Quirky, but not very thrilling

[Herald, 17 february 2014]

Pat Stacey

John Banville is on the record as describing crime fiction, in which he dabbles under the pen name Benjamin Black, as "cheap writing". He's admitted he writes the Black books faster than he writes his literary novels. The first he regards as a mere craft, while the others he considers art.

As a voracious reader who has gorged on all kinds of books – thrillers, sci-fi, horror stories, 19th century Gothic potboilers, Spanish magic realism, history, politics, biography and, yes, literary novels (including Banville's The Book of Evidence) – and valued them equally, I find this cultural snobbery of the most precious and obnoxious kind.

I imagine authors as different as Dennis Lehane, Robert Harris, Len Deighton, PD James, Patricia Highsmith, John Le Carre, Henning Mankell, John Connolly and the late Elmore Leonard, all of whom chose to specialise in thrillers and/or crime fiction, and have illuminated the human condition as perceptively as supposedly more "serious" writers, would have little time for this sort of pretentious, elitist bullshit.

CONDESCENDING

Banville's condescending attitude to genre fiction suffused Quirke, the first of three feature-length BBC-RTE dramas based on Banville's/Black's books about the eponymous pathologist operating in 1950s Dublin.

Adapted by Andrew Davies from the first Quirke novel, Christine Falls, it adopted the familiar elements of a classic, hardboiled noir thriller: the flawed but morally upright hero with a hatred of authority, hypocrisy and mendacity; the drab brown offices and downbeat barrooms; the murky streets lit by sickly sodium lamps; the duplicitous establishment figures; the menacing thugs in big hats and heavy overcoats who invariably get to give our hero a good beating; the endless drinking and chain-smoking. It was missing a couple of important ones, however; plot and actual thrills. I haven't read any of the Quirke novels but, assuming this was a faithful adaptation, it had the hallmarks of a writer with little genuine affection, and even less respect, for the genre in which he's decided to slum it for a while.

It's the literary equivalent of playing dress-up and reminded me of Sebastian Faulks (an author whose books I generally like) and his dismal James Bond revival novel Devil May Care, which he dashed off in a few weeks for a fat pay cheque. The finished product read like it, too.

Gabriel Byrne, smouldering as effectively at 63 as he did nearly 30 years ago in Defence of the Realm, makes for an engaging enough lead as Quirke. When the body of a young woman called Christine Falls, whose death certificate claims she died of a pulmonary embolism, disappears from the morgue overnight, the indignant Quirk tracks it down, performs a post-mortem and discovers she died in childbirth. But where is the baby? Quirk suspects there's been a cover-up. His investigation ties the child's disappearance to a shady orphanage in Boston, run by nuns and funded by a benevolent Irish-American who's also a prominent member of a Catholic lay organisation.

The trail also leads back to his own family and history. Quirke, you see, was an orphan himself and was adopted by a judge (Michael Gambon, giving his native Dublin accent a rare run-out), who's just been appointed a papal count. He suspects his hated brother, Mal (Nick Dunning), a prosperous doctor, might be up to his neck in the conspiracy.

Quirke boasts a fine cast, including Stanley Townsend as Quirke's detective friend, and the evocation of grey, dreary 1950s Dublin is first class. But the emphasis is on the atmosphere rather than the storyline, which is sluggish, meandering and predictable – a critical failing in a thriller. Its precious few surprises are telegraphed a mile off, which makes for a long and frankly tedious 90 minutes.

Dismayingly to some of us, Banville has been commissioned to write a new Philip Marlowe novel by the estate of Raymond Chandler, the author whose fusion of the literary with the popular transported detective fiction out of the realm of dime-novel pulp. I wonder if Banville considers the job craft or art?