Irish author, alter ego come together for ‘The Lock-Up’

A decade ago I wrote about Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville, an Irish writer who wrote detective fiction under the open pseudonym “Benjamin Black.” I say “open pseudonym”: Everyone knew that Black was in fact Banville and that the name was simply a way of differentiating between the art of Banville and the page-turning efficacy of Black.

It was, in short, a marketing device. Black and Banville presumably had two disparate readerships, and I’m guessing Banville liked being able to slip out of himself and get his hands greasy with a detective plot. As a literary novelist, Banville had from time to time expressed his dissatisfaction with his work, going so far as to tell interviewers that he at times is embarrassed by his fiction — that he often hates it. (Most writers understand the feeling.)

When I was writing about the Banville/Black duality a decade ago I came across a YouTube video in which Banville talked about how “Benjamin Black and John Banville are two entirely different writers. John Banville writes very slowly; Benjamin Black writes with great fluency. When I began writing the Benjamin Black books I was John Banville writing under another name. Over the years, Benjamin has taken on a kind of personality of his own. I’m now split into two.”

Black, he says, gets interested in his characters “in a way John Banville doesn’t get interested in his characters” and that while Banville struggled to produce 400 words a day, Black could knock out 10 times that number.

Sometime in the past few years, Black and Banville have re-integrated. “The Lock-Up” (Hanover Square Press, $30) is published under Banville’s name, although it continues the adventures of characters invented by Black. It’s the 11th entry in his series of Dublin-based police procedurals — Black wrote the first eight before Banville took over a few years ago.

“The Lock-Up” concerns the murder of 27-year-old Jewish historian Rosa Jacobs, a crime that was staged to look like a suicide. She was found in a closed parking garage (the “lock-up” of the title), inside her car, the engine purring away, an apparent victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. But Black/Banville’s usual protagonist, a middle-aged alcoholic forensic pathologist known only as “Dr. Quirke,” has determined there’s more to the case than fatal despair.

So Quirke spurs an investigation, led by Detective Inspector St. John Strafford, a police officer Quirke unfairly loathes for failing to prevent the death of Quirke’s wife a few months before. The episode is recounted in Banville’s 2021 book “April in Spain.”

From “The Lock-Up” we glean that Strafford shot a would-be killer, and as the man was dying he fired off a round that hit and killed Quirke’s wife.

It turns out that Rosa was, among

other things, a political activist who advocated for abortion rights — a dangerous thing to do in ’50s Dublin where the Catholic Church enjoys unquestioned power. Rosa was also entangled with the son of a mysteriously well-off German émigré to Ireland who has extensive business dealings in Israel, where another young woman, a newspaper reporter investigating the Israeli government’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons, also turns up murdered.

Rosa’s sister Molly, a reporter for a London newspaper, returns home to Dublin to help her hapless father deal with the aftermath of Rosa’s death and begins an awkward yet touching romance with Quirke, who’s living with his daughter (who believed Quirke was her uncle until she was 19 years old). Compounding the domestic dynamic, the reviled Strafford begins keeping time with Quirke’s daughter.

Those used to American-style commercial detective stories might be put off by the obliqueness of Banville’s narrative, which is more concerned with depicting (in James Joyce’s term) a “priest-ridden” Ireland in the wake of world war, where fog and chill wrap the city and everyone seems to know everyone else’s business. Quirke and Strafford fumble around, interviewing various parties but making only minor inroads into the central mystery.

Banville has a marvelous set piece where Strafford’s superior, Hackett, who figured in the Benjamin Black novel “Holy Orders,” meets genial Bishop Tommy McEvoy, a hale-fellow-well-met character generally considered to be the successor to powerful Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, for a drink. The bishop, an old school friend of Hackett’s, tells the barman a slightly risque joke about Louis Armstrong and the Pope, offers Hackett a cigarette and, in no uncertain terms, warns him off any further investigation of the German, “a great friend of the Church,” lest his Garda pension be put at risk.

Things eventually unravel and wrap up in a fashion, though Quirke and Strafford never genuinely get to the bottom of the case. Banville leaves the final denouement for a chilling epilogue that feels a little like one of those teaser chapters that publishers sometimes insert at the end of books to drum up interest for the next one. It’s a monologue from the one that got away. It’s chilling and fitting in a novel that merely plays with the conventions and tropes of detective fiction.

This is Banville, not Black, and the resulting book is more a novel of social commentary and manners than the thriller it pretends to be.