Community Library Notes

“Snow” by John Banville is the story of Detective Inspector Stafford who attempts to solve a mystery in a small Irish town. Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 and the Irish PEN award in 2013. His plots are gruesome but logical. This one opens with a priest having been stabbed in the neck. He opens a door to a stairway. He goes down into a room. It is very cold, has been snowing for two days continuously. The worst winter ever.

The dead man was Father Tom Lawless, a popular priest. He had been “gelded” brutally. Colonel Osborne is the owner of the mansion, a type Strafford is familiar with. Osborne had won a medal at Dunkirk, and his hair is combed up like an exotic bird’s tail. His wife had found the body. Osborne had tidied him up. It was like the scene in a drawing-room melodrama with an audience, thinks Strafford. Osborne thought he knew all the Protestants, but does not recognize the Detective. Detective Sergeant Jenkins arrives. He is Strafford’s second in command, in his 20s — and smart.

The forensics team arrives and Osborne sends Stafford and Jenkins to the kitchen for tea. Osborne’s wife Sylvia enters, her face like a Madonna. She looks to be 20 to 25 years younger than Osborne, seems cold and dazed. Five people were in the house last night, the housekeeper has a place downstairs. There’s a daughter, Lettie, who is 17 and sleeps all the time. There is tension between Strafford and Harry Hall, the leader of the team. Harry says the castration looked like a professional job. There would probably be a scandal, a dead priest in a house of Protestants.

Strafford notices an empty light socket where a bulb should have been. So it was planned, he thinks. A plan always has a flaw. The Chief Superintendent calls Strafford and tells him he wants the body brought to Dublin. Already a cover-up, thinks Strafford. “It was an accident,” the Super says.

Jenkins goes to Dublin with the body. He’ll report to Chief and return to Strafford with instructions. Dr. Hafner has no kind words to say about the Archbishop who lives nearby.

Strafford finds a pair of boots that fit and goes into the woods. He comes upon a shoddy caravan with a puddle of blood near the door. The door flies open. It is Fonsey, the stable boy.

Strafford leaves for the mansion, and thinks he should have gone into the law. On the road he’s picked up by a butcher’s truck. It’s Rek, the butcher, but also the proprietor of the Inn he will be staying at. Rek tells Strafford about Fonsey: he’d been an orphan and Rek and his wife had taken care of him. When he left them, he went to work at Osborne’s.

“He’s a good boy,” says Rek. “He couldn’t have killed a man, didn’t like killing even chickens.”

Strafford finds Dominic in the drawing-room studying a medical textbook. He’s a medical student. He would know where the jugular was, Strafford thinks. Strafford goes to the Inn for the night. It’s warm and cozy.

Harbison is sure someone shoved the priest to his death. He wants to buy the priest’s horse, Mr. Sugar. Mr. Rek says Strafford should talk to the priest’s sister, Rosemary.

The following day, Strafford rises early to go see the priest’s sister. Jenkins offers to go with him but Strafford tells him to go to the mansion to look around some more. It’s freezing cold, with ice on the windscreen. Ruts on the road gleam like black glass. Banville is great with similes. As Strafford drives back to the mansion, snow falls like communion wafers. He thinks of asking to be taken off the case, as he is floundering.

Back at the mansion, he can’t find Jenkins. He calls the Superintendent and is told there was a stain of semen on the priest’s trousers. And Strafford has been summoned to an audience with the Archbishop who lives nearby. The Archbishop asks about the press finding this story sensational. Strafford says some stories are too big to be suppressed. As Strafford leaves, the Archbishop says “Murder will out.”

Strafford says that Jenkins is missing and he wants to send men out to look for him. Strafford has an intuition that Jenkins is dead. Radford’s son Larry had walked into the sea a few months before. He had been popular with the priest, but Radford didn’t know why he had done this.

Strafford goes to Fonsey’s caravan. What does he find there? Does Strafford discover the killer’s identity? Banville ties everything up in a coda. But the reader will still be surprised at the denouement. Banville is a master story-teller of the Irish environment, with pubs and Inns and Archbishops and grisly murders. Find this on the new mystery shelf of your Mendocino Community Library when it re-opens.

The Mendocino Community Library is closed until further notice due to COVID-19.