Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

“It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living. When he walked into the morgue long after midnight and saw Malachy Griffin there he felt a shiver along his spin that was to prove prophetic, a tremor of troubles to come.”

Not quite the opening lines of Christine Falls by Benjamin Black, though the first after the prologue.

The line – and paragraph – introduce the pathologist Quirke, the novel’s protagonist, and his preference for the living over the dead is not the least of his quirks. The scene that follows is an economical introduction to the important aspects of the character.

First of all, he’s drunk, as he will be, to varying degrees, through much of the novel. But his inebriation notwithstanding, he is also closely observant; he notes that Mal is writing “with peculiar awkwardness” in a file, and on the next page that Mal puts “his forearm quickly over the file to hide it.” But though he observes, and draws conclusions from his observations, Quirke characteristically keeps his own counsel, and he does not mention the file in the ensuing conversation.

And finally, in the first paragraph, we see Quirke as a person shaped by, perhaps obsessed with, his past. The first thing we learn about Mal is that he is in Quirke’s office, sitting at Quirke’s desk, an interloper. But even within the same paragraph, Quirke flashes to a memory of “their school days together,” revealing immediately that the two have a long shared history. This knowledge resonates through the tension of the conversation that follows.

Christine Falls is famously (perhaps infamously) John Banville’s pseudonymous take on the mystery novel, but it is this rich sense of the characters’ histories that, for me, distinguishes it from most works in the genre. I don’t say that other mystery novelists fail to provide backstories for their characters, or do not imagine crimes that are rooted in the shared histories of suspects and victim, but the nature of the form inevitably places a great deal of focus on the present action of the investigation. While Christine Falls is also shaped by an investigation, Banville’s skill in creating a living context for the characters and their relationships is one of the things that, for me, distinguishes the book.