A time for murder

 

This might look like an inconsequential little mystery novel. But look again. The author's name is a pseudonym for John Banville, the Irish writer who won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005. Talent like that raises a mystery to another level -- and this book is just what I needed to help me through the waning days of the pandemic. 

Even John Banville was slightly horrified at himself when he sat down one day in 2005 and pumped out 1,500 words of a new form of fiction for him – a mystery novel. “John Banville, you slut,” the Man-Booker-Prize-winning novelist told himself, according to a 2020 New York Times story  about his venture into popular fiction.

The thing is, neither writers nor readers are really supposed to be proud of stepping “down,” shall we say, into the world of fictional crime.

As someone who has set aside Dorothy Sayers’ entire oeuvre as a survival kit for difficult times, beaten back Covid isolation with all of P.D. James, and just finished Banville’s The Secret Guests, I’m here to say there’s a time and place for murder. When life is a puzzle and the bad news just keeps coming, who can be blamed for escaping into a world where there are….answers.

Readers all have their favourite mystery authors, and I sniff at none of them. But for my money, there’s much to be said for truly literary writers like Banville, who can’t not bring their talent with them. When they relax their efforts to create  “serious” literature, there’s still plenty left to bring to the game.

Here are some examples of what Banville—writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black – brings to The Secret Guests, his fictional tale of two young British princesses holed up in a dilapidated Irish country house to escape the London blitz:

There’s the fat Irish politician in a voluminous overcoat looking like “a slightly compressed and elongated Guinness barrel.” His hand, when he greets our hero Detective Strafford, is “soft and warm and surprisingly small, almost dainty.” For a moment, Banville writes, “Strafford entertained the notion that within the folds of that enormous overcoat there was concealed a tiny woman, a female assistant, or even a wife or daughter, whom the minister bore along in front of him everywhere he went, to perform his handshakes.”

Strafford himself is the opposite of the sexy, ambitious, hard-minded detectives familiar to crime readers. He’s skeletal, “pale and spindly,” with a “concave chest and narrow head and mild, distracted manner.” Women, including the secret agent he’s working with, don’t find him attractive. He’s used to that: When he imagines an affair with her, he also immediately imagines the sharp words she’ll use to end it.  We gradually realize his secret is that he doesn’t take anyone, especially himself, too seriously. The politician, the secret agent, the duke of the country house, his own boss, are just interesting, often amusing objects of his disinterested gaze. As for his work, he forgets his gun, he’s felled by the flu as the action heats up and he fails to make an important phone call. But in the final crucial moments of a shootout with the IRA, he does what’s humane and necessary.

Banville plays with stereotypes, meaning I’ll never see the classic British diplomat – urbane, languid, world-travelled, public-school-educated -- in quite the same way again. When we first meet Richard Lascelles, he’s carrying his bowler hat balanced on the upturned underside of his wrist and making it do a somersault before catching it with his fingertips, “to what end it wasn’t clear, except perhaps the small pleasure of so deftly performing something at once trivial and difficult.” Lascelles does get the girl, but when the crunch comes, he falls suspiciously unconscious just before the gunplay. In the aftermath, there’s a fecal smell and a fast exit that make Strafford wonder whether the man of the world had soiled himself. Suave urbanity doesn’t necessarily equal courage.

Then there’s the local hardware-store owner who learns his lesson when reality smashes into his IRA fantasies. “Boss” Clancy leads what he likes to think is a revolutionary squad that will one day work with the IRA, but is actually a group of locals who talk a lot and do nothing. Behind his back, he’s a bit of a joke with townspeople, who think he’s too old to be playing “toy soldiers.” The arrival of the royals is a dream come true; at last Clancy has something to report to the IRA. But reality hits him in the face when two brutal, mocking thugs – one badly deformed – arrive on his doorstep with plans to kidnap the girls.

 Terrified by the thugs and horrified by what he’s set in motion, Clancy is shocked awake. “All that stuff about commanding a squad and itching for the next round of the revolution – had it ever been anything but a way of spicing up his life and looking important, to himself and to the town?” he wonders. Why couldn’t he have been content with running a useful business? Why doesn’t he have a wife, kids to carry on the business, not even a dog to greet him when he comes home? Clancy survives – just barely –but he’s a changed man: “After this night, he was to be forever more, for the town, plain Tom Clancy.” Clancy’s tale is dramatic, but I like it because it’s a reminder of the dangers of ignoring reality for fantasy in our more mundane lives. We might not end up in a gunfight with thugs, but we might miss the real things in front of our noses.

Banville, who is notoriously perfectionistic and critical of even his most serious work, told the Times that in rereading his mystery novels (he’s done about a dozen since his first in 2005) he realized they “might even be quite good.” With that, he decided to kill off the Benjamin Black pseudonym and allow both kinds of his work to bear his name.

I’m glad he’s come to peace with his detectives. For readers not up to his higher literary efforts at the moment – and I recall his prize-winning The Sea as a brilliant but long and grueling read -- it means his talents are still accessible. Even to those of us who just want a good murder solved.