Misfits, Frenemies, and Glorious Prose

By Peter Handel
If there’s a new John Banville/Benjamin Black title (in any year, really), it’s a good bet that it will be—minimally—in my top-five choices for “best crime novel of the year,” if not the first on said list.

In The Drowned (Hanover Square Press), Banville continues his recent pairing of a newer protagonist, Detective Inspector St. John Strafford—a lone Protestant cop amongst a sea of Catholic members of the Irish Garda, who think he’s merely an outlier (and if he’s not, he is one weird fellow)—with another misfit, the hardly ever working State Pathologist, Quirke (introduced in 2007’s Christine Falls).

Strafford made his debut in a rather odd, too-little-known novel, The Secret Guests (2020), which imagined the lives of the British Royal sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret, while they were safely ensconced in the Irish countryside during the German bombing Blitz of 1940.

Quirke and Strafford, who share an open distaste for one another, made their first joint appearance, tragically, in 2021’s April in Spain. This unhappy collaboration was hinted at in the second Strafford novel, Snow (2020).

The Drowned, released this last October, comes on the heels of 2023’s The Lock-Up, wherein the two frenemies squabbled their way to solving the murder of a Trinity College history scholar found in a car lock-up (or closed garage). While the new book is not an actual sequel, several players from The Lock-Up are involved in its story, too.

The mysterious disappearance of a young woman from an isolated coastal setting in 1950s Ireland, and the strange subsequent behavior of her husband as he claims that she bolted from her Mercedes sports car and ran toward the sea, open The Drowned.

But rather than run through a detailed plot summary of this yarn (always intricate as hell with Banville), it’s much more enjoyable to highlight the glorious prose for which this author is so well-recognized.

The missing woman’s husband, Ronnie Armitage, practically invades a nearby home after his wife’s apparent abandonment. Right away, tensions between the owners of that house and Armitage start to boil beneath the surface.

Armitage has been helped to the isolated home by a man named Denton Wymes, a former prisoner and sex offender. Wymes picks up on a prickly dynamic emerging soon after their arrival.

There was, there was something between these two men ... [he] was certain of it, some angry, bitter, rivalrous thing. He had a sense of the night crouched outside the windows like a sleek dark animal, attending with an animal’s indifference upon the lamplit human scene within.

A recurring series character, Chief Inspector Hackett, is nearing retirement. His cigarette smoking has caught up with him, and as he and Quirke talk, he lights up.

Suddenly, Hackett leaned far forward on the bench and began to cough. Drawn-out, soupy squelching sounds came up from deep within his chest, as if instead of lungs there were a faulty suction pump wheezingly at work in there … he coughed and coughed. Quirke watched him, horribly fascinated. Would there be blood? Would something inside of him sunder, sending purplish slivers of flesh shooting out of the poor man’s open, funnel-shaped mouth?

Later, after Hackett has been hospitalized, Strafford pays him a visit. Here, one of Banville’s most overt themes from all the Quirke novels comes to the fore: the inability of men to be authentic with each other, themselves, and of course, women.

It was all awful, and horribly embarrassing—the shrunken frame, the raggedy woollen jacket, and the deluded interrogation [Hackett mistakes him for a doctor]—and not five minutes had elapsed before Strafford rose, grasped the old man’s tiny, withered hand, and fled … afflicted by shame and ignominy.

It's not just human interaction that Banville effortlessly (or so it seems) conveys, but the physical world of Dublin in the 1950s. For instance, as Quirke and Strafford take a taxi out to get a drink, Banville writes: “Along the quays, the traffic was light. The river was high and fast-running, a rain-stippled surge, tin-coloured, frothing against the slimed, grey-green embankment on either side.”

Quirke and Strafford make an exceedingly odd couple—ying and yang in many ways, yet both share a fear of intimacy, between themselves and with the women in their lives.

One anticipates their collaboration will continue, as Banville is clearly enjoying their fraught, dysfunctional relationship. Readers who want more Quirke, pre-Strafford, can pick up Christine Falls, the start of truly one of the greatest crime-fiction series ever conceived.

(Author photo courtesy of Hanover Square Press/Douglas Banville)