What Book to Read?

I really believe that some crime fiction is as rewarding to read as some literary fiction, and both of the books discussed here fit into the rewarding category, though for different reasons. And just for a change, I’m including TV crime series that is based on crime fiction which, though offering other pleasures, for me falls short of the written word.

Even the Dead (2015) is I think the eighth of the Quirke mysteries by, as the cover tells us, John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. It’s a story that picks up some of the threads left hanging in the first of Banville’s crime stories, Christine Falls, reviewed here. Quirke, a pathologist in Dublin in the 1950s, has been on a sort of indefinite sick leave, but at the urging of his second in command, returns to work to consider anomalies in the autopsy of a young man apparently killed in a car crash. He teams up again with Inspector Hackett to find out what really happened, and it is soon clear they are treading on the toes of the rich and powerful. ‘This is Ireland ..,’ Quirke says. ‘There’s nothing the Church can’t get away with.’ But as Hackett retorts, they are ‘fierce inquisitive men, disinclined to be put off’. Quirke is also driven by his past, or rather lack of it (he was adopted); he needs to find ‘other lost creature(s)’. As in earlier books, his daughter Phoebe plays an important part in the story. With her involvement I think that Black the crime writer allows for coincidence to play rather too great a role. Perhaps Banville is rebuking Black when he has Quirke repudiate coincidences: ’they seemed to him flaws in the fabric of the world’. Black contrives a satisfactory ending where justice is seen to be done, but it is nevertheless for Banville that I read this series. His writing is a true pleasure, and I only had to reach for the thesaurus once.  (See my review of The Sea to decode that.)

Silent Kill (2014) by Peter Corris is his umpteenth Cliff Hardy story. It is in no sense ‘literature’ in the way that Banville/Black books are because of the fine writing they contain. The pleasure of Corris’s crime fiction is the characterisation of Hardy – a sort of Australian Philip Marlowe.  He doesn’t exactly walk the mean streets of Sydney, but he has his own code of honour, and dead-pan wisecracking repartee.  Here he is employed as a body guard to Rory O’Hara, a self-styled ‘self-funded righter of society’s wrongs’ who is about to undertake a speaking tour in which he promises to spill the beans on political corruption. He has already been victim of a hit and run accident. But the tour is disrupted when it has only just begun; there is treachery within O’Hara’s ranks, and a murder. Hardy does the basic detecting; ‘asking the right questions to find someone was my bread and butter, and I set about it.’ The story gets quite complicated, with shadowy intelligence services involved, which I find a bit of a cop out as it involves access to information and resources that are beyond the ordinary private detective.  It’s exciting in the same way TV crime shows can be: more action than explanation. But it’s still a satisfying story.

Speaking of more action than explanation, this is also my problem with the recent six-part Jack Irish TV series. It is the fourth Jack Irish production, the three previous ones, Bad Debts, Black Tide and Dead Point being telemovies based on Peter Temple’s books of the same titles. This one uses many of the Temple’s characters, but has a plot written specially for the series (with Temple’s consent). To my eyes, this has resulted in a less carefully crafted plot. The action is exciting enough – and of course you can see it – but I was often left thinking afterwards ‘how did that happen’? Being a six part series also meant that every episode had to end with a cliff-hanger situation, which gives a different shape to the story from that of a novel, which can build more slowly and establish firmer causation.  There is, too, a huge coincidence built into the story. Jack is hired to find a missing person, but finds himself framed for his murder. (One of the things that was never clear to me was why bother to frame him, when all the baddies needed to do was to use him to find their quarry. Or simply kill him.) He sets out to discover who did frame him, and finds himself enmeshed in a shadowy conspiracy doing something nasty, and murdering anyone in their way, though it takes a while to find out exactly what they are up to. Coincidentally, Jack’s on-again off-again girl-friend Linda Hillier has taken a job in Manilla that just happens to involve her in the same conspiracy. Hmmm. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. Guy Pearce makes a wonderful Jack, his horse-racing buddies are working on yet another racing scam and his old mates are still mourning the demise of the Fitzroy Football Club from the same seats in the pub. The Philippines connection makes for exciting viewing. In fact visually it was all pretty good. I think my problem is that I’m more attuned to reading than watching, whereas I should simply see these as two activities that aren’t really comparable. Then I might enjoy each for what it is. I doubt it though.

You can read more about John Banville here. Benjamin Black has a separate web page here; there’s also a 2013 three-part TV series based on the first three Quirke books. You can find more about Peter Corris here. And here is a review of the Jack Irish series which has recently finished on the ABC, so you might be able to catch it on iView, or DVD. You might also like Peter Temple’s two other crime stories, The Broken Shore and Truth – both of which fit into my ‘literature’ category; see my reviews here and here.