Benjamin Black is history, and so can you

John Banville signing
at Gutter Bookshop,
Dublin. Photo by your
humble blogkeeper

One of the last sights I saw in Dublin last week was John Banville signing books for a crowd that I'd guess was mostly Banville fans but had turned out on the occasion of a book he wrote as Benjamin Black.

Holy Orders is the sixth novel in Banville/Black's series about Quirke, a police pathologist in 1950s Dublin, and Black showed that he has his historical-novelist head screwed on right.

"Rome was our capital" in the 1950s, Banville told interviewer Olivia O'Leary at Smock Alley Theatre, Ireland's politicians taking their cue from the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, he said, he refuses to give his characters the benefit of hindsight. They don't know what the church is doing to them, and they — or Quirke, at least — can't learn from it. No characters spouting reassuringly progressive sentiments here, and the gap between what the characters know and what the readers know is a nice source of tension.

Here's part of what I wrote about the fourth Quirke novel, A Death in Summer:

"John Banville distinguishes between the artistic pleasure he derives from the literary novels he writes under his own name and the craftsman’s pleasure he gets from the crime fiction he writes as Benjamin Black. This makes it fair to ask a craftsman’s questions of the Black books: How well do the parts fit together? How smoothly does Black execute them? Are they beautiful? Do they work? Does the finished product perform the functions essential to an object of its kind?"

Get all the answers in the complete review, which appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With Banville's remark about characters and hindsight in mind, what must a contemporary author do to make historical fiction work? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Kells and other books on my last day in Dublin

Sign at the Gutter Bookshop
(above); Shane MacGowan
mural, Adair Lane (right);
Bachelors Walk reflected
in the River Liffey from the
O'Connell Bridge (below). 
Photos by your humble
blogkeeper

I spent part of my last day in Dublin looking at the Book of Kells, part listening to John Banville at the Smock Alley theatre, part buying books at the Gutter Bookshop, part drinking cider at the Palace Bar, and part cursing my impending return to Philadelphia and work.

Banville took questions from Olivia O'Leary in an interview to be broadcast on RTÉ Radio, then crossed the street to the Gutter to sign copies of Holy Orders, his latest novel written as Benjamin Black and featuring Quirke, a pathologist in 1950s Dublin.

Banville talked about Quirke, about the Black books, and about the novels he writes under his own name. He also revealed (a revelation to me, at least) that he used to be a newspaper sub-editor, what the English and Irish call a copy editor. Banville and I, that is, share a profession, and I am therefore obligated henceforth to consider him a blood brother.

Jim Larkin

My purchases from the Gutter included Kevin Barry's City of Bohane which, it transpires, is now award-winning. I may read that on the plane home, or else the history of the GAA. Or maybe, so help me, Lady Gregory's collection of Irish mythology.

How does it feel to be back? Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat! It's time to start planning my next trip.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Lean, green Irish crime-writing machines

In other news, Alan Glynn's Bloodland won top crime-fiction prize at the Irish Book Awards last week, topping a shortlist that included Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke and Benjamin Black's A Death in Summer.

The Burke and the Glynn are high-water marks of this or any other crime-fiction year. The only reason I hesitate to call each an uneasy monument of our uneasy time is that they're so much fun — sometimes angry or chilling fun, but fun nonetheless.

***

And to the reader hungry for more scraps of Adrian McKinty's forthcoming Cold Cold Ground, here's one:

"`School's off. I just heard it on the radio!' I yelled across to them.

"`Piss off ya pervert!' a seventeen-year-old slapper yelled back, flipping me the bird as she did so.

"I'm the bloody peelers, ya wee shite!' I thought about replying but when you're in an insult contest with a bunch of weans at 7:58 in the morning your day really is heading for the crapper."

All crime writing should be this much fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The new (Benjamin) Black in my newspaper

My review of A Death in Summer, by John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer:

"John Banville distinguishes between the artistic pleasure he derives from the literary novels he writes under his own name and the craftsman’s pleasure he gets from the crime fiction he writes as Benjamin Black. This makes it fair to ask a craftsman’s questions of the Black books: How well do the parts fit together? How smoothly does Black execute them? Are they beautiful? Do they work? Does the finished product perform the functions essential to an object of its kind?"

Read the complete review for all the answers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Black and Burke

Declan Burke's and Benjamin Black's latest novels just happened to fall into my lap around the same time, but the coincidence is apt.

