This is as good as contemporary crime writing gets! A literary quality, so lacking in other journeymen & women of this unfairly under-rated genre, sparkles & gleams amongst the mists, drizzles & fogs of mid-50's Dublin - & it's not just a superficial sheen either, but a deep & reverberating prese...
The chain smoking of the main protagonists in this novel tells us it takes place a few decades ago. The setting is Dublin in the fifties, a soiled sort of city – what I recall most vividly of Dublin long ago was the smell of the Liffey and (I have an abiding memory of) noisy bus brakes in need of...
I liked Black's 'Black eyed blonde' a lot, so I thought I would check out his other works. This one was a disappointment. It is clear Black (or I should say, John Banville) has a lot of talent but he badly bungles this 'thriller'. Notoriously wealthy Dublin tycoon Richard 'Diamond Dick' Jewell is...
I had the advantage of reading this almost entirely on a 5 1/2 hour plane ride from DC to Portland and I think it benefited from being read in one sitting. As always, the Benjamin Black books are much more about the characters than the mystery, but this one had both working at a high level. I c...
The bottoms of his trouser legs were wet, too, and his feet felt damp. When he got to the door he saw at once where the wood was splintered beside the lock, and when he put a hand against the door it swung open easily. He smelled cigarette smoke, not his brand. He wasn’t surprised, and yet he hes...
I could have done what I’d said to Joe I’d done, could have phoned Clare Cavendish and told her she must have been mistaken, that it couldn’t have been Nico Peterson she had seen up in San Francisco that day. But why would that convince her? I had nothing new to give her. She was already aware th...
John Glass sat on the pitch pine verandah with his coffee and his cigarettes and watched the sunlight stealthily leaching the night’s shadows out of the trees. He had slept badly and woken at dawn. He had sat first in the big central living room and tried to read, but the silent house with other ...
The driver, a burly fellow with a wheeze, had already complained breathily of having had to come so far out of the city, and Quirke had annoyed him all the more by pointing out with weary sarcasm that it was a taxi he was driving, and that the meter had clocked up two pounds so far and was still ...