Book review: Banville’s precision lifts the drabness of 1950s Dublin right off the page

The latest in John Banville’s Strafford and Quirke mystery series is well up to the high standard already set. The early novels were published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, to distinguish these crime novels from Banville’s more literary work.

While the plot moves at a good pace, many readers take as much pleasure in the precision of the author’s depiction of the drabness and discomforts of 1950s Dublin, and the petty snobbery that ruled everyday life.

 In Bewley’s, for example, ‘… the dingy crimson plush of the banquette where they sat gave off invisible puffs of weary-smelling dust’. Or the precise Protestant idiom of Strafford’s reflection on his estranged wife’s resentment of the fact ‘that his people were grander than hers’. 

Detective Inspector Strafford, St John (pronounced Sinjun) by name, is a Big House Protestant. The Straffords could trace their roots back to the start of the 1170s when Henry II “came over”.

 St John is by his own admission, “a dreadful snob”. Tall, pale, thin, and inherently awkward, he dresses in much the same tweedy style as his father, even down to wearing his late parent’s hand-made shoes. 

Quirke refers to Strafford as “the lanky-looking galoot in a gabardine raincoat”, and is at a loss to understand what his daughter Phoebe, sees in him. She is currently Strafford’s girlfriend, though half his age.

Quirke, a Catholic, a brilliant pathologist, a heavy drinker and a lady’s man, is still mourning the death of his wife, Evelyn, ‘shot to death by mischance in a restaurant one sunny afternoon in Spain’, as readers of April in Spain will recall. He and Strafford have a fraught relationship, disliking each other intensely, but make a brilliant detecting team.

The novel opens on the Wicklow coast in late October. A reclusive fisherman, making his way home to his caravan at dusk, sees a swanky new Mercedes abandoned in the middle of a field, engine running and its lights still glaring, and decides, against his better judgement for he hates people, to investigate. He turns off the engine and meets a man coming up from the seashore who explains that his wife has run off threatening to drown herself.

The fisherman, Denton Wymes, pronounced “Weems”, is suspicious of the man, Armitage. His concern for his wife does not ring true and he is reluctant to seek help. So Wymes heads for the nearby farm house, in spite of his anxiety about his dog, who is locked in his caravan, awaiting his return. Armitage reluctantly follows, and they find not a local farmer, but a Dublin couple visiting for a holiday with their strange young son. They summon help, while Armitage drinks their whiskey.

Wymes is revealed to be living in seclusion because he has been in prison for child molesting and is ostracised by the locals. This was the very place where he was first seduced as a young child, and his memories of those days and his subsequent downfall are given in such a compassionate way that his predicament adds another dimension to the story.

When Strafford is put on the case, he immediately sympathises with Wymes. He also realises that he has met Armitage before, when investigating the crime recounted in The Lock-Up, the previous Strafford and Quirke mystery, which also involved a car.

You need not have read the earlier novels to follow this one, but it will be a better read if you do. Phoebe and St John become estranged, Quirke’s skills as a pathologist are paramount, while various loose ends are left tantalisingly in the air, making it clear that a sequel will follow. It can’t come too soon for this devoted fan.