Burke was probably the first person to get me thinking that Black (who calls himself John Banville when creating art) might be something other than a condescending shit when it comes to crime writing.  His interview of Banville in Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century reveals the two writers' common ambition to do something different with the crime novel, and Banville comes across as almost charming, which is not always the case with him.  This suggests to me that Burke and Banville are to some extent kindred spirits.

The circumstantial evidence is there. Banville says that when he adopted the Black persona, he vowed to avoid clichés. Burke says that

"you won’t find in [Absolute Zero Cool] what seems to me to have become, if I may be so bold as to make sweeping generalisations, the defining characteristic of the vast majority of contemporary crime novels, which is, however well written any book is, the simplistic pieties of some liberal sadist masquerading as an authentic exploration of modern society, but which is first and foremost designed to ring bells on cash registers."

 Black steers clear of clichés for the most part in A Death in Summer, which makes the occasional lapse all the more noticeable. One such mars the novel's most nervously beautiful scene so far.

The oddest coincidence, and one that may mean absolutely nothing, is that an unusually high number of scenes in both books end with "But he/she/name of character wasn't listening."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Benjamin Black, crime craftsman?

One reviewer wrote of John Banville's crime novels, written as Benjamin Black, that

"Black has improved with every book, and the latest, A Death in Summer, is his best yet. Reading the books leading up to this one was to watch a writer—a very skillful writer at the outset—learning the rudiments of a new genre. Sometimes you got too much information and sometimes not enough. The narratives were often less than fluid. Not this time. Black wears the formulas of his genre casually, like a trenchcoat tossed over one shoulder."

The article appears under the headline "The New Master of Noir."  Black is not that, but he does evoke a noirish setting, a stifling 1950s Dublin in which suicide is not spoken of, Jews are not welcome in the best circles, and gossip rules.

He handles another crime-fiction convention less well: that of the the apparent suicide that may not be what it appears. How would a shotgun blast have lifted the victim backward from his chair and across his desk? And why doesn't the first police officer on the scene, a detective inspector by no means stupid, notice the obviously difficulty of suicide via shotgun. Maybe Black is poking fun at the convention; I think he just handles it poorly.

***

Banville told the Paris Review that

"One of the reasons I love doing journalism—that is, reviews and literary articles—is that I can do it quickly. It gives me a craftsman’s pleasure. Fiction doesn’t do that."

Is crime writing like journalism to Banville?  I'll be looking for signs of Black's craftsmanship as I read A Death in Summer.

And he pays tribute to Richard Stark and Georges Simenon here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Irish openings

Last week I promised a return to some current crime fiction by authors from a country that plays a role in the Icelandic and Old Norse sagas, and here it is.  (That country is Ireland, and the authors are Benjamin Black, known as John Banville when not writing crime novels, and Declan Burke.)

A Death in Summer, Black's fourth novel about the pathologist Quirke, opens thus, on the death of a newspaper tycoon:

 "When word got about that Richard Jewell had been found with the greater part of his head blown off and clutching a shotgun in his bloodless hands, few outside the family circle and few inside it, either, considered his demise a cause for sorrow."

A newspaper tycoon who was a bad guy. Who'd have thought such a thing possible in this day and age? The opening pages offer detached, amused observation, a poke at the intrusive excesses of tabloid journalism (No!), and a secretary who has a better grasp of English than an editor-in-chief. That's not a bad start.

Burke's Absolute Zero Cool is more recently arrived than the Black, and I've read even less of it. But this blog is a sucker for good opening lines, and Burke's is not at all bad: "The man at the foot of my bed is too sharply dressed to be anything but a lawyer or a pimp."

More to come on both.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

If he likes Westlake, he's all right

My recent detours into poetry and Parker have not taken my mind off international crime fiction. In fact, they've led me to an Irish crime writer I had not tried before: Benjamin Black (John Banville).

This joint interview Black/Banville did with Parker's creator, Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) in 2007 dispelled any doubts I might have had about whether he takes crime writing seriously. For anyone who doubts that B/B appreciates fine crime writing, read what he had to say about Stark and Parker in Slate in 2006.

***

The Parker browsing also led me to this wonderful utterance from Westlake:

“I certainly hope Parker hasn’t mellowed. When one of the Kennedys was killed, a group of Hollywood actors formed an organization to swear never again to carry a gun in a film. Of course, these actors were mostly people like Don Knotts . When Lee Marvin was asked if he’d join that group, he said, `They’re trying to put me out of business.' "

That's from the same interview in which Westlake said: "For early influences we have to start, and almost end, with Hammett." Westlake was always one of the most insightful and intelligent of crime writers. It's worth reading the full interview for what else he says about his influences.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011