Some Murders Do Have Em

The new novel in John Banville’s superb series of Benjamin Black crime novels, A Death In Summer, finds hard-bitten pathologist Doctor Quirke returning to investigate the suspicious death of newspaper magnate Richard “Diamond Dick” Jewell on his stud farm in County Kildare. Although an apparent suicide, Quirke quickly becomes convinced that Jewell has in fact been murdered, which is the cue for a compelling journey into the dark side of 50s high society in Dublin, taking in Jewell’s mysterious and attractive widow, Francoise d’Aubigny (with whom Quirke swiftly embarks on an affair), his disconcertingly self-contained nine-year old daughter, and the notorious orphanage St Christopher’s, where Quirke once resided.

I wonder if, as is the case with many of Banville’s justly celebrated literary novels (he was recently bestowed the prestigious Franz Kafka award for his body of work), real life events inspired the story of A Death In Summer.
“No, A Death In Summer certainly is all invented,” replies Banville, more quietly spoken and warmer than you might expect, over a glass of wine in the Drawing Room bar in the Merrion Hotel. “I worked in journalism for 35 years, so it’s quite nice to kill off a newspaper mogul. It’s not based on a specific event. It’s very hard to say where fiction comes from; there are all kinds of bits and scraps, and everyone in fiction is a Frankenstein’s monster with a screw in his neck. Luckily it’s on the page so nobody can see it. I wanted to do a book set in summer, because the others had been rather gloomy– not that this one is particularly cheerful! But somehow I got used to Quirke being in fog, cold, snow and rain – it seems to have always rained in the 1950s when I look back on it.
“Also with regard to real details, Quirke’s flat in Upper Mount Street is based on the one my aunt used to live in. I came to Dublin to work in Aer Lingus when I was 18 I guess, and I shared the flat with my aunt, who tragically died after a couple of years. Since she had a 99-year lease I took the flat, which you could barely live in, it was falling to pieces. But it was magnificent, my living room was about the size of this room and the bedroom was about the same size. You can imagine what that was like in the winter, with this tiny coal fire. So I’ve given Quirke a more upscale version of that.
“There’s a weird coincidence with the photograph on the cover of the first book, Christine Falls, which they chose from thousands of pictures on Getty Images. It’s an archway in the middle of the street and it seemed familiar. My Greek publisher used the same image and I took him up to see Upper Mount Street. Purely by coincidence, the photo was taken on St Stephen’s Place, just off Upper Mount Street. I took that as a good omen. I loved being there, especially on the weekends, because in those days Dublin used to shut on the weekends, so there were no cars or traffic, and no one out in the evening except the whores and their extraordinarily numerous clients. This used to fascinate me. Those poor working women in those days were not exactly young and not exactly ravishingly beautiful, but they did a brisk trade. So it was a different world, gone now – although of course Mount Street is still there (laughs).”
Banville doesn’t do much research into police procedure (“it kills fiction”) and, for various reasons, isn’t particularly keen on a lot of modern crime writing, whether it’s TV shows such as CSI or the massive selling Stieg Larsson books.
“One of the difficulties in writing this series is that, in those days, a murder in this country would be headline news for months,” he considers. “We had about one murder every five years or so; now of course we’re completely inured to people slaughtering each other all over the place. So the police wouldn’t have been used to dealing with murders, and they were sort of making it up as they went along. Forensic science was in its very early stages. I abhor all this stuff that you see now on television, which is completely fantastical, like CSI. Also, I deplore the absolute horror of modern crime fiction, whether in book form, on television or on the screen.
“Somebody was writing in The New Yorker recently wondering at the success of the Stieg Larsson series, and I was going to write in and say, ‘Don’t you realise that, for our time, this is the perfect formula for crime fiction?’ Extreme violence against women, a woman who is herself violent but a heroine, and a hero who is so politically correct as to be completely unbelievable. It’s a perfect combination. But 95% of crime fiction nowadays has extreme violence against women; women being raped, tortured to death and cut to pieces. Our palate gets increasingly jaded. Most of us – and this is the attraction of crime fiction – will never see any violence throughout our entire lives, apart from people waving their fists at each other after their cars collide.
“We’re bombarded with it constantly by the news, by fiction and television. Somehow, we feel that we know it, so there’s a vicarious thrill that we get from violence, which I find deplorable.”
Is Banville a fan of Thomas Harris?
“Who’s he?” he asks.
He wrote The Silence Of The Lambs and Red Dragon.
“I tried to read one of those,” groans Banville. “Again, hideous violence. When I set out to write the Quirke books, I determined that I would write books that would be realistic, plausible and true to life. The only thing that’s implausible about them is that there are so many murders in Ireland, but I have to live with that. Hannibal Lecter is as absurd a creation as Sherlock Homes. Vastly entertaining, but completely unreal, so I don’t care for that kind of work. My crime fiction is life as it’s lived, one slight step on. I like good crime fiction; I read people like Raymond Chandler, and I just did an introduction to Ross McDonald’s The Drowning Pool, written in 1950 but amazingly up-to-date. It’s clever, realistic, plausible fiction.”
Banville, of course, is primarily noted as the author of such literary masterworks as The Book Of Evidence and the Booker-winning The Sea, and he is currently finishing off his latest literary novel.
“I’m doing the last revision which I hope I’ll finish this week and get its claws out of my throat,” he explains. “So I can kick it away and start another one. It’s about many things, it’s a very complicated book, but I suppose one of the main strands is a man of 65 remembering an affair that he had when he was 15 with the 35-year-old mother of his best friend. So, I have no doubt that I will be accused of being a dirty old man, and I’m definitely going to win The Literary Review’s bad sex award this time around!”