Benjamin Black's Christine Falls: A Review

Joyce lives. In the several generations since Irish literary giant James Joyce died, his influence has rippled wave-like through his homeland, even lapping gently on to Scottish and English shores from time to time.

Man Booker prize-winner John Banville got his shoes wet, so to speak - he has my vote as the heir to Joyce. The Irish novelist has been writing books for a few decades, earning respect and book sales in his homeland. (And just respect in the United States, it seems.) He's recently written a few mystery novels under the Benjamin Black pseudonym, making no attempt to mask his identity. It's nothing new to write under a pen name, but to do it so openly? Fun idea, methinks.

Christine Falls is the first in a series that center on pathologist Garret Quirke, a fairly miserable man living in 1950s Dublin. He drinks, daydreams about his dead wife and her very much alive sister, with whom he really wished he could have spent his life. Quirke (drunkenly, natch) stumbles into his office/autopsy room to find his stepbrother Malachy altering the medical files of a young (and freshly dead) woman named Christine Falls.

This does not sit well with Quirke. His initial prodding into the matter turns up nothing, but keeps at it. People die. Thick-necked bruisers hurt people. Conspiracies are uncovered, if only marginally. Angst flows freely.

In a few ways, Black/Banville shows his hand early on. It's almost like he's winking and nodding, rhetorically asking, "This book isn't really a mystery, is it?" Sure, it goes through the motions, but even amateur sleuths might be able to figure out who did what around the half-way mark. Look at the reviews on Amazon.com for further confirmation on this - folks that were looking for head-scratcher were disappointed. In some ways, this hurts Black. The pacing is very uneven, for one - not to say that every story needs some prefabricated plotting metronome. At one point, though, Quirke is about to bail out of his poking and prodding, and I was about to do the same with the book.

Glad I didn't. It took me a while, but the book owes more to James M. Cain's legacy than, say, Dashiell Hammett. That is, it mines a different portion of the noir deposit, brushing suspense or action in favor of moral complexity. By the time I had finished, I felt like Black opened up something in my chest, something that drained vitality out of me.

It also helps that his descriptions are vivid and varied. He focuses a bit too much on them, but Black delivers a very convincing atmospheric painting, one that the overall mood slips into easily.

Yes, it's not perfect, but it worked well. Quirke's subsequent stories are either released (The Silver Swan) or on their way, and I'm pretty excited to check them out.

Christine Falls
2006
by Benjamin Black (John Banville)
ISBN-13: 978-0312426323