Genre-Busting Irish Crime Fiction from John Banville, THE LOCK-UP

 

[Originally posted at New York Journal of Books]

“What neither can say aloud is, Strafford failed to save Quirke’s wife in a shooting the year before, and there’s no forgiveness on the table.”

 

Crime may be impulsive, launched by a forgotten set of car keys dangling from a sports car’s ignition or an easily hacked online account. On the other hand, it can root deep in the history of grievance, violence, prejudice, and war—which makes a far more complex narrative and is, of course, how John Banville situates The Lock-Up. War and its profits, going back to an escape from Germany during the Second World War, mean an excuse for a twisted soul to take revenge via markets and manipulation. 

 

The death of youthful historian Rosa Jacobs, found murdered in her car in Dublin, provides the entryway for investigating both the “not yet past” past and today’s market rewards. It will take dedicated research (and a bit of provocation) to untangle the threads of motive for this crime, and in the process, two of Banville’s noted characters of previous novels, Detective Inspector St John Strafford and police pathologist Quirke, collude. This isn’t new to Banville’s work—the pair, originally introduced in separate books to probe different Irish issues, appeared together in April in Spain (2021)—but because each is enduring a personal crisis, their conversations cut deeper this time around.

 

For instance, Quirke (gulping whiskey, of course) abruptly offers an awful description of an autopsy on a child, to which Strafford struggles to make a sympathetic response. Quirke next asks Strafford, “What was your first death?” Strafford takes the question as meant, and briefly tells of shooting an IRA man who’d pointed a tommy gun at him. And what neither can say aloud is, Strafford failed to save Quirke’s wife in a shooting the year before, and there’s no forgiveness on the table.

 

“Do you dream about him, the IRA man?” Quirke asked.

 

“No. Do you? Dream about the child?”

 

“I remember him, that’s all … All that, and the plume of steam coming off the child’s brain.”

 

The novel won’t get much more graphic than that, although the clumsy dance of intimacy between these two aging men continues painfully throughout. As is the case for the Troubles that background the book, and the Second World War yet further back, there seems to be no calm resolution for the long-term effects of trauma when nurtured today.

 

Still, with Banville’s Irish home terrain in mind, it’s startling as the action begins to tilt toward distant Israel. Perhaps the ongoing presence of war and violence there provides an apt counter to the fumbled efforts to make peace in Ireland. Or between Quirke and Strafford, a matter that becomes increasingly urgent as the walls separating their private lives are pierced. Loneliness followed by attraction may force the stones of resentment to move, like water that’s been frozen, then thaws, leaving gaps where it’s been.

 

For some years, Banville separated his literary fiction from his genre work in crime by using the pen name Benjamin Black for the genre books. But The Lock-Up comes out under his own name, and stitches together the two forms of narrative, the way Quirke and Strafford also become painfully connected. The death of Rosa Jacobs? Yes, of course, the investigation brings a solution, even resolution.

 

But what about the pain of Ireland and its besetting illnesses, alcohol abuse and divisive religion?

 

“We know a great deal,” Strafford lied. “We have all the pieces, we just need to put them together. You can help us.”

“Why should I?” one likely murderer replies to him. Which is, when you think about it, a very sensible response, one that pierces the walls of genre and makes reading this crime novel a haunting and memorable experience.

 

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

 

Going Global: To Florence with Marco Vichi, DEATH IN SARDINIA; to Dublin with Louise Phillips, RED RIBBONS

Reading darker crime fiction lately? Here are two authors whose mysteries probe very different kinds of evil -- where each redeems the story in a very different way.

Louise Phillips is a significant award winner in Ireland, and Hachette Ireland recently brought her series to the United States. I started with RED RIBBONS, a forensic investigation featuring Dr. Kate Pearson -- she's a criminal profiler in Dublin, where there's plenty of skepticism about her craft and skills among the usual police investigative teams. But the discovery of a murdered child, carefully posed in her grave in ways that must have meaning to the murderer (why the braids and red ribbon? why the prayerful position), pulls Kate into a race-the-clock partnership with Detective Inspector O'Connor and his team. It's clear the killer's likely to strike again, and also pretty obvious that the timing of the next murder may be a lot faster than the investigation can move.

