets of Dublin and the conservative and reserved society of Ireland in the 1950s and its hidden, seedy underbelly.  The book hinges on two events that at first seemed unlikely: Quirke’s decision to lie about an autopsy and his withdrawn and distant daughter taking up with the victim’s flamboyant business partner.  However, the first makes some sense when placed into the context of Ireland in the 1950s, when suicide carried significant stigma, and the second works well in terms of introducing a certain edge to what is generally a quite a flat story.  The plot is nicely set out and the characters well drawn, with Quirke a reticent, taciturn and troubled investigator.  Overall, a tale that takes a different path to most crime fiction.