Sun, siestas and lurking demons

Faber & Faber, £14.99

THE title of John Banville’s latest foray into crime may sound like a romance. But he hasn’t gone soft – or at least, not entirely. Billed as the next in his series featuring AngloIrish Detective Inspector St John Strafford, April in Spain opens instead in the company of Banville’s morose and troubled pathologist, Quirke.

The presiding presence in Banville’s first crime series, written under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black (a device he’s since abandoned), Quirke is reluctantly on holiday in San Sebastian with his wife. His marriage to Austrian psychiatrist Dr Evelyn Blake might surprise some readers, who doubtless thought the alcoholic, misanthropic, short-tempered Quirke was too consumed by demons to settle. It’s even more of a shock to him. Five years into this happy relationship – “he had been married before, but never like this” – he prays he never loses her.

The pathologist’s usual stamping ground, rain-sodden 1950s Dublin, is a more atmospheric backdrop for delving into the murkiest corners of Irish venality than sunny 1960s Spain. Yet Banville conveys both the pleasurable tedium of a holiday where there’s nothing to do but eat, drink and sleep in the afternoon, and the potential for the sinister in a picturesque, seemingly benign place. St John doesn’t appear until well into the book. By then it feels an age since his previous outing in Snow, when he was pitched into his own aristocratic and autocratic milieu as he solved the murder of a priest. Some of the chill of that winterbound tale clings to him still.

The DI is summoned to Spain when Quirke believes he has spotted one of Phoebe’s old friends, a young woman whose brother, in a previous novel, confessed to murdering her. When he asks his daughter to come to Spain to confirm his suspicions, she is dispatched with the protective detective in tow.

Quirke’s aimless holiday is interleaved with the first-person ruminations of a revolting character called Terry Tice. An orphan, whose Dublin upbringing was unspeakable, he is a stock figure of gangland horror, familiar with the Krays and their kind. In Banville’s hands, he is pitiful and terrifying. Swaggering around town in his too-short, crisply creased fawn trousers, he occasionally feels vestigial remorse for his actions. The sort of figure found in movies, he mutters “heh heh”, like a cartoon villain, which in some respects he is. A hired assassin, he finds his path taking him from London to Dublin, then to San Sebastian.

Banville enjoys describing Quirke’s “large, soft-eyed, mystifying wife”. Wholly tolerant of her husband’s ill-humours, she has a background to match the misery of his orphaned childhood.

The drama is operatic

Her family was wiped out in the Holocaust, which she narrowly escaped. Further tragedy followed. Thus, with the arrival of Terry Tice, the players are in place: three wounded individuals, drawn together by accident, yet as if preordained.

The drama in Banville’s crime fiction, and this one in particular, is operatic. It has an almost mythological dimension, as implacable forces shape human affairs. The story is satisfyingly rich, bringing together Quirke’s family, their past and possible future, and turning the spotlight on 1960s Dublin. Although part of the pleasure of Banville’s detective stories lies in their understated evocation of the recent past, his emphasis is on showing that the upper echelons of government and society were mired in hypocrisy, corruption and violence. In that sense, the plot feels both timeless and modern.