Phillips is deft and sure with pace, suspense, and twists. She lays out two other important narratives: one, the mind of the killer -- at least as skillful as the investigators, and in the lead on this perverse dance; and the other, the confusion of Ellie Brady a woman who's spent years in a psychiatric hospital, numbed with medication, after declaring she'd killed her own daughter. As the strands pull closer to each other, the risk for the probing profiler takes on menace toward her and her family.

RED RIBBONS could take place in most locations where urban landscape meets preserved wilder lands, and the main "feel" of Ireland here is the structure of police responsibilities, as well as a throbbing sense of the power of religious imagery. Even when the crime is solved, there's no recovery from damage done. But (unlike Stuart Neville's books, for instance) it's not especially steeped in Irish history.

In that sense, it's very different from Marco Vichi's series.

DEATH IN SARDINIA is the third in Vichi's Inspector Bordelli series, which is gradually making its way here via release in English in the UK, then in America, thanks to Pegasus Crime - but the series is originally in Italian. This title opens in the December holiday season of 1965, just 20 years from the end of World War II. Through Bordelli, a lonely bachelor unable to quite kick the cigarette habit, or the habit of socializing with a former prostitute, the war is an unforgettable part of his own life. His city of Florence is tinged with the sorrow, loss, and anger that the war's left behind. And although the crime he's investigating -- the murder of a loan shark who seems to have few pleasant qualities -- is clearly personal and related to some recent pressure on a victim-turned-killer, Bordelli keeps coming across threads that lead back to the war: a scandalous photo from a concentration camp, for instance.

Meanwhile he's missing one of his officers, the young police office Piras, who's recovering from a gunshot wound at his parents' home in Sardinia. When Piras realizes that a death in the village community is also murder, for Inspector Bordelli there is significant relief in being able to help the younger man's investigation move quickly forward.

The pace and the dolor of midlife frustrations for Inspector Bordelli echo Henning Mankell's Wallender series -- but with some lovely interludes, like the visits Bordelli pays to the hospital room of a dying colleague, to play cards with the frail Baragli and pretend death's not approaching, while also discussing the case:

"It was probably one of his debtors that did it," Baragli muttered with a wheezy voice.

"That's exactly where I'll begin."

"You've got your work cut out for you, if there are as many as you say."

... "I also found some photographs of a very young girl hidden behind a picture frame on the wall. I've got some men looking for her," said Bordelli, to let him feel part of the investigation. And indeed the sergeant seemed pleased.

Even this small sample reveals the slightly stilted language of the translation, which I suspect reflects partly the original and partly the deliberately slow uncovering of the everyday evils that Bordelli is confronting. There were moments when I felt like I was reading a Russian novel -- one memorable paragraph lasted for two pages! -- but the warmth with which Vichi's protagonists interact with their colleagues and friends kept me reading. It's good to savor this kind of portrait of teamwork and to see the author letting it gently reflect the bonds that soldiers in a long war also form.

I enjoyed DEATH IN SARDINIA, and I'll look for more Vichi crime fiction ... to read when I can make time to linger with the language and characters. Winter turned out to be a good time to read this one.

Best Yet from Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad: THE SECRET PLACE

Readers and writers alike know about the state called "flow" (named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi): when you're doing something that's so "right" for you that you lose track of time. It's the ultimate reward for people who become really good at what they love.

My guess from reading the newest Tana French "Dublin Murder Squad" crime novel is that French goes beyond "flow" to "glow" -- that red-hot powerful form of writing that speaks powerful truths inside a compelling story.

But I wasn't ready for THE SECRET PLACE in any sense. First of all, I'm already accustomed to French's established pattern of moving from one investigator to another in her Dublin Murder Squad as she moves to each new novel. And her previous titles have often delved into the depression and sense of guilt that police work can bring, along with the pervasive disorder of Irish life that lingers from the long war years of "the Troubles."

