The two literary worlds of one of Ireland’s most acclaimed authors will collide this year when the protagonist of John Banville’s crime novels, published under the alias Benjamin Black, appears in a book written under his own name for the first time, writes Eithne Shortall.
Last year Banville announced he had “killed off” Black, the pen-name used for his long-running series featuring a pathologist named Quirke. He then released a crime novel under his own name featuring a new protagonist, Detective Strafford. This October the Booker-winning author will publish another Strafford novel, in which Quirke is making an appearance too.
April in Spain finds Quirke struggling to relax in San Sebastian when he spots a young woman he thought had been murdered by her brother years earlier. Quirke phones the authorities in Ireland, and Strafford is sent to Spain to investigate.
Banville said it had been easy to discard the Black pen-name but Quirke was proving more difficult to shake off. “I don’t know why I took a pseudonym in the first place,” he said. “I thought, back when I was writing the [first Quirke] book in 2004, that my readers would think this was an elaborate literary joke at their expense. I wanted people to realise I was taking a break; I was going in a different direction.”
Banville, who won the Booker in 2005 for The Sea, intends to write all future novels under his own name. He is working on a follow up to The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 1989.
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It is the story of Freddie Montgomery, a murderer based on Malcolm MacArthur, the Dublin socialite who killed a nurse and was arrested in the home of the then attorney-general in 1982. He was released from prison in 2012.
In the follow-up to The Book of Evidence, which Banville has been working on for five years, Montgomery gets out after a 25-year prison sentence and “wanders back into the world”.
Banville’s literary novels, always published under his own name, typically take him several years to complete, while the crime novels take three or four months. He said The Book of Evidence follow-up was “a summing up”.
“It’s probably my last one. I don’t know that I’d have the courage to embark on another five, six, seven-year book, but I’ll do something smaller, maybe,” the 75-year-old author said.