This time, though, she's alternating two points of view as she works this double narrative toward a climax of revelation at a girls' boarding school in Dublin, Ireland. One strand is a braid of experiences of two foursomes of girls in the school -- more or less, a nice group of long-time loyal friends, and a truly nasty group led by a near-psychotic manipulator who loves punishing others. Best of the nice group is Holly Mackey, a teen already known to Cold Case detective Stephen Moran -- she'd been a witness when a small child, and he'd helped her to testify and provided some support for her recovery back then. Now he's stuck in Cold Cases, unable to enter the highly desirable Murder Squad, thanks to a twist from that earlier case. And Holly's at his desk, carrying evidence related to a year-old death discovered at the girls' school. Could it be his chance to work with Murder after all?

Almost immediately, Moran realizes he's in a bad bind: The detective on the death of wealthy Chris Harper, a boy from another boarding school, is a woman, Antoinette Conway, tough and acerbic and not willing to give Moran much room to enter the tiny fragment of the squad that she's claimed for her own -- in the face of a group of Murder detectives who despise her and effectively wall her out of the team where she's supposed to work.

Let me add right away that the title, THE SECRET PLACE, is itself an example of the twists within this case. It's not a place that's hidden -- it's a message board in plain sight at Holly's boarding school, where the girls are welcome to post anonymous messages ... that is, to air their secrets, whether of fact or emotion or, inevitably, of fictional troublemaking. And to which of these does the evidence belong that Holly's brought to Moran?

Rich with insight into the barriers and markers of class, as well as the painful frictions of women officers in rough packs of men, and the longings and misunderstandings of teenaged girls (hint: think Salem Witch Trials, as well as Jennifer McMahon), THE SECRET PLACE is tight, compelling, and boldly twisted to prevent guessing ahead at the actual criminal and motive, any further than Moran and Conway can see. And that's not far ahead at all, as the head of school does her best to wall them out, the girls manipulate and mislead, and danger scents the very air of what should have been a safe retreat for students.

I'm shelving my Tana French books with those by Stuart Neville, Åsa Larsson, Vidar Sundstøl, Mary Kubica, and the best of Louise Penny and John Le Carré and Charles McCarry -- authors who know where they want to take us, and will invent whatever framework is necessary to pull us, heart and soul, into the pressing story that they need to tell.

New on This Week's Bookshelf: Neggers, Child, French, Turner, and Briefly, Penny

I purchased these and they came by mail this week, so count on reviews over the next few weeks -- I'm also working on a stack of advance review copies of other titles, and I'll probably interleave the two categories. But I wanted to let you know what I picked up most recently:

HARBOR ISLAND by Carla Neggers. Few realize this gifted author of romantic suspense is a Vermonter ... her multiple series span several police forces and take place on two continents. This one features Sharpe and Donovan. I always know a new Carla Neggers mystery means a deft plot twist, likeable sleuths, and a satisfying ending. I buy these "for me."

But I also can't resist Lee Child's Jack Reacher series -- where the pace drives me into staying up half the night, and Reacher has just enough honor and vulnerability to keep me wanting to know more. So I've picked up PERSONAL. Can hardly wait. (US cover on left, UK on right.)

The most depth and provocative ideas are sure to come in the Tana French book in my stack, THE SECRET PLACE. French rotates protagonists in her Dublin Murder Squad series and makes it clear how directly the crimes and sins of the past impact the present.

Which leads me to my fourth acquisiton: from poet and Iraq war veteran Brian Turner, the new memoir, MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY. Dave and I are already gently competing on who gets to read this one first -- we're passionate about Turner's writing, and the way he shows us both war and the human heart. No, it's not a mystery ... unless you count the enjoyable investigation of how Turner carries revelation and suspense and meaning into his pages.

Now, back to those other books I've already savored and want to mention -- oh yes, one more quick tidbit. I've changed my mind about something I mentioned a couple of weeks ago: I'm not going to review Louise Penny's new Armand Gamache mystery, THE LONG WAY HOME, in any detail. I think Penny dropped a lot of items in this one that should have been woven more effectively into the book, and I'm not happy with the way she tipped a crime into a book that otherwise reads as a series of personal investigations into art and creativity. Fans of the series -- and I am definitely a fan! -- will want this anyway for the sake of the Three Pines characters, but I think it's best viewed as a draft of a better book she could have written. Those who explore her website or follow her newsletters know she's had a hard year personally, and I tip my hat to her for completing her work within the yearly publishing schedule that her fame now demands. Everyone deserves a "pass" at least once in a writing career, and I'll let this book slide without further